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Comment by baincs | Hacker News Reader

> The history lesson is that when the most of the GDP generation doesn't need without the help of the population, the result is a regime. Scalable and cost efficient AGI will do the same to countries that do not make most of their GDP from extracting natural resources because once the citizen is not needed for wealth generation, territorial control, etc., their political representation goes away.

That's a great insight

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Doesn't Norway bring that conclusion in doubt? The state gets massive revenue from oil as well as oil-financed investments, but is still very much a democracy.[0]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?tab=t...

Because they need they still need the favor of the populace for collective defense and territorial control.

The regional military powers have more population.

Sure. It’s also possible Norway is just an outlier and not the coming norm.

I personally - as an American of Norwegian descent - am proud of how they’ve built much of their country…and I hope we can learn from it.

It might be that democratic countries are more resilient to that kind of effect because (and to the degree that) they already decouple productive power from representation.

E.g. a welfare state doesn't make sense from a purely GDP-selfish perspective, beyond as a crime-prevention tool, since people on disability benefits don't work. But they still exist.

Sometimes I believe that democratic systems can also be so polarized (as america) and rest of the countries that they simply split a country into two pieces somehow.

One might want lets say welfare to the youth/masses and the other wouldn't want it sometimes it feels like just to differentiate themselves from the first or to just contradict it.

We have sort of stopped coming to common agreements in republicans and democrats and heck some democrat bsky user pasted me an AI pic for something and when I said that it doesn't actively contribute to the thread they had the balls to say "Google things.Do your own research. Research." Like uh okay mate, we are on the same page but even then they came across as passive agressive :/

We just infight and never try to reach conclusion's man. And if we do and become tolerant, some intolerant freak hijacks the system, maybe the system's broken a little, I am not sure. but I know its the best hope

According to this article, it was down to 1 Iraqi:

https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...

> Sure. It’s also possible Norway is just an outlier and not the coming norm.

It’s a petrostate NATO country that the US can’t nearly as crazily obviously meddle with and more importantly exploit. That is the outlier.

The differentiating factor is that Norway wasn’t colonized.

It is possible that in a future where territorial control is done by robots and drones that are mass produced and maybe even self-replicating, and the scientific and economic output comes from AGI, there won't be ballot boxes anymore. There will be also no food stamps, hospitals, a justice system or anything that benefits the common person. Everyone will just be building power plants and datacenters and robot factories while being supervised a robot or being implanted with a motor control chip, or being processed into Soylent green to be fed to a chemical reactor to power a data center with the same level of indifference we currently have for animals in industrial farming. All while the people running the dystopia party all day and take selfies while not caring at all.

At that point human leadership and wealth becomes just as superfluous as the rest of humanity. However it isn’t necessarily a stable system.

The difference is that leadership and wealth has agency and power. Of course the coming dystopia will serve to benefit them exclusively. Who do you think is calling the shots here today? Billionaires are. These are products designed for them by people they hired. The idea of using profit to create a billionaire is already inefficient and yet, that is how most of these companies are structured to burn profit on enriching the few vs having the ceo live like a monk and putting everything back into the company.

Leadership and wealth are quite fluid in major transitions.

Read up on the US robber barons and they didn’t come from old money. The relatively recent (80’s to today) round of Tech billionaires don’t hail back to earlier great fortunes and most VC investors lost money compared to a simple index fund.

The first few rounds of AI investors are already getting screwed.

Rachel Maddow's "Blowout" is a must read related to this insight.

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