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Comment by lateforwork | Hacker News Reader

You don't need money. What you need is wealth. I am going to leave it to PG to explain the difference [1]: Wealth is not money. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.

AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale. In the future, you won't have a job nor have any money, but you will be fabulously wealthy!

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

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My main concerns:

1. When such wealth is possible through autonomous means, how can the earth survive such unprecedented demands on its natural resources?

2. Should I believe that someone with more wealth (and as such, more power) than I have would not use that power to overwhelm me? Isn't my demand on resources only going to get in their way? Why would they allow me to draw on resources as well?

3. It seems like the answer to both of these concerns lies in government, but no government I'm aware of has really begun to answer these questions. Worse yet, what if governments disagree on how to implement these strategies in a global economy? Competition could become an intractable drain on the earth and humans' resources. Essentially, it opens up the possibility of war at incalculable scales.

> someone with more wealth

Well in trekonomics [1], citizens are equal in terms of material wealth because scarcity has been eliminated. Wealth, in the conventional sense, does not exist; instead, the "wealth" that matters is human capital—skills, abilities, reputation, and status. The reward in this society comes not from accumulation of material goods but from intangible rewards such as honor, glory, intellectual achievement, and social esteem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekonomics

What use is human skill, abilities, reputation, and status when human labor has been totally outmoded machines?

Trekonomics seems like a totally backwards way of approaching post-scarcity by starting with a fictional setting. You might as well prepare yourself for the Star Wars economy.

Humans have an innate desire to be loved and respected, and this won’t change even if jobs cease to exist.

There are billions of people who essentially live in varying degrees of servitude today, and they desire love and respect. Other humans ensure they stay in servitude, though. Why would that be any different in the future? Why wouldn't it be worse?

All life has a desire to exist, but that doesn't prevent extinction.

That sounds great. Presently we still experience scarcity due to the limitations of earth's resources, though.

I’m not so sure access to scarce resources = wealth. Wealth can be an abundance of valuable things that are not scarce.

These concerns are already perfectly applicable to the current state of the world, no? More planetary boundaries keep getting crossed due to unnecessarily large resource usage, the poorest people don't have access (even though they could) to the resources necessary to survive...

That's exactly why I'm concerned. It seems to me that we will only exacerbate the problems we have today, not alleviate them. We would need dramatic breakthroughs in energy technologies, but also... I don't know, some means of acquiring raw resources which doesn't strain the planet.

The rich will be the people who control the finite resources. If you have land that can be mined you will be rich if you can protect it and sell the thing that is actually limited.

Plus, many billionaires fund campaigns to spread the ideology of a cripplingly limited government.

It's garbage opinions like this that makes PG so tiring. The superficial air of reasonableness makes it attractive to younger SF tech people who haven't experienced the context out of which these arguments arose and have no idea who he's plagiarizing/channeling. (For starters, the distinction between wealth and money/capital goes back at least to the 17th century.) For those who are more interested in being the "next unicorn" than engaging seriously with ideas, his little "essays" serve as kind of armor--we don't have to think about that problem because PG wrote about it!

Lets say I have a robot or two with a genius-level intellect. In theory it could manufacture a car for me or cook my dinner or harvest the crops needed for my dinner. But I don't own the mine where the metals needed to make a car come from. I don't own a farm where the food for my dinner comes from. Unless the distribution of resources changes significantly, it doesn't really help me that I have a genius robot. It needs actual physical resources to create wealth.

Right now the people that own those resources also depend on human labor to create wealth for them. You can't go from owning a mine and a farm to having a mega-yacht without people. You have to give at least some wealth to them to get your wealth. But if suddenly you can go from zero to yacht without people, because you're rich enough to have early access to lots of robots and advanced AI, and you still own the mine/farm, you don't need to pay people anymore.

Now you don't need to share resources at all. Human labor no longer has any leverage. To the extent most people get to benefit from the "magic machine," it seems to me like it depends almost entirely on the benevolence of the already wealthy. And it isn't zero cost for them to provide resources to everyone else either. Mining materials to give everyone a robot and a car means less yachts/spaceships/mansions/moon-bases for them.

Tldr: I don't think we get wealth automatically because of advanced AI/robotics. Social/economic systems also need to change.

Great points. We can only get to 100% trekonomics if people don't hoard raw materials.

Maybe it’s time we all started taking Trekonomics seriously.

We already have systems that create unprecedented wealth: industrial economies. And yet we let billions live and die without proper healthcare, nutrition, housing, and so on. The promise you make -- that with increases in productive capacity will clearly come an end to want -- has already been shown to be a lie. Please stop peddling it.

Quality of life has greatly improved since the 1970s.

Consumer goods have generally fallen in price (adjusted for inflation) while improving in quality relative to the 1970s, so we have become wealthier (using PG's definition of wealth):

Televisions, computers, smartphones, clothing (mass-produced apparel is cheaper due to global supply chains and automation), household appliances (items like refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves are less expensive relative to income), air travel, telecommunications, consumer electronics, automobiles, furniture have fallen in price and gone up in quality.

Housing and healthcare are two items that have gone in the opposite direction. I think this is where AI and robots will make a difference. Houses can be 3D printed [1] and nursing and medical advice can be made cheaper using AI/robots as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXUX6dv2_Yo

Great, but what about the people who still starve to death? The ones who are left to die on the streets? Yes, those homeless now have phones, but I imagine that does little to mask the hunger pains. And unlike housing, food has not gotten significantly more expensive -- so what gives? The fact that we let this happen, even in the very heart of the richest nation on Earth, the richest nation in history, is proof positive that regardless of how rich the world gets, there's no guarantee that those riches will be used equitably. I agree that we've made massive strides; as such, making more massive strides is unlikely to change this dynamic.

Username checks out. ;)

How will the AI wealth get distributed to people at large?

Great, sounds awesome. I'm actually 100% in favor of this vision.

So when are we going to start pivoting towards a more socialist economic system? Where are the AI leaders backing politicians with this vision?

Because that's absolutely required for what you're talking about here...

The world would be a lot better if people looked at near history more often for the political movements that failed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

(its where the excess profits from mechinisation will be fed back to the citizens so that they don't need to work as much. That failed spectacularly.)

PG's argument is a huge amount of words to miss the point. Money is a tool that reflects power. Wealth derives from power.

> AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale. In the future, you won't have a job nor have any money,

I would gently tell you that you might want to look at the living conditions of the working class in the early 20th century. You might see planned cities like borneville or what ever the american version is. they were the 1% of working classes. The average housing was shit, horrid shit. If AI takes off and makes say 10% of the population jobless, thats what those people will get, shit.

It wasn't until those dirty socialists got into power in the UK (I don't know about other countries) did we start to see stuff like slum clearances where the dispossessed we actually re-homed. rather than yeeted to somewhere less valuable.

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