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Comment by daymanstep | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain how AI is going to make energy, water, food, and shelter cheaper ?

The only time I've seen "too cheap to meter" actually happen was the city water in Chicago, and even they are adding or have added meters now even though they have effectively infinite fresh water from Lake Michigan.

Cheap raw materials does not affect the cost of everything else that must be done to prepare and deliver the product to the end user.

> they have effectively infinite fresh water from Lake Michigan.

While the total volume of the great lakes is appropriately great, the areal recharge rate is much lower than one might expect. IIRC about half of its recharge is from groundwater, and so competes with aquifer withdrawals elsewhere.

Overuse is still a concern.

I didn't read that as AI making energy, water, food and shelter cheaper. I read it as "technology (generally) making energy, water, food and shelter will determine how the AI driven job changes are received"

They are obviously not saying that they think this is going to happen. It is explicitly an “if-then” thought experiment: “if technology is deflationary, then avoid civil unrest”. The tone is rightly skeptical.

If you're asking for AI hype, promises that haven't come to pass and may not ever, but proponents want you to believe (I mean, I want to believe, the question is if it's a rational belief or not), I can give you some. AI could lead to scientific advancements and make fusion reactors on Earth feasible. (We have one in the sky already, it's just 1 AU away.) With AI enabling fusion, (because controlling the magnetic fields is beyond what humans can do), we get cheap energy. Cheap energy means electrolysis is feasible, making water cheaper. AI robots to farm the fields means land that was previously uneconomical to farm on becomes usable. More arable land means more crops can be grown. Food is already cheap as hell though, farmers don't make a good living in the global economy. Shelter, unfortunately, is a political problem. We have the technology to build more housing right fucking now. China has a glut of housing. Blame the NIMBYs for your housing cost. But AI, in the form of a machine that fills out the paperwork required to build, faster and cheaper will help. Especially in the case of nuclear power plant permits. AI, in the form of helping to generate architectural models of your home that you get 3d printed is also a thing.

But that's all a bunch of hype that may never come to pass. Some people don't want to hear any hype. Hoping is too much to take if you've been let down too hard before. Or for the rich and you're poor. It's there though, if you want to dream. Dream big.

So let's say everything is cheap - will that lower housing prices? Grocery prices? Energy prices?

Or will the cheapest provider gobble everyone else up and then raise prices to maximize marginal revenue / whatever everyone can bear? For example, imagine if Oracle (or whoever you want) somehow wins the AI price wars and completely owns every energy company, every housing company, every farm on earth, every bank, etc. You think they'll LOWER prices to make life easy for everyone? When they'll know exactly just how much you can pay each month to still survive and not riot?

Haha I mean if you’re asking for doomerism, I’ve got that too! Once robots can do it all, why keep any of the poors alive? Implement human breeding programs based on attractiveness and intelligence, and cull the rest. You know who don't riot? The dead. Once there's robot soldiers and baristas, everyone who's not super intelligent (but none of that autism) tall white and blonde, with blue eyes, is of no use to the overlords in this dystopian scenario, and is just a waste of resources. Better, then, to make it quick and painless for all of them. So they'll select "the good ones" among the poor to escape away on nuclear submarines, nuke the planet, get the rest of humanity to die off, then resurface once it's safe and repopulate the Earth in their own image. We're firmly in to writing science fiction now though, so we might as well add in a time machine and a cure for aging and bioengineering so I can have extra arms and also gills for breathing underwater.

If you want to go to conspiracies theory land, the world is already controlled by 100 families, or corporations, or the Jews or the lizard people. We’re all just toys for them to play with.

At the end of the day, you have three options and a choice to make: corporations, government, or billionaires. Which one are you going to throw your lot in with to survive the upcoming upheaval?

Not that this is actually what will happen, but: technological unlocks by R&D utilizing AI in the production of all of those things could make them dramatically cheaper or efficient.

Or not. In history, what we have seen is that new technology makes us use more energy, not less.

LLMs are a very good example of that: they are a lot less efficient than the processes they replace in terms of energy. "We produce more with more energy" is the norm.

My follow up would be, "if AI is doing so many 'menial' jobs, even if AI makes everything cheap, how will unemployed people afford anything?"

It's not a coincidence the people loudest in pushing AI are the same people who build high walls around their San Francisco homes. They plan to do the same thing around larger chunks of society. There is no plan for people who are unemployed and unable to afford anything. The expectation is the walls will be built high enough that their suffering can be hidden.

Someone recently said there will be "sustainable abundance" but this is magical thinking. There will be abundance for people in one class and death and poverty for people in the other class. But the abundance will not be "sustained" -- it will be fueled by the suffering of the under class.

We've done this before, and it turned out great.

In the industrial revolution, tractors and machine looms and steam engines did all the old 'menial' jobs. We just invented new jobs that pay better with all the extra wealth created by automation. The middle class grew and quality of life skyrocketed.

It was arguably the best thing to ever happen to the world.

This is categorically not what happened during the industrial revolution, you're thinking of the second industrial revolution and even then it's a less rosy picture. The first industrial revolution did not lead to rapid growth and in fact led to brutal methods to increase cheap resource extraction like children working in coal mines, expanded slavery in the new world, and brutal colonialism.

I wish i could see a credible explanation from anyone that logically explains this.

so far ime it's just 1000x more slop everywhere. fake emails at work, fake images on every app, fake text in every comment. and we are sooo productive because we can produce this crap faster than anyone can wade through it

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