People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work.
As more people start companies, more competition will drive down prices for everything, making the things people want more accessible.
Right now, the world is making all the stuff people need and then some. Poverty and hunger, in the 21st century, are distribution problems. (And, inevitably, politics problems.)
Now, it's true that what people want exceeds what they need (almost by definition). But it doesn't exceed it by so many orders of magnitude that we're that far off from being able to produce it with what we have today.
The danger arises when people want stuff but cannot afford it as there is no more work and what remains of available work (i.e. trades and sex work) is being fought over heavily, driving down the prices.
When that "cannot afford it" extends to necessary stuff such as housing and food too much, eventually there will be a revolution once people are fed up.
The US is in a particularly bad spot here - in contrast with other countries that experience utter poverty (e.g. Afghanistan), most of the population lives in urban areas and has zero opportunity to at least engage in subsistence farming. Whoops.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
You're talking to a group who has seen a comment similar to yours every day of the week for two years.
That also means that they have already seen the rebuttals. So have you, too, maybe?
The argument implies that there's some kind of balance point in there. But I'll bet it's not one where the general populace is living remotely well.
Or high intelligence, enough to replace all humans, becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of energy and data compared to humans that we maintain a kind of biological advantage on a large category of economically valuable tasks.
Or training sufficiently advanced ai to replace us requires judgements and training data that is essentially beyond us (eg if we can’t figure out what the right answer is, how can we train or judge an AI)
No one has any real idea what is going to happen. What we need tho is a collective promise, through our democracies and communities and governments, that we will make it right. Institutions and laws that make sure the benefits are distributed broadly, that we stay safe, that we have a better world because of it. If people get that I think everyone will be mostly excited by ai, not opposed.
> If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output.
there isn't infinite demand for the output. unless they're in an industry with infinity growing demand (which would be ...?), companies are not going to retain their staff and 5x their output, they are going to cut their staff by 80% and 5x their profits. we're already seeing this (not 80% but things are just getting started).
> People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff.
wanting stuff and being able to afford stuff are two very different things. if people don't have jobs, they can't buy that much stuff. This is why we will end up with a few very large and profitable providers.
> Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want.
Completely false.
> As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
No. As long as there is continued consumption, there will be a demand for output of companies most of which will (if the promise of AI holds true) not be fulfilled by humans.