What do we do if many people aren't working? | Hacker News Reader

What do we do if many people aren't working?

wilsoniumite.com

2 pointsWilsoniumite6 comments

Market economics must be a truly unstable equilibrium in a cognitive sense. People constantly reinvent centrally planned societies where jobs of need are chosen by the state. Inevitably, in their conception these jobs are chosen by the utility function that they desire. Then, once put into play they find that the populace has another utility function. Then it’s either suppression of this obviously wrong utility function or concession to it until your government is merely an instrument to reallocate resources from everyone to the utility function setter and his relatives.

The structure involves a large number of intermediaries, doubtless all dedicated to telling people how essential they are in this utility function and why they must be allocated more of the state money and people. Of course this endowment fund is tens of billions but we’re doing crucial crucial stuff here and yes you should select the leader who wants to give us more. And yes we will vote for him en masse.

Also, prices to educate you UBI apprentices are rising man. I’m sorry but it’s now up to $150k. I know, it sucks, but our guy in power (who you should absolutely vote for) will make sure it’s paid for, okay? So don’t worry too much. You won’t pay a dime. Vote for him. I know, you have to take a loan for this, but he’s going to cancel it.

You're right, but if you imagine a world where a machine outcompetes you for every job, you have no other choice unless you just want everyone to sit around doing nothing. There's no market signals anymore to guide labor, so if you want people to work and understand their economy, you'll have to design some signals.

I think the thought experiment of achieving marginal cost per job higher with human than machine for all jobs is best explored with the pathway there. Machines will not come into existence in a blink. Real-world concerns like manufacturing capacity and power will constrain the pace of building. (In the event they don’t, we will be grey goo).

Given that, the question becomes what happens in the intermediary period and whether that period will last very long.

You have to contend with my utility function in that period which prefers maximum leisure over Commissar Wilson’s Labor Corps. Either you let me have the machine that outcompetes everyone else for the things I want done and I don’t enter your CWLC or that thing I want done needs a human and I will exchange something I have to get what the other has and reinvent market economics the hard way on the black market if required.

Put simply, commissar, I don’t want to work or understand my economy so unless machines arrive in a blink and place you on the throne, the fact that you want that has no bearing on what will occur through the transition because there are more of me.

I mean, fair enough, but this is just me toying with the hypothetical, at no point did I say we need to do this immediately right now, but thinking ahead is just prudent, no?

One of the cool things about the system design is there are only a few numbers you need to/can set:

- UBI level

- Short Placement Level

- State index vs market requirement ratio (this is the big one, essentially "how much do we trust crisis forecasters versus what the market thinks")

- A few other small ones that don't do much.

At no point except for one thing (which I explicitly said is so hard that probs you don't do it) can you favor one company over another. At most, you can favor one industry over another, but even then that is offset by the higher level ratio.

That’s fair. You should be able to play with an idea without it being perfect. All right then.

I think industry level collusion is the natural thing that arises from this with regulatory capture. But it’s fine. No need to be overly negative. I’ll leave it alone.

I think we should ask what do we do if many TECH ppl aren’t working bc there are lots of jobs that don’t need tech but still need doing. The desirability of these jobs would shift how we think about them.

Old people still need care, children still need care (tech can’t replace parenting we don’t know enough about what works vs what doesn't), food still needs to be sown and grown, trash needs to be taken out, water needs purification, materials need gathering, houses need to be built (different when a majority of ppl can’t afford them but they still exist), healthcare, entertainment (peak experiences need humans)…I’m sure we could think of many more.

Some people would do creative things, writing art etc.

some people would obviously be bad actors, a panopticon is not a great way to manage crime (a human problem w mostly human solutions).

So no art anymore bc a machine can do it? No more imagination, no more human condition?

This might be a silly question but why does the industry imagine that with LLMs everyone will just stop working? We’ll all just sit in our pods and collect UBI, dying of collective boredom rather than evolving new ways of existing? Is the concern how capitalism will work when there’s no wage slavery (or when there’s actual slavery/serfdom)? My blind spots are American, and I would love to hear more opinions!

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