Global Intelligence Crisis
citriniresearch.com
citriniresearch.com
Speed is unrealistic. It compresses a decade of enterprise adoption into 18 months. Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo. And if it were true, companies would also stop buying AI once their customers are broke and revenue is falling. The "rational firm" logic cuts both ways.
"No new jobs" is asserted, not argued. It dismisses 200 years of counter-evidence in two sentences and treats intelligence as one thing when it's really a bundle of very different skills.
Ignores the deflationary benefit. If AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises. The article only looks at the income side and never the cost side.
Consumption collapse is too fast. It ignores savings buffers, severance, spousal income, and automatic stabilizers. Even 2008 took years to fully hit spending.
"Ghost GDP" is wrong. Corporate profits don't vanish. They flow out as dividends, buybacks, investment, and taxes. The distribution changes, but money doesn't disappear from the economy.
Overstates the intermediation collapse. People don't optimize purchases like machines. Brand loyalty, identity, and experience aren't just "friction."
Stablecoin disruption is fantasy. It ignores KYC/AML rules, consumer protection laws, chargebacks, and the reality of merchant adoption.
Assumes zero regulatory response. Governments moved in weeks during COVID. White-collar professionals are politically powerful and vocal. Regulation would arrive fast.
hahaha, hilarious, imagine thinking prices will go down instead of companies just pocketing the difference
>People don't optimize purchases like machines
correct, machine optimize purchases like machines. that was the author point
>Regulation would arrive fast.
what regulation? "Stop using AI or you will get fined?" "Extra tax on AI companies"? good luck passing those in today America. also, the author touches on the exact point as well
Just no depth of thought to those sort of replies at all, on a site where curiosity and deeper thinking is encouraged.
I imagine I'm not alone in having seen a _big_ secular shift in colleague behavior since Opus 4.5 came out. The organization will lag the behavior, but weird things are happening.
(I'm not speaking to the rest of your points; the crypto-bro stable coin bit was jarring for me too. Europe will just go onto Faster Payments, the US will eventually catch up with FedNow, you don't need crypto).
Assumptions that I think warrant closer inspection:
- agents will always win vs antibot firewalls: highly doubtful given my experience with openclaw. Antibot measures are everywhere, they're advanced, and the more agents threaten legacy business models the harder they'll fight to protect them. Think e.g. Uber investing more in anti-bot tech to stop agents turning them into a whitelabel API. Think CloudFlare's recent moves in this area. Think Salesforce reducing access to Slack API. Data moats will be guarded more strongly.
- total cost of inference will be cheaper than the margin destruction caused by agents: inference is currently heavily subsidized. I have serious doubts "on device" inference will ever be reliable and competitive enough to be viable for running high capability agents (will they even be online enough?). What's the real cost of inference? Does Claude Code really cost $200/month at maximum utilization?
It indeed assumes steady state responses from all incumbents and governments while AI agents move at the speed of innovation. Not sure about that.
>Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars
No one [^1] price matches for protein bars because it's a commodity item with minimal price differences (and people often have a preferred brand anyway), but they probably do for $2k laptop.
>once AI agents equipped with MLS access
The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman. The fact that MLS is gatekept seems to be deliberate, so I don't think they'll hand over the only thing keeping them in business. Even Zillow couldn't get access to it and they've undoubtedly tried.
Same with the medical industry. I don't think the rent-seeking middlemen that exist today will be dethroned that easily, they have often been codified into law. But who knows maybe all the AI money pouring in will be enough to convince them to make a faustian deal towards their destruction and that'd be a happy byproduct of it all.
[^1] Edit: I erred in making too broad of a statement here, see the response threads.
> The data is the moat here, I'm sure even today individual consumers would be happy to have direct access to MLS to find properties and cut out the middleman.
Prior to agentic AI, businesses could price discriminate between human access and machine access to a database. Browser automation tools let humans arbitrage between the two but require investment in developers.
Now that Claude can browse the web, any consumer can engage in that arbitrage.
This is the most "silicon valley" statement I've ever read on this website. Perhaps I'm just being obtuse and misunderstanding, but the assertion people don't price match groceries is so, so wrong. Many, many, many people have no choice. Far more than those regularly purchasing laptops.
It's nuts that people genuinely believe statements like this.
Yes, but that is different from going out of your way to purchase the protein bar at the lower price in the place you can find it. You are not going to drive to another supermarket for just the protein bar alone. So there is an intrinsic stickiness. You might hold off on the purchase if you're happening to visit the other store in the near future, but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar?
Some people have no choice. Checking other stores and planning multiple trips is exactly what they do, e.g. those on fixed income, coupon power-users, etc.
Outside our comfy bubble here, there are a LOT more folks in that camp than those buying luxury goods.
Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.
I do understand and see that there are cases in which one's time preference could be such that it is sensible or necessary to price-match at that granularity even when buying a single unit. However even then there's still other constraints such as cost of transportation & reputation of vendor.
Even today you can often find protein bars or name-brand supplements on Amazon for a slightly lower price (including shipping) than supermarkets, but that comes with the risk of adulterated, expired, or tampered products that not everyone will accept for the sake of slightly lower prices.
This was clearly an error. GP is right to call it out, but not right to characterize it as nuts. It's obvious what you meant.
You’re not nuts. But you are trying to twist the logic to justify your own situation. The correct word to characterize this is “manipulative”.
Clearly, no one is nuts on this thread but some people are just dicks.
It’s completely normal for people to not be literal, and to also mistakenly say something.
Here's a hint though: normal is a myth.
Normal in the sense of "you can model a distribution of human behavioral processes or outcomes" that encompasses, say, 95% of humans in a given culture or geography is very much a thing you can do. And I'd go as far as to say a large chunk of the mental bandwidth of the average person is running those simulation models just to operate in a multi-human-agent world.
(If you want to say we observe bimodal or other multi-peaked distributions in practices rather than "normal" ones, I will strongly agree, but that usually isn't the objection when people say "normal is a myth")
A behavior may be typical, or common maybe, but I think "normal" evokes certain connotations when describing human behavior.
To live in a country where tens of millions of people have food insecurity, 50 million rely on food stamps, and the median income is 40,000 while the median rent is 1,700 (20,000/year) and claim no one has to watch their grocery bill to their own inconvenience would be utterly disconnected from the reality of the survival of half of their countrymen.
Anyway, the irony is not lost that you simultaneously advocate for the parent being interpreted non-literally, by intent, but my colloquial, common use of the word "nuts" is "unacceptable".
Stop turning this into some kind of holier than thou angle. He knows, you know we all know.
>Anyway, the irony is not lost that you simultaneously advocate for the parent being interpreted non-literally, by intent, but my colloquial, common use of the word "nuts" is "unacceptable".
It is, because it's a targetted attack. Let me put it this way, would you say what you said to someones face? Your best friend? You mother? or father and call them nuts because they said something that was off? Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on the amount of people relying on food stamps? You would? Then please continue.
What are we, children? You're acting like I insulted their mother and called the police.
> would you say what you said to someones face?
Yes, of course I would. I have. "That's nuts" or "it's nuts" is such a basic, inoffensive phrase and has no bite.
I've also said "incredulous" and "absurd" and "crazy" and a myriad of other adjectives. I've also had my arguments called those things - correctly. Maybe we keep different types of company, but when I'm having an argument/debate with friends or family, they're not so delicate we can't call each other out when one of us is being ridiculous.
> Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on the amount of people relying on food stamps?
Damn, objective facts and counterpoints related directly to the conversation are holier than thou now? I guess I forgot that when people say things diametrically opposed to basic reality, we're all supposed to just ignore it and let it go.
After all, we wouldn't want to be seen as a loon by a random guy on the internet, offended on someone else's behalf over a one syllable word that wasn't even directed at any individual, but an idea.
I mean, heck, that actually sounds kinda nuts.
I guess I didn't quite say my point clearly, the time and physical cost to get to a grocery store puts up barriers against perfect price matching. You likely are not going to go out of your way to visit a grocery store for just a single item.
And I don't think online delivery will change anything here because shipping is a fixed cost, so price swings less than that will not change any buying habits.
I think you’re a bit out of touch with the common man. People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.
Though that joke is in desperate need of an inflationary update.
*for anyone out of the loop this is a reference to Arrested Development -- incredible show!
> People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.
That makes it easy to rotate: stop by one store one day, another the next, often on the way home from work since you’re taking the subway or bus anyway. For example, I buy most of my groceries at one store, and then pick up certain items in bulk at other stores every 1-3 months when they carry the brand I want at a good price (unless my usual store has a sale). Most people I know do something similar, especially as groceries have gotten more expensive, particularly since COVID.
you have never been poor (enough) and it shows
> I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet
People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
The AI could also research which stores are reputable.
> People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.
Sure, there are also people scared of flying in airplanes, those must be a dud too going by your logic.
1. I buy in bulk.
2. I check amazon vs walmart usually.
ChatAI - show the top 50 online retailers by revenue in the US and note any that have credible new stories about quality control issues. Save all of them except StoreX and StoreY in your list you use for comparison shopping.
Or maybe another one, scan all my credit card purchases for all time that you have history and record all the stores.
Done. And plenty of third party sites (consumer reports, wirecutter, etc...) will do this kind of thing too. And you could perhaps transitively trust them - either view direct lists or just scraping the places they recommend.
And the average person doesn't need to figure this out ... skills encoding this will propagate.
When you’re broke and hungry, those differences become immaterial compared to the protein-bar/no-protein-bar tradeoff.
Everyone will prize match all the time – for protein bars and absolutely everything else, when AI can do it for them for ~free, and the ai-meta-shopping experience is the best that you can get anywhere.
Thinking about this task from todays perspective misses the point: You simply won't be considering it. AI will. It's backend optimization. It just happens.
This has been repeated ad nauseam in the media without any bearing to reality. I'm not a software developer but one has to just use any enterprise grade software to develop an appreciation for how difficult it is to maintain it. And that's just from a user's perspective.
Not sure about a startup, though, maybe they’d roll the dice.
Blue collar work is somewhat insulated so long as humans are cheaper and less fickle than robots.
We have seen in Gaza and to native americans what capital/power does to populations deemed surplus. It's not pretty. of course, that kind of violence happens once their land is desired, before that they are simply repressed.
I think if the superintelligence hypothesis really does happen, we will need to have a rapid accommodation for the bulk of the population or things will get quite out of control.
One thing this piece doesn't contemplate is deflation. Competition will still exist in this world; if friction decreases and renders switching costs lower for a wider variety of industries, while AI efficiencies improve margins, prices in those markets will be competed down to a substantially lower marginal cost floor.
In other words, people may make less money, but goods in industries which benefit from AI should become cheaper in a growing set of competitive markets. The magnitude of the impact on prices should correlate with the magnitude of the employment impact; the better AI is at taking our jobs, the cheaper prices should get for an ever wider basket of goods.
The bull case for AI and consumer welfare is 1) turning more markets into "perfect competition" like airline tickets, and 2) driving actual prices lower because the marginal cost of production is lower with less labor. Even if real inputs don't change, removing labor will reduce marginal cost (which implies that you'll see the largest price declines in labor-intensive industries).
I do think the idea that AI is good for economic growth is for the fairies personally under the current model. I cant square the circle of a consumer based economic model will see higher growth by the apparently significant reduction in said consumers income.
You lost me there...
This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. The barrier to entry isn't the app, it's the network of drivers and restaurants, and all the money that apps like DoorDash poured into marketing. Just having a functioning app doesn't really do very much.
The displacement numbers are the other thing (support hires down 65% in eight quarters) but historical evidence keeps showing tech creates more jobs than it kills.
Okay, I get that. Nobody is disputing historical evidence.
What we're asking is, does the current pattern also fit historical evidence? The answer a growing number of us seemingly reach is, no it does not, because generalized artificial intelligence is by definition able to replace general labor, and that includes future roles as well as current and prior ones.
That's what I'm shaking, screaming, and (metaphorically) punching people over: these companies are openly stating their intent to replace all human labor with AI, and yet people still cling to "yeah but history says" as a liferaft in a hurricane. They're not ambiguous about the goal, and we need to take them seriously if we want to avoid a gargantuan collapse of societal order as a result of their myopic, narcissistic, misanthropic bullshit.
I mean, just think of the absurdity of your own statement: technology designed to replace all human labor (not some human labor, but all human labor) will also still create more jobs for human labor than it displaces by replacing human labor.
Like, f'real? That's your entire position, and your sole defense is "historical evidence"?
Come on, already.
We gotta take these bad actors at their word that they're creating AI meant to (eventually) wholesale replace human labor, and act accordingly. That doesn't mean burning down data centers or trying to shove AI back into Pandora's Box, so much as it means not letting them dictate societal trends or reforms necessary to ensure stability and survival through such an incredibly disruptive transformation, provided they're right.
Arguing against proactive reform with regards to AI is the same sort of ignorance I've heard about climate change for my entire life, and folks shouldn't stand for it. We have infinitely more to lose by doing nothing with a "wait and see" approach than if we proactively legislate around its definitive harms.
If we accept that information processing and process automation are about to become ludicrously cheap compared to now, what previously-impossible projects become feasible-but-hard now?
Security oversight and trust management for AI services seems like a good stepping stone. Air traffic control innovations that enable a flying vehicle per person? Dynamic MMORPGs where great storytellers can build and manage whole worlds for adventurers to explore? Organic food production so well managed that it becomes accessible to normal folks? Perhaps our ability to consume resources before robots will flip everything around and mining basic resources will become the valuable human labor.
Even without new categories, there are plenty of service professions where a human touch will be valued over anything that any machine can provide. These might be unlikely to pay doctor-level pay (except perhaps... doctors).
Who is going to buy flying vehicles when there's no jobs, and said vehicles are manufactured in dark factories like current Chinese EVs are? Certainly not the swaths of the unemployed.
Who is going to pay for MMORPGs curated by human GMs (again), their compute infrastructure, their content, their maintenance? Not the unemployed, not absent profound societal and policy changes!
The fact you're falling all the way back to basic resource extraction as potential outlets for labor is just...I don't even have the words to describe how profoundly out of touch you are with the effort involved, the harms caused (mining is one of the single most dangerous professions a human can possibly do, and your pitch is to send more humans into the mines? Or onto asteroids? Have you ever talked to a miner?), and the pittance of pay doled out to these humans as-is, nevermind in a post-AI society where labor availability far outstrips available roles.
The problem was never "what will humans do when they don't have to work", but "how will humans survive when they can't find work in a society predicated upon it for survival", and wow, you've done nothing to address that question beyond "send 'em to the mines".
Jevon's Paradox falls to pieces in the fact of a proposed tool that can replace human labor wholesale, and ya'll know it. Stop trying to wallpaper over this with historical context alone and actually sit, think critically, and address the core question at hand:
If human labor is no longer required due to generalized artificial intelligence and robotics rendering humans obsolete, how do we prepare for such a potentiality ahead of time without risking the collapse of society due to sudden and mass displacement of labor?
I mean... I wouldn't exactly pay to have sex with Claude Code
Other than that, good points.
This only tells you one thing: the market is fully delusional and driven by chemically pure fomo and greed alone. Everyone wants to be part of the next big thing, but no one can tell you what it even is
For the 180 on AI regulations you are going to have to explain that to me because as far as I can see there wasn’t any regulation under Biden of AI
How will that be possible if all wealth is held by a small group of ultra-rich individuals? Or do you think they will all simultaneously opt to distribute their wealth to everyone in some form of UBI?
Research:
- Where does most money come from?
- What are these gazillion AI agents creating if no-one has any money to buy anything?
- What is this "wealth" of this small group of ultra-rich individuals? Who is buying the shares of their companies to make them wealthy? Who is buying their products?
As Lord Acton said - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
O'Brien from 1984;
'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
To which the representative asked how many cars the robots will buy.
A human can't search 10 apps for the best rates / lowest fees but an agent can.
Thinking ahead 100 years from now, companies like doordash and uber eats don't exist and are instead protocols agents use to bid for items their user asks for and price discovery happens in real time.
Why would those apps permit access by agents?
It's always been the case that “agents” could watch content with ads, so that the users can watch the same content later, but without ads. The technology never went mainstream, though. I expect agents posing as humans would have a similar whiff of illegality, preventing wide adoption.
Local agents running open weights models won't really work because everybody will train their services against the most popular ones anyway.
And a human can 100% search 10 apps and use his brain to do basic maths, that's what we've been doing until now. Sometimes I wonder if ai shills live in a parallel universe because it truly feels like they're living a completely different life than the vast majority of people...
A human _can_ do all of that, but it takes time. If I have to search 10 apps for each item I want to buy (clothes, daily food, movie tickets, laptops, etc.), I will spend the rest of my life just searching for better deals. I'd rather have a bot do all of these searches for me.
While this Global Intelligence Crisis assumes a rigid endgame where machines spend nothing and humans lose everything, it ignores the historical reality that human desires are infinite. As AI commoditizes current white-collar tasks, the economy will pivot toward new and currently unimaginable domains of human value. A 19th-century economist could never have predicted the rise of cybersecurity or the creator economy, and we are likely in a similar pre-prediction stage today. Betting against human adaptability has been a losing trade for two hundred years because our social and economic structures have always evolved to find new utility for human agency.
This is factually false. Human desires are only infinite for things that have positive utility and cost nothing and by nothing I mean nothing. The moment you have to spend even a single second thinking whether you want to buy or not, demand collapses from infinite to finite by definition.
This means people will accumulate infinite quantities of money, stocks, etc, but never infinite quantities of anything concrete that exists in the real world.
This redirection is precisely what fuels the expansion of the global economy into realms far beyond basic survival. When a primal drive is blocked by the cost of a physical object, it sublimates into the high-end art market, the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs, or the infinite scroll of digital entertainment. Entire industries exist solely to harvest this redirected energy.
It may seem that way if you’re tasked with fulfilling such demands and are in the selling software business but it’s quite the opposite on end customers side ie buyer.
Software adds cost and complexity so absolutes minimum that still gets the job done is the aim. Software that enables some efficiency gain is good and worth the complexity of another system. But adding a second piece of something on same doesn’t have same favourable tradeoff. Nobody needs or wants two accounting systems. Or two ERPs. Or two slack clones.
Nah it totally is.
We've just forgotten it. This doesn't require a technical solution, it just requires operating in a trustworthy manner and only extending your web of trust in your platforms to trustworthy entities.
Price matching across vendors does not matter if you trust one vendor. You can just go with "order from Costco" and avoid a complicated technical problem.
So much of what we are doing now is rediscovering trust, integrity, and ethics. Think about Meta and the challenges they would have to being a foundational model provider in light of that analysis, for example.
The article puts a specific number on it: a $180K PM replaced by a $200/mo AI agent. I've been building a tool that lets you run this kind of scenario on your own career — scores your AI exposure and simulates paths that reduce it.
One thing I've found from running hundreds of simulations: augmenting your current career with AI consistently leads to better financial outcomes over 5-10 years than pivoting to a new field entirely.
The best move isn't to run — it's to adapt in place. Free to try: parallaxapp.world
Integration of intelligence into humanoid robots is rapidly improving. Some indicators: multiple recent demos of learning from human demonstrations or from video, doing household tasks like putting dishes in the dishwasher and folding clothes, dramatic adaptive acrobatic performances, etc.
We have to anticipate that within the next couple of years, general purpose intelligence becomes standard in humanoid robots. And so a similar story about blue collar work could be written.
This is quickly becoming one of the largests threats to the public in history and the concentration of power of this trajectory threatens democracy. Irreversable shifts in the structure of power are on the table.
This is also why AI companies are not tackling robotics yet. Because doing so will make it painfully clear what is about to happen.
No matter which, it paints a very intriguing picture about potential near-term impacts to various pieces of the machine that underwrite our day to day lives, and the scariest thing is that no matter what happens, the overwhelming vast majority of people have No. Fucking. Idea. about any of it. We'll see changes happen and be helpless to stop them, and the average person (or bozo politician) will look back at the impact crater and be like "Why didn't anybody try to shift course?"
Then again, maybe it'll all turn out OK!
I'm not making bets either way though -- sounds like I won't have enough discretionary spending left over to afford it!
But it's unsettling because it somehow feels more plausible than most thought pieces on where all this is going. Not as a single big-bang, but a multi-year big-squeeze. That and the circumstances being materially different from previous recessions/crises that governments and policy makers won't have a ready-made playbook to refer to.
I expect we'll see governments attempting the old playbook than doing nothing though. Fiscal and, specifically, monetary stimulus.
I mean yes, maybe the humans will just be out of the loop in the budget if agents can do it all. But maybe it's a long tail of getting there. Or maybe it happens suddenly. Who the hell knows. Interesting times.
That seems intuitively right
In parallel there’s an explosion of creative output; Marvel movies turn around in 1 year instead of 4, solely blocked on availability of actors. Some actors license their likeness to unblock their calendar from reshoots so they can earn more. We don’t replace them wholesale because people idolize celebrity.
And demand for movies? Skyrockets. With new mediums to pursue. Classics like Goodfellas resurrected in high-fidelity 3D on the Vision Pro. A combination of diffusion models and Gaussian splatting means every movie can be upscaled to immersive 3d.
Video games enter a second renaissance, with indie developers having the advantage. For large studios, nostalgia is the moneymaker. The remake of Final Fantasy VII across three games that costs $100Ms and decades? Final Fantasy VIII gets rebuilt from scratch with a team of 30. But the rest of the money and team that would’ve been on that project now expand to other, more ambitious projects.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Mars? Why stop at Mars? Let’s start megaprojects to explore the galaxy. Mine asteroids for resources. What’s stopping us? Humans yearn for the unknown. When we exhaust resources or a modality of existence, we dream bigger, not smaller.
I personally see consumer and entertainment spending, and people employed lucratively in these sectors, growing dramatically. Maybe SaaS and a lot of businesses that have traditionally employed white collar employees fade. And a bunch of boring “financistas” don’t know how to make a buck betting in the casino anymore because boring old businesses and things nobody really wanted to do anyway aren’t lucrative anymore.
But, personally, the whole reason I got into software was to build cool stuff. Starting with video games! The type and scale of cool stuff I can build is only getting better, at an insanely fast rate. My bet is we thrive.
You may be right. OTOH, one could say the last decade had the best conditions ever to create the best movies, and yet for some reason I feel that the newer the movie is, the less soul it has.
With new tools we can reduce the production costs of great movies considerably. More budget, if it exists, can go to marketing and distribution. I expect this will lead to more experimental films and a lot more "soul." There will be a TON of slop, too, but that's fine! It's all part of experimentation with a new medium.
The economy becomes a hedonistic mill of entertainment - where most people will only be passive consumers.
Man if this is why we have to give 7 trillion to Altman fucking kill me already. Who's looking forward any of what you described?
And since human attention can only spread out over so many different entertainment items, there will not be nearly enough opportunities for all of the humans. Even if many convert to AI and robotics enhanced entrepreneurship.
I actually think that this can work out if we just assume humans have some value and right to live, identify the actual humans, track resources a bit better, and make sure enough robots are employed to maintaining key resources for humans like food
But that only can happen if decision makers actually agree that all humans have value and are willing to figure out how to make that assumption globally and fairly.
It may lead to a very positive future or to a very dark future for most people. Not sure what it will be.
There has been so little thought to the multi-order effects of the future we're pushing toward, and even if AI fails to deliver on its lofty promises, it will likely cause an economic crisis in its collapse.
The people saying that AI will rapidly drive costs down are frankly delusional. The things that people actually need to live like food, shelter, and clothes all have inputs that are physical and real. Even if AI somehow can drive the input costs of those things down, it will be delayed, and people will suffer in the interim.
The AI future that I worry about isn't the terminators coming to get us, it is the top 0.1% using this technology to accumulate more wealth. Unlike feudalism, however, the feudal lords will not be dependent on or responsible for the serfs, they can rely on a small minority of humans for production of critical goods for themselves.
These wealthy people don't really hide how they feel either[1], they are clearly stating their contempt for the unwashed masses below them. As Lasch predicted in his "Revolt of the Elites," they are separating themselves entirely from culture in favor of their own insulated fiefdoms. This is already happening: companies more than ever are orienting toward ultra-luxury: from travel, to housing, and everything in-between.
[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/peter-thiel-billio...
Everyone, if it comes with productivity gains. We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
Not to mention: the grand majority of the US's GDP is wrapped up into services. If AI can flatten the skill floor so that anyone from anywhere in the world can produce 80% of the output of a US or European skilled worker at a fraction of the cost, what do you think happens? We're doing to US white collar work what offshoring did to manufacturing, but it'll be faster and to the only healthy cohort of economic actors in the US.
AI does not control the inputs of lumber or vegetables.
> We will need good tools to distribute the gains.
There is enormous handwaving happening here. Tools built by whom? The US can hardly pass a budget now, and its dominant political movement is allergic to questions of wealth redistribution. And as I already mentioned, the wealthy class in the US is clearly openly contemptuous of the idea that they owe anything to the broader population.
No, I am assuming the opposite. I agree: We do need political intervention.
Like I totally realize we're agreed in some sense, but some form of socialism now in the US seems politically untenable, and as soon as AI actually starts making service labor obsolete, we lose our leverage. How do we do something about it?
The leverage will simply come from existing and being in the same group as roughly ~everyone on the planet.
Mass economic displacement often doesn't produce solidarity, it produces fragmentation, scapegoating, and strongmen. People won't agree on why things are bad.
And the state is way more sophisticated than during the labor movements of the last century or two. If it is aligned with the elites and the masses have no leverage, it has numerous tools for massive surveillance, police and military control, and propaganda that will only get more effective through AI. They might not even need the extreme levers, mass confusion alone might be enough.
There's that old joke: "I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
so you become target practice
Is everyone on this website 20 years old? They pulled the same shit with automation, with computers, with internet, with cryptos, and now with ai,... And people keep falling for the same bs over and over again. "the three day workweek", "we'll retire at 45", &c.
As of now there are basically no such tools. Everything is geared towards letting owners accumulate more and more. We would probably need highly progressive taxes to get some level of distribution
Lol that's set by law. This guy doesn't have a clue. Nice sci-fi, I guess.
Here is roughly what we need now: A workable plan to turn unfathomable productivity gains (which are amazing) into wealth for everyone.
Socialism looking like the correct configuration of the end state. Who knew!
capitalism = AI
communism = human security system
but capitalism always wins
A very simplistic take
We humans need food, shelter, and occasionally a vacation (more vacation if you're European vs. American or Chinese). What does the AGI need? I suppose to buy GPUs and pay the electricity bill?
Hah, AI "moving house" by moving cloud providers would be an interesting metaphysical concept...
Members of the line-must-go-up tribe (I'm not excluding myself) sacrifice everything in order to maximize the number called "Net Worth", seemingly forgetting what's important in life (extreme examples: utter cunts like Zuck or Musk). It's almost like human beings turning "programmatic".
As an aside, the plot of The Matrix would've made more sense if humans didn't become "energy storage" (what babble!) but that the AI discovered human brains were the best CPUs, and that's why they were "farmed"...
Do not confuse the hypothetical details for discounting of the whole narrative, i.e., "Don't miss the forest for the trees."
This is what a lot of us have been banging on about in some form since the opening salvo in generative AI: it doesn't matter what its technical deficiencies are, so long as it's good enough to replace enough labor, enough of the time, to collapse the underlying economic engine (that is, consumer spending). That's what this hypothetical is trying to lay out, and honestly it's not far off from the truth as to what's actually going on.
With constant RIFs but rising profits, there is simply no brake whatsoever to this cycle: myopic boards and self-interested leaders (paid mostly in stock) have no incentive to stop this behavior, even as it kills the economic engine of the past few centuries. They make out like bandits, and use that money to insulate themselves from the harm they created - or attempt to for as long as possible, until governments and/or the public demand their carcasses on pikes for destroying their livelihoods.
It's not a matter of whether or not folks find something to do when work is irrelevant so much as we're not building a society where that's feasible as an alternative. We're not expanding welfare, we're not employing rent controls or price caps/floors, we're not increasing accessibility to housing and healthcare and education; instead, we're letting a handful of practicing sociopaths take everything for themselves under the guise of "number go up, so it must be good".
"So what's the alternative?"
I am so glad you asked, because the alternative is a societal judo throw on contracts and expectations. It's incentivizing larger workforces and shorter work weeks as a means of gauging share value: how many workers can you support with higher wages to spend on goods and services with AI increasing the revenue per employee? It's not paying companies to hire workers so much as markets valuing companies that retain workers despite AI's ability to displace work. It's inverting their tax burden based on how big their workforce is and how well they're compensated (higher paid workforces + larger workforce size = lower tax bill, because worker wages will just get dinged accordingly by income and Capital Gains taxes instead of payroll taxes).
The point isn't to keep nitpicking how these hypotheticals are alarmist, or how a specific detail is wrong, but more to highlight that this is a very real problem in the face of permanent job displacement due to any sort of competent generalized artificial intelligence now or in the future, and deciding to solve it before there's riots in the streets.
You can see the symptoms already if you look hard enough: the gig economy is already oversaturated with workers to the point wages are decreasing for everyone, and autonomous vehicles are displacing them in major metro areas. Commercial shopping spaces are increasingly empty with the exception of major brands, who in turn increasingly consolidate under holding companies. Private Equity is already in crisis with assets nobody can afford to buy at their valuations but unwilling or unable to take losses in the face of angry consumers and governments.
We can't put AI back in the box, but we can at least acknowledge that these problems are here, now, and if we don't address them soon then the entire economy is likely to collapse beneath our feet in the next few years.