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Comment by cglan | Hacker News Reader

The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

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We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.

> Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...

> We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.

You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?

Yes. That tends to happen when you don't increase the minimum wage for multiple decades.

Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!

He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm.

And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.

Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.

2 or 3 degrees of separation

If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.

I had to drop off my health insurance when the bill hit $4,850.24/month.

Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html

That sucks and I hope congress gets their shit together soon, but there are a lot of non-FAANG companies that offer insurance.

That money black hole hits companies too. A $50k/year job typically can't throw in $60k in healthcare benefits.

It’s not that much.

https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-h...

A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”

It really is.

The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.

I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.

I think the world would be a much better place if travel was more common.

Having people see how other countries work on a regular basis really opens your eyes.

And then you have travel and expensive healthcare to pay for.

I’m also not treating these six weeks as a tourist. My wife and I both learning Spanish - she’s just starting I’m at around a high A2 (https://www.escuela-hablamos.com/en/understanding-the-common...).

We are involved in ex pat groups on Facebook, have gone to meet ups, and are having dinner with a few people we have met.

> I hope congress gets their shit together soon

Narrator: "In fact, they did not"

My guy, congress can't even remove valid bad actors who openly lie to and threaten them. They will never fix any problems except their "light" pocket book

Trump rather likes handing out cash, as long as he can put his name on it. Maybe as long as congress agrees to call it TrumpCare.

This is a problem specific to the US. The price of your health insurance is very far from the actual cost of it to providers.

FAANG wages are also fairly specific to the US - the two go hand in hand

I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.

This is a family plan; the bronze plans are $2400 or so a month. But that means a huge deductible; for a high-needs family, it works out worse financially.

When I compared plans at work over the years, I’ve found that it is rarely cheaper to do low deductible/higher monthly costs than higher deductible /lower monthly cost + pay deductible out of pocket.

That will vary from person to person.

In our case, we tend to hit the max out-of-pocket pretty fast.

Is that still cheaper than high deductible + HSA contribution to cover the deductible?

Yes. Substantially so, in my case.

Likely not for many, but I definitely did all this math annually.

Both my wife and I have been contractors for decade+ and have been with Kaiser and are paying $1.1k/month for Bronze-ish plan (1 child)

How does that work if you have a pre-existing condition? I am honestly curious

ACA-compliant plans can't deny or change pricing for them.

It was a good change, but it needed the individual mandate to function successfully. That got removed.

ACA put a stop to that

You think regular Americans have the money to afford high deductible plans? One ER visit bankrupts people.

High deductible plans max out at around $10K deductible. But it’s the same cost in my experience low deductible vs high deductible + HSA contribution.

The difference being that if you don’t need to use your HSA in a year you keep it - unlike low deductible plans.

Ah yes because the family making $40k/year can afford $10k in medical expenses.

In my experience the cost of a low deductible health plan is more expensive than a high deductible health plan + equivalent amount of a pre tax HSA.

I have never known a health care provider that you can’t negotiate a payment plan with. Even if your HSA isn’t funded, they could probably have a payment plan = HSA monthly contribution and then take it out of the HSA.

Yes I understand that a lot of people making $40K would be deftly afraid of doing that. But they would still statistically come out ahead

A family making 40k a year qualifies for significant benefits and subsidies, even today. But don't let not knowing what you're talking about stop you from angrily talking about it.

That’s incredible. That must be responsible for population decline (migration more than death).

You were working at a FAANG and had the enhanced subsidies? That strikes me as complete bullshit and non sequitur to the post.

ACA plans and LG/SG plans are not the same, and pretending they are is, frankly, a large part of why healthcare in this country is such a dumb discussion - those discussing it have no idea what they're talking about.

For a lot of people on HN, "making a living" means owning property in a VHCOL area.

Correct. This is a space occupied disproportionately by spoiled rich nepo or otherwise kept silver spooned babies.

Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.

For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.

I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.

I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.

I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down.

California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]

Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.

[1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...

My example is representative of EVERY person I grew up with that didn't come from generational wealth. I guess if their parents died when they were young of a fluke you would consider them lucky, but what's the average lifespan for someone in the area? Everyone I knew would rather have had the option to live/raise a family in their home town than inherit a million dollar home in their 50s after they had to start a new life they didn't pick.

You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.

A functioning economy is full of these tensions between people with divergent "desired end goals". Everybody wants high home prices when they want to sell but low home prices when their kids want to buy. Everybody wants low prices for things but high wages for people, even though those things are inversely correlated. I'd bet many of the parents you're talking about voted for NIMBY policies and cheered the tech industry's rise. Of course they would. If I'd owned a house in the bay, I'd have been pretty jazzed about it too.

I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.

When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"

Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.

The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords.

NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing.

Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.

The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics.

Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.

The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.

There's been a 'cost of living crisis' discussed in many countries --not just the US-- since roughly the end of the pandemic. For obvious reasons, there are other factors responsible for this - not just Trump.

Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.

Respectfully disagree. Food, clothing, fuel, electricity are too expensive, but they are comparatively much less of an issue compared to rent and healthcare costs.

Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.

As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.

...in the US.

I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems.

---

That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call competition) is... interesting.

And I wasn't advocating for Sanders personally or his policies specifically, just using him as an example of a conviction politician who might have had the chutzpah to take on and dismantle the business-lobbying-politics establishment.

Ah ok sorry missed that you were talking globally instead of just US.

In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.

In housing, for example, NIMBY laws have for decades restricted all kinds of new housing being built. In capitalism, developers would be allowed to build. So we've very much had the opposite of capitalism.

Cities that are waking up to this and allowing new houses to be built are seeing rents fall across the board.

> In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.

I'd challenge whether for complex topics like healthcare, there truly ever could/would be a market that would deliver the savings you envisage.

When someone is diagnosed with cancer, you'd expect them to do everything in their power to give the best outcome, right? Wrong. Most people just go to their local hospital, and sadly the quality of physicians, surgeons, treatments offered, and overall care varies tremendously. There are various data to suggest that joining a clinical trial may offer improved outcomes (and of course, in extremis, clinical trial participation is the only way to access experimental treatments) and yet a very small percentage of patients ever do. Anecdotal experience suggests that many patients can barely understand the details of their disease and treatments (which are becoming more technical with time).

My point? For reasons that require further exploration, healthcare "customers" typically aren't sufficiently informed, discerning, engaged, or mobile in the way that would be necessary for a genuine competitive market composed of for-profit providers to function effectively to drive down prices and improve outcomes.

Please.

The median household income in the US is around $85K

https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/

The median individual household is $55K

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

Neither are living on the streets.

https://www.lmtribune.com/local-news/achilles-takes-on-risch...

> By my estimate, about 60% of Idahoans don't earn a livable wage

Sure boss it’s all fine and dandy.

And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho…

Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.

Why are you so defensive of rich people?

Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.

I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70%

It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.

elect better people (you won't but that's your core problem)

You illustrate the point perfectly. "Not living on the streets" is not exactly a measure of prosperity. With $55K, you cannot afford a decent place to live, a health event can and will bankrupt you, and retirement is out of the question.

If you go by the 30% of your budget guideline making $55K a year as a single person you can definitely find a place to rent for $1375 in a decent neighborhood.

https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/

What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc?

If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.

If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.

The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.

You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system.

Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system.

Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else.

More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.

The parallel economy could even kinda sorta work except that we made frontier living largely illegal in many places (though I understand you probably could get some cheap land in e.g. Idaho and try to live off it) and the existence of said parallel society represents a clear challenge to capital owners who say trading your labour for their profit is the most sensible way to live.

There is not enough space for 8 billion humans to do "frontier living."

Sure, but there might not be enough jobs for them to command the economic power that allows something better.

Even so for someone who's been crushed in the gears enough they might give it a try.

It always intuitively felt to me like there was enough space, but I am now getting the sense that my intuition here has been wrong.

Will you define "frontier living" so I can better see the lack of space ?

I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.

I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?

We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.

But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.

I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can.

And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.

Very true, and I worry that as the planet heats many of those billions will die

I think maybe there is a "frontier living" fantasy that is resting on the hidden assumption that you can bring your modern tech stack with you, minus the civilization that it relies on.

If I squint my eyes and imagine really hard, I can see living off the land, supported by small fusion reactors powering powerful AGI computer clusters, highly advanced 3D printers capable of producing all the physical support structure of life.

AGI + Power + Magic 3D printing and maybe one can live "off the land" with "civilization and all of human knowledge" hiding inside this portable tech stack.

FWIW this isn't even remotely close to what I was thinking - I definitely had no notions of AGI or 3d printing involved. You can do a lot with hand tools if you have plenty of time and a forgiving environment (access to water and trees for timber).

Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.

Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.

So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.

One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.

I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.

This is the small solace I take when it comes to climate change reducing arable land - almost all of our crops are grown to supply a luxury product (meat), so if we need to, presumably we could just eat the grains we grow directly, instead of turning them in to animals first.

Not to even forget how unstable that sort of living is. A few bad seasons from various causes could really affect population. Just look at history of famines. It kinda works when you have industrialised agriculture in other places to fallback on, but without that it is very risky in long term.

They can manage it. Cheap drugs, distributed by the government, can handle you from suffering and ensure you will not participate in any kind of anti government protests. Also they can add birth control additives and reduce the population significantly.

I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.

I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this : lol

Hmmm ... there is definitely historical precedence for the article's assertions.

There is also precedence for what happens when such a big wealth imbalance is present (spoiler: it's a revolution).

This article is methodical in its points.

Your retort reads like an easily dismissed hot take.

And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Humans are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than economic systems. The negative net is easy and very popular today but positivity is just as possible. It’s all about how you read data and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. If you’ve fallen for the doom that’s on you but calling something with so much historical precedence as hope for humanity ‘an easily dismissed hot take’ doesn’t make you look very bright.

>And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Dinosaurs are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than _______, hell, they were around 99 million years longer than humans.

Species go extinct all the time, most species go though all kinds of things before then, so there is nearly zero correlation between surviving something bad in the past and surviving something else bad in the future.

Modern humanity is not anti-fragile any longer like we were in the past.

The articles argument is fine, but it takes as an axiom that AI is better right now at much cognitive work. I haven't found that to be true in the tasks I've looked at.

It's certainly cheaper and faster, so there's potential for it to unlock more demand but I'm sceptical that current models will replace a large fraction of knowledge work.

> When Nick is not at a computer, you can find him out racing sailboats and involved with various entrepreneurial ventures.

Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…

Nah thats petty nobility that will get wiped out for taking the wrong side in the first dick measuring war lmao.

The man who thinks he's going to be the feudal lord in GGP's scenario.

In GGP's scenario, there isn't much room at the top. :)

That's right -- the best way to succeed within a system is to hustle as hard as you can, and definitely don't stop to question the system itself.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think this is actually good advice. It's great to be a free-thinker and question things, but I do think there is some (monetary) value in just not asking too many questions, but optimizing to be the best at whatever you're doing.

Edit: to give an example, I probably would have done better in school had I spent less time questioning the education system and more time just accepting it and trying to get good grades.

Yeah, succeed in the system, fuck everybody else. If the system is making the world a worse place, all the better, you can take advantage since you’re in the system. All that until you find yourself spat out by the system and get to experience what you’ve been part of with no recourse.

Your interpretation of the comment in this way says more about you than anything else. Because that's not what I or the parent comment said.

and your conclusion on this situation says a lot about your current state of economic privilege and/or ignorance

The trick is to compartmentalize

Better than those who just want to burn the system down with no real plan for what comes next, and unable to comprehend the inevitable bloodshed of the 'glorious revolution' that they crave.

You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.

And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.

Do you comprehend the scale of the inevitable bloodshed that maintaining the status quo is bound to lead to? You don't do so any better than those you're chastising.

Most of them fried their brains with stimulants long ago. Thankfully for them, they no longer have to think. An LLM does it for them.

But it’s just the same idiots were rabidly cheering the latest JavaScript framework a decade ago, NFT’s and all manors or ridiculous things anyone with 2 working brain cells saw transparently though.

There's a lot of bloodshed going on under the status quo. Why do you think people are 'unable to comprehend' it? Maybe they just want to reallocate it and aren't especially sympathetic to those who who have avoided it up to now.

You can use AI because you know its good for you, but still think it won't make all people better off

Historical data is never a guarantee of future performance. The downside of your attitude is that you can’t really point at the right thing to do, so then you invest your time and effort on the same things, when it could be the case that the rules of the game have changed.

I don’t see the comment as necessarily defeatist. If anything, it’s an invitation to rethink what might work instead, and whether there are things worth lobbying for/against beyond what can be solved at the individual level.

> I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.

I'm picturing a 12th century French feudal lord saying these words to some of his serfs complaining from a lack of firewood.

If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).

Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.

This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.

This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model.

I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements

While you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life.

Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well.

LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.

Robots are already way better than people at a vast majority of manufacturing work, but there's still plenty of high-skilled manual jobs around.

What are ai and robots other than excess labor, waiting to be allocated? Why does the wealth have to come from the meat bags?

Who is going to buy the stuff that the AI and robots produce, then? What will the point be of producing all this stuff?

You act like I produce the dollars I spend. No, the government does, who debases our currency to print more.

You act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more.

Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.

There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.

Presumably the captains of the universe will want ever increasing luxuries and expressions of their power.

What is the point of producing all this stuff now?

Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.

At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.

In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.

What are you talking about? Is this some dramatic way of saying you think some of their products are underpriced relative to their specifications?

I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately got stuff for free.

But, as before, it doesn't really matter as rich people aren't interested in things. They already have everything they could ever dream of and physically cannot handle even more. They are interested in social standing.

This doesn't make any sense. Apple has a pile of cash hasn't spent or invested = they have given away free product?

A debt never called is the same as giving something away for free, yes.

Technically they can still call the debt, but the question remains outstanding: What do you have that they would want in return? The answer is effectively nothing, and increasingly so.

Who is the debtor in this case, the US government? You seem to think this is a brilliant insight but to me it seems like an empty truism.

By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).

And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.

Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.

> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free".

If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make life enjoyable. However, once you become rich, you transcend beyond that — where you cannot ever begin to call all the debt you've accumulated. It's a uniquely rich experience to be able to sit on billions of dollars worth of debt and not think twice about those who owe something.

> If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free

Exactly. In that scenario both the buyer and seller exchange an equal amount of value. No debt lingers to be paid (or never paid, as the case may be) in the future. But Apple wants more. They want you to promise them something else in some hypothetical future.

Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.

And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.

You haven't responded to my second statement:

> And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.

According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provide the other party something in the future. However, A could then turn around and promise party C for its resources using B's promise - and effectively transfer this promise to C, which then holds the right to demand resources from B.

You are effectively just describing the fiat system of currency where B is the government.

Calling cash, which is fungible and transferrable, "debt", which generally denotes an obligation of some sort, obfuscates what your logic.

Once you pay Apple - ergo, transfer it IOUs that represent your promise to provide resources in the future - it has no way of holding you to your promise other than by giving you back your IOU or giving it to someone else. This does not square with the definition of "debt".

Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people. Of course a billionaire would not be able to "call all the debt [they have] accumulated". You're just saying that they maintain so much value that they can't ever trade it all for tangible goods and services. However, no-one except the government has to honour their request to trade their so-called "debt" that they have accumulated from others for actual resources.

> Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people.

Quite possibly. But that doesn't actually matter because if they don't understand something they will ask questions until they do understand, just as it seems you now do. That's how communication works. It is bidirectional for good reason. I admittedly don't understand what you are trying to add with this. What are we supposed to learn from this?

I would argue that most people already understand money in the way you describe it: as a medium of exchange. Your description of money just frames this function through the idea of an obligation of some sort which doesn't exist actually for anyone except the government.

There is no framing beyond my intent. One may originally misinterpret my intent, but that's again why communication is bidirectional. I am still unsure of your intent in this. My failed interpretation is that you are trying to invent some kind of hypothetical communication problem that isn't one, but what are you actually trying to get across here?

What I'm trying to say is that I don't see any benefit in describing cash as "debt" and instead find it misleading as it implies an obligation to be fulfilled that doesn't actually exist for anyone except the government, and certainly not its customers.

In fact, to address an earlier comment:

> Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.

> And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.

The cash Average Joe proffers for a product - what you describe as "debt" - wouldn't be in Joe's possession without first being exchanged for Average Joe's simple labour. Simply put - Average Joe cannot be indebted to Apple without first trading his labour for someone else's indebtedness, which he then gives to Apple in return for his iPhone. If his labour has no value, he has no unit by which to even denominate any potential indebtedness he may offer.

1. Well, cash is debt. Obviously all things in life are dependent on perspective, but the framing should be useful to separate the idea of a company seeking cash not because they want the raw silver, or what have you. If you try to think too hard about it you might end up confused, but then you ask for clarification and then are no longer confused. This is where I fail to understand what you are trying to say. We get it. You didn't understand the intent originally. That is why you asked for clarification. But your subsequent comments indicate that, upon receiving that clarification, that you do now understand. So the communication worked perfectly. My continued flawed interpretation is that you still seem to be trying to invent some contrived hypothetical, but that doesn't make sense, so I will have to ask you to clarify once again. What are you trying to say here?

2. At least where democracy is found, the government and the customers are the exact same people. The distinction you are trying to draw isn't clear either. What do you think government is if not people?

1. Whether it is debt or not makes no difference so long as someone else will take it. You imply that Apple having cash means customers owe Apple something. I say that Apple having cash just means Apple could have something else in the place of cash in the future if someone chooses to take Apple's cash for it.

2. I disagree. An autocratic government is fully capable of issuing fiat currency, and a the government being obliged to provide resources in return for its currency is a concept orthogonal to democracy. It doesn't matter whose "debt" cash stems from. All that matters is that it can be traded easily.

Also, I updated my comment to point out more clearly where I disagree with your conclusions. (Apologies for such a late response. I hit HN's rate limit.)

In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.

This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.

>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.

--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.

You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.

As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?

Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.

You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.

In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...

So the broken windows fallacy for the AI age?

I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.

You are right.

The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.

There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value.

Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy.

You can radically change the economy. But it’s going to either use money in the open or some much less efficient warped backroom version of money.

You can’t avoid having to pay for valuable things with valuable things. Money is just a ledger. But you can always add inefficiencies to transactions, or mismanage money, and make any problem worse.

My point is, there is probably something to what you are thinking but you are misframing it in a way it won’t work, unnecessarily. Consider what you really think should happen and what might be a better way to frame it.

Most likely, that means focusing less on money, and more on how resources cycle to create more resources, as apposed to less. And matching that to a problem where you can find reciprocal improvements if it is solved. Some waste is avoided. Some fraud or unchecked damage is eliminated. Some mutual arrangements are magnified, etc. There has to be a resource return cycle of some kind.

(Replacing every mention of “money” with “resources” tends to clarify what can work or not quickly.)

I think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward

The problem is currency is inherently clumpy. While value is always judged and assigned to things, the existence of a static, cumulative ledger of it is not a requirement.

It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that imbalance for further wealth by way of rentseeking. Wealth provides power which provides more wealth and more power. Eventually your landlords drop the "land" prefix and simply become nobility.

Prior to the invention of currency, we had reputation economies. One might be tempted to model such economies as just money economies with implicit ledgers, but that isn't how reputation works in the real world. Being implicit, reputation captures a lot of activity that doesn't warrant an overt exchange of currency. Think of all the things that you appreciate, and make you value a relationship with someone more, that would be terribly inappropriate to pay them for: the friendly guy at the pub who tells you stories of questionable accuracy, a fellow parent watching your kid during a playdate, anything in the romantic sphere at all. Reputation also doesn't add up in anything close to a linear way: The guy who did something really big once and the guy who did something small with extreme regularly over a long period of time both likely have stronger ties with others in their community than the one who sporadically provided middling value. Reputation also isn't particularly inheritable: I might feel some obligation to someone's kid because of my relationship with their father, but that obligation fades rapidly as they entire adulthood, and nobody owes you shit for who your grandfather was. Likewise, gifts from someone who has an embarrassment of excess are valued much less than the same thing offered by someone who has barely enough.

All told, reputation economies act as a damping function on wealth and power accumulation, whereas currency economies provide positive feedback on the same.

you give a nod to the solution. If we have an undamped oscillator, or a system with a tendency in an undesirable direction, we can damp it.

And currency (given that we make it up and have a reasonable degree of control over its worth and distribution) does not have to be a static cumulative ledger

Any solution needs the damping function to be intrinsic to the system, rather than tacked on as policy. Policy ends up being dictated by the powerful, so if your system's only check against runaway wealth accumulation is policy, eventually your guardrails will be demolished. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow. But eventually, self-propelled wealth wins.

There are models of currency that try to include such dampening intrinsically (Tankies love talking about various experimental forms of currency as "labor vouchers" to try and sidestep the "moneyless" pitch of Communism), but I've yet to see one that really addresses the "wealth begets wealth, hierarchy begets hierarchy" problem.

I mean, if any argument on why AI would extinct mankind, this is the most likely. Humans make no economic sense to an AI that controls all intellectual and manual labor. What do most humans have to reciprocate? Why not use the resources it gets to build more AI?

Fiat is actually a warped backroom version of money. It's a measure of trust I think? You could replace it with something that represents resources, perhaps even [future] labor.

The problem is just how far USD has departed from the value. There are some funny tricks people pulled with abstract concepts and now people have found a way to "print" their own money. It's created a new power and influence shift because you can just go to the Finance or Tech worlds and get money instead of producing actual value to other humans.

I agree with the risk you’re pointing to. Money currently mediates access to resources through labor and markets.

We either need to redesign money or a novel way to mediate access to resources. I haven't seen any proposal to make that work, which is a bit scary.

There won't be any well off people because the machines will rule. Humanity will become second to its own creation.

There is no future in which a human ruling class will be lording it over superhuman machine intelligence. I mean look at the clowns who run the world today. They won't be able to keep the machines from taking over.

Honestly, I'd rather be ruled by my laptop than the Epstein class.

I'd propose that the opposite is just as plausible. Look at the world today: compared to most of the people in charge, plenty in the underclass are superintelligent. Yet the rich remain that way, because the underclass are taught to play by the rules that were written by the rich. Who's to say the same scheme can't be pulled off against the machines?

> There will be a few well off people with capital.

How much capital does one need to be in that group? Is that the same world wide, or location-dependent?

Luckily electromagnetism is the great equalizer. I'm imagining guerrilla warfare involving giant (in terms of GWh stored) Jerry-rigged capacitors driving electromagnets that are lobbed into places that would be extremely unappreciative surprise recipients of magnetic fields with flux densities measured in full Teslas

I saw a gh for a $100 stringer missile last week. I often wonder if I will miss the stable tyranny of American capitalism if we descend back into warring nation states defended by cheap autonomous munitions.

That thing was a toy, not even remotely viable or even a meaningful step towards viability.

It was discussed here.

Small ~$1000 drones have been proven to be very effective weapons in Ukraine though.

Compared to an actual stinger missile and its usual application, yes. Deployed against soft targets like trucks, cars, or homes, it has the potential to be very effective.

>or even a meaningful step towards viability.

Says the person that gets rocketed in the next civil war.

The more unstable our country becomes the more meaningful weapons like this will develop.

Hell, if I were a nation that controlled my internet and other information, I'd start injecting effective versions into the internet of 'free' countries so they could take themselves out.

they will get poor people to die fighting each other, as it works today.

Service for citizenship, stationed along the border walls and manning really big fucking guns seems to be the place my brain always goes to in these sorts of conversations.

SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP

I'm doing my part!

Would you like to know more?

> Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities.

People keep saying this, but AI is making intellectual abilities more important, not less. If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is like a supersonic fighter jet. You will still need plenty of ability to steer it properly for the foreseeable future.

I like to call this "capitalist feudalism", and it appears to be the overt agenda of big business and their allies/agents in governments around the world, notably but not exclusively in the USA.

Seems like if we want to avoid dystopia, our options are:

1. Full-blown socialism

2. Georgism

Georgism may have been right all along!

Given that rich people often push Georgism, it looks like a trojan horse. Only rich people will be able to afford land.

3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.

> 3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the mind of man"?

> Only rich people will be able to afford land.

That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

> rich people often push Georgism

Your user was created 8 minutes ago specifically to make this comment!

It seems like its literally you who is pushing things! The gaslighting in this comment is insane!

> That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves.

Georgism solves for land not being used productively. That means it isn't economical for rich people to hoard land, but it also means that it isn't economical for poor people to hoard land. The difference is that rich people can take that land and start doing something productive with it (build large-scale housing, a factory, farm it, etc.) Poor people can, at best, only afford to hoard it — which Georgism puts a stop to.

georgism would make owning property, such as ai, very expensive. it is a way of ensuring that rents get recirculated back into the rest of society

Only rich people can afford land now. The exception is some uninhabitable patches that would require you to give up your livelihood, except for the small amount of people who can work remotely and they can afford land already.

Full-blown socialism is pretty dystopian.

Rosa Luxemburg was right all along.

Our two options are socialism or barbarism.

So you are saying essentially nothing changes ?

The permanent underclass permeates everything.

End state of capitalism is Egyptian pharaohs, a few pyramid architects, and a lot of slaves and whips.

The only thing to counter this would be some sort of geopolitical Darwinism, where societies that invest more in their populations would have healthier and stronger societies and militaries.

But nuclear Armageddon prevents that from being any sort of slim hope.

The current American political climate of extreme service to the ultra rich, vast degradation of the democratic institutions, and infrastructure for a complete surveillance state is bleak.

The only hope I have for some sort of human structure in this technological wasteland that might win out is the fact that AI and the tech algorithms in general have taken the demographic collapse associated with urbanization and vastly magnified it.

We're already seeing this in places like China. If you have too much centralized control and too much limitation of freedom, The population will simply refuse to procreate, and your country dies a slow death over 50 years.

> The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones.

Which is why Iran bombing a few Western-run data-centers located in the Emirates was cheered by many of the normal people actually living in the West. I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.

Do you have any sources for "normal" people (i.e. not the terminally online) being happy that datacenters were bombed?

> i.e. not the terminally online)

We're not in 2018 anymore, everyone is terminally online now, you must have missed the shift. I've seen mini-bus drivers watching social media videos (Tik-Tok, that is) while driving from all the way to Germany to here in Romania (from where I'm from), I noticed that because I was one of the passengers. Almost all of the remaining passengers (not middle-class, you can well imagine that) were on their phones for the majority of the trip (30-ish hours or so), that is when they were not sleeping.

That didn't really answer the question...

However, using your phone does not make you terminally online. That is more of a mental state, and while some Europeans may be in it, my experience is that most are not.

> my experience is that most are not.

As I said, my experience is totally the opposite, but I've started seeing that, i.e. the middle-classes trying to distance themselves from the internet (as present on their mobile phones), such as seeing that, i.e. being terminally online via one's mobile phone, as a "mental state". It wasn't a "mental state" when it was only the middle-classes who were doing it, back in the late-Obama era.

Back to your question, the people I shared my ride with, the normal people, have started being very conservative, I would say even luddite, when it comes to their voting choices, if you live in Europe you might have noticed that.

"Terminally online" does not mean "uses the internet a lot".

> I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.

Cute, but that's why they took over TikTok baby, so there's no chance of anything like that happening again.

The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population

It’s thermodynamically impossible for 8-10Billon animals that have no satiation reflex and limited coordination capacity to live on a resource limited rock

Absolute Best case future is what I wrote in 2025 which is basically humans living in care facilities managed by machines:

https://kemendo.com/We%20All%20Slept%20Well.pdf

That is a strange ideal, and I am an environmental nutso myself.

You have a better long term plan for humanity?

Whats the next 20000 years look like in your mind?

Hey, I saw that movie! The little robots were cute.

Which?! I’d love to see a version of my short story of someone already did it

I think that the parent means Wall-E: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Plot

>The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population

Okay! You first though. What, still here?

"You participate in society, how curious"

If they're choosing not to have kids then they are doing their part towards their beliefs.

Nope, using the "I am very intelligent" comic doesn't work to defend those who want to eliminate society

Oh see that’s where you’ve hallucinated (apparently not just computer hallucinate after all ;))

Who said anything about elimination?

All that has to happen is for people to stop reproducing

We’re already pretty well along that track (except Afghanistan and the DRC)

>All that has to happen is for people to stop reproducing

And if they don't?...

More of the same then

There is a more direct action possible here.

The thing is, in advocating for removing 999 out of 1000 people (how? I don't hear a suggestion for a gradual decline, so assuming a bloody genocide seems like a reasonable interpretation), opens a body up to pretty harsh criticism. It's reasonable to read that line of reasoning as a direct threat!

I’ve tried to kill myself a lot of times but people seem to want me to stay around so unfortunately I am stuck here with everybody else.

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