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Comment by rahulyc | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what happens (I think no one does), but with every other technology, I can opt-out if I don't want to use it.

Even if I get unemployed, I don't see how I can opt-out when it comes to everyone everywhere using it.

Governments historically have considered humans as assets - it's even called "human capital", and they require us for tax revenue and to run the state. What happens when we aren't needed? Even if the AI is magically aligned to the state, I don't see how I end up the winning side of that. It's not like we're getting a voice in how this is shoved down our throats today. Why would it get any better when AGI can do everything humans can do? What still gives us a voice in the world?

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The 'voice' anybody has is some function of their capital, ability to leverage it and ability to prevent its erosion by theft, fraud, seduction/politics scams and honeytrapping. Humans can still acquire capital in the future in several ways, although their ability to not be parted from it is in doubt.

1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing or newly created works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed or disfavored,

2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,

3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,

4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,

5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),

6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,

7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,

8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by some hypergraph of patron AGIs and the superorganisms they compose with, or without, your knowledge of what your work entails.

Some of these have a strong factor of supply and demand. You can increase your market value by reducing the supply of other humans competing for these revenue sources.

National governments which can print their own currency don't require people for tax revenue. They use taxes to compel people to acquire their currency to give it value. If they can instead compel AIs to acquire their currency, they won't need humans for that either.

I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but the purpose of taxes isn't to "compel people to acquire their currency", it's to remove that currency from circulation and prevent the currency they've printed from inflating itself out of existence.

Reducing inflation is indeed one of the reasons, but what I was getting at is that the government doesn't "need" people for tax revenue to pay for its services, contrary to popular belief. It needs taxes to make its money valuable.

L. Randall Wray, "What Are Taxes For? The MMT Approach" (2014):

> Sovereign government does not really need revenue in its own currency in order to spend. It is the tax that 'drives' the currency. If we eliminated the tax, people probably would not immediately abandon use of the currency, but the main driver for its use would be gone.

Fair enough, both points are valid

There are two types of citizens: debtors and creditors. Printing currency pays the debtors. Raising interest rates pays the creditors. Income taxes take from debtors. Property taxes and printing money take from creditors.

The government is made up of human beings too. I doubt most of them are psycho to such a degree as to let 99% of humanity die for no real reason.

At the risk of being incredibly banal, the current US government shows you absolutely can consolidate enough of such psychos.

Game theory is a helluva thing.

All you need is 1% of humanity to be psycho enough to let the other 99% die out.

And I do not have much faith in the charity of the most powerful 1%. Charitable people often do not make it into that group.

I agree and I think uncertainty causes people to miss this. A dystopian world is good for no-one. The shitty things people do to each other are scarcity motivated and call me delusionally optimistic but I think a world of total and complete abundance doesn't incentivize people at the top (who are there because people at the bottom allow it) to mercy kill everyone else with AI drones.

> I think a world of total and complete abundance doesn't incentivize people at the top (who are there because people at the bottom allow it) to mercy kill everyone else with AI drones.

They will have one of the strongest incentive: to remain at the top. Moreover, it will not be that hard. In Soviet Union one honest socialist with four revolvers (major general Vasily Blokhin) could easily kill up to a thousand people per day personally (if he were laboriously working overtime). And back then there wasn't even a global governmental surveillance or AI-drones with explosives.

> They will have one of the strongest incentive: to remain at the top.

At the top of what? After all the massacres the remaining billionaires and their families would be all that's left of humanity. Who would want to rule over a human-empty, machine-led Earth for the rest of their lives? Not to mention the attitude and morality of their families and those close to them.

I can think of several billionaires who would be quite fine ruling over a devastated and machine-led earth. Their families are chosen or bred to agree with their amorality, and they and their dynastic families would rule with pleasure.

Yes, they can print, but they can also tax capital. It's not actually impossible. We already do it a tiny bit, we've done it more in the past, and contrary to the dogma blasted from the billionaire-owned media outlets and drilled in billionaire-think-tank-approved Econ 101 curricula the universe will not actually explode if we do it again.

We're assuming the oligarchs control the government so they can be rich and powerful and use that to lead lavish lives. Well with these hypothetical AGI imbued robots, they could just construct lavish lives directly.

Not much different from the feudal era. You still need access to good lands (energy production, minerals) but an army of computers and robots instead of serfs and knights. Like Asimov's world of Solaria.

If humans aren’t needed, neither is government/state.

> What happens when we aren't needed?

Depends on the political system. Under socialism authority will simply improve the environment by reducing your carbon footprint with eight grams of lead. Under capitalism you're already not needed to anybody.

> Why would it get any better when AGI can do everything humans can do?

Because that "better" we are building ourselves with our own hands. How it can get worse? Only if authority forbid us from building ourselves like we always did and decide to improve the environment.

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