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Comment by ratelimitsteve | Hacker News Reader

this is how capitalism does things. no one wants to overinvest but no one wants to be left behind and everyone is sure that either there's not gonna be a pop or they can sell before it pops.

it has been educational to see how quickly the financier class has moved when they saw an opportunity to abandon labor entirely, though. that's worth remembering when they talk about how this system is the best one for everyone.

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Leaving large portions of the population jobless surely can't be good for business and political stability.

They basically want to be like the spacers in Asimov's robots novels: a handful of supremely wealthy people living in vast domains where every single one of their needs and wants are provided by machines. There is literally no lower (human) class in this society.

This is what's making me laugh a bit about Ford's brazen "we're firing all the white-collar workers" nonsense. Ok, go for it. Who are you going to get to buy a $80,000 F-150?

Chevy workers?

I feel like a lot of people aren't fully examining what AGI would mean for labor. As of right now labor exists separate from capital, which is to say the economy is made of workers, stuff and money. Workers get stuff, put labor into it and turn it into more valuable stuff, capital owns that stuff so they sell it to other workers (usually) and give their workers some portion of the increase in value. AGI would mean that capital is labor. The stuff can go get more stuff and refine it. Capital won't make stuff to sell, they'll just make stuff they want and stuff to go get and make stuff they want. It will, of course, be wildly bad for political stability but I feel like a lot of people think they've found some sort of catch 182 in AGI when labor has no money to buy stuff. They think "That'll shut the whole economy down" but what would really happen is instead of building a machine that makes boots, hiring someone to run it, selling boots and using the money to buy a yacht they'll just build a machine that makes yachts and another machine that kills anyone who interferes with the yacht machine. An economy made of workers, stuff and money will become an economy just made of stuff, as workers will be replaced by stuff and money was only ever useful as a way to induce people to work.

You mean a catch 187

naw, that's when you catch 2 on the corner

Zero labor cost is the dream!

To whom does one sell when they've deleted their workforce? Seeing company after company add to unemployed workers shows they have no forward-thinking ecomonomists advising them. Further, AI for all of its positive potential is NOT going to be free... or even "cheap" once the investors dry up.

I never said it was a smart dream. It all seems somewhat (at best) shortsighted to me.

I'm pretty sure they all see the it as someone else's problem to solve.

yeah.... always someone else's problem to solve. Just like a pyramid scheme.

Why would one need to sell anything to anyone after one acquires the first machine that can automatically build the others? Capitalist economies kinda suffer from Goodhart's law: money is a better metric for success in a capitalist economy than most metrics are but it's important to remember that money is only a token to stand in for work and materials (I'd argue that the value of materials themselves are really just the work of retrieving them but that's a different argument). Having money in reality is just having work and materials in potentia. So what happens when the materials can do all the labor? Workers are cut out from the loop of owners gathering more things to own, and this does not hamper the owners at all. Adding AGI to capitalism isn't going to bring about capitalism with AGI in it like adding salt to water. Adding AGI to capitalism is going to act much more like adding sodium to water. I don't see it happening this generation, which is I guess nice, but I'm not looking forward to the transition between what we're doing now and Star Trek post-scarcity because I have the oddest feeling that if you look closely at any society that has done that transition there's likely to be an extreme genetic bottleneck, if I may be vague about it for pleasantries' sake.

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