The Economist interviews Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

The Economist interviews Elon Musk

economist.com

9 pointsandsoitis7 comments

if he is correct, in a few years’ time money will not matter, even his own $750bn fortune. He predicts that AI will create such abundance that there will soon be little point in accumulating old-fashioned currency units.

Which he isn't. I will bet $1000 against him, choosing 10 years as my number for "few". Gains accrue to owners, and relatively few own things. By the same token, UBI is a non-starting concept, a government choked for funds by its own trillions of dollars of debt and everyone seeking to pay no taxes has nothing to offer in terms of support for its citizens.

No one can 3-d print their own food or land. Start there. Clothing for free? Huh? Solar panels and batteries (ie energy) for free? Etc.

It's interesting to hear the logic he lays out, which seems parsimonious and highly probably at unfolding. I have not been able to think of high probably counter-logic.

It amounts to: robots (physically manifested AI) + digital AI ==> any job can be done vastly better than any human.

Consequently, goods and services will far outstrip what any human can consume. We'll end up with deflation.

So we won't have to work and won't need money. Very exhilarating and scary road ahead, but there's no way to stop it.

That's the argument, but everyone who runs a factory knows not to run it so hard that profits dip. No one will allow their profits to dip. As costs for some tbings decline, prices might decline or might not, depends on the mood. Eventually, the need for profits to eternally grow will make any "abundance" disappear.

Everything is still run for profit. To shift into abundance mode, we need to give up this economic system entirely. Become the Star Trek economy, not Star Wars or Dune. Maybe the path is to have every government, or the most influential, become so f'd up with things like debt that they decide to blow up the current system so they don't have to actually pay anything back? I mean, the ability to deficit spend shows that actually having money is irrelevant anyway.

Investors certainly prefer it when they can make a profit, but that doesn't mean they always succeed. Because investing means making predictions about the future, and sometimes the predicted profit fails to materialize. And by the time people realize, it's typically too late.

Producers will keep making products until they suddenly can't sell them for more than the cost of inputs anymore, by which time they'll already have amassed a pile of unsold inventory. They'll increase production capacity until they can't run their production line profitably anymore, by which time they'll already have amassed a pile of superfluous machinery. And so on recursively along the supply chain.

So the creation of robots that can do any task a human can do will most likely cause a boom in robot deployment that suddenly ends with an oversupply of robots. This oversupply won't necessarily be enough to achieve abundance on its own, but fortunately widespread unemployment will make human-provided goods and services very cheap, too.

That chain of events assumes that course correction loops don't occur. Producers won't overproduce for more than a fiscal quarter, maybe two. It'll be messier than that. And investors will pull their money out of anything unprofitable and put it somewhere else. There will be somewhere else.

Think about this social disruption: if money doesn't have meaning, what does the plutocracy do to stay relevant and keep their islands and relative wealth? How will those things be defined?

Anyone who has followed musk for a while knows that he is an almost pathological liar. Interviews with him are pointless

Reply on news.ycombinator.com