Comment by Ray20 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ray20 | Hacker News Reader

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> AI is different

Literally the same thing.

> humans will be economically obsolete and worthless

Only if we are talking about a socialist system (and they are making pretty small progress in the field of AI). A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.

A people's well-being is literally the goods and services created by that people. How can it decrease if the people's ability to produce those goods and services is not hindered in any way?

So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits. The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes, taxation out of production, and other practices that would lead to people being declared economically obsolete and mass executed to optimize their carbon footprint or something.

> A human's value under a capitalist system is equal to their ability to create goods and services. And AI cannot make this ability smaller in any way.

Yes they can. Your ability to produce goods and services depends on the infrastructure around you. When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.

See that land over there producing food you need to eat? It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc.

Under a US-style capitalist system the rich (i.e. the AIs and AI-run businesses) control politics, the courts, etc, so the decisions the system makes will favour AIs over humans.

> So, when it comes to the entire nation benefiting from AI, the most important thing is to preserve capitalism, and then the free market will distribute all the benefits

...to the AI-run companies!

> The main danger is a descent into socialism, with all these basic incomes

Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.

> depends on the infrastructure around you

Yeah, and who is creating those infrastructure? Jesus? This is the same part of goods and services.

> When that's all run by AIs for AIs, humans won't be able to compete.

So what? The ability to produce goods and services (and therefore general well-being) will not decrease because of that.

> It turns out it's more economically efficient to pave it over with data centers etc

By the way, a good argument against your position. Agricultural land is very cheap, but the vast majority of people who believe AI will put people out of work and worsen overall well-being are for some reason reluctant to buy this asset, which would see a catastrophic increase in value under such a scenario. So these people are either incapable of analyzing the economic processes, and their predictions are worthless, or they don’t really believe in such a scenario.

> will favour AIs over humans

Let me repeat: it does not reduce the ability to create goods and services. Under capitalism, this is the only characteristic that determines people's well-being.

> ...to the AI-run companies!

I think this is a fairly unlikely scenario. But even in this very unlikely case, people's well-being will not be reduced. Simply because of the mechanisms of creating well-being.

> Without UBI most people (or maybe everyone) would starve.

Economic theory (and 20th-century economic practice) demonstrates the exact opposite. In every country that attempted to effectively implement UBI, it led to a sharp decline in production and mass starvation. Literally every single time.

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