If AI leads to an era of abundance, then the economic system has to change. The system it transitions to and what that transition looks like will need to be fought for, and I imagine it’ll be done better in some places than others. Yet I think the parallel existential question of meaning in this world is one that is inherently optimistic. Humans decide meaning, it is not something imposed on us or taken away by the existence of something else.
How do you think this will work? Do you think the whole of the rest of the world, about 7 billion people, will agree to give up on wanting to reach the western life standard that is currently consuming 4 Earth's of resources every year?
Will all rich people in all countries collectively agree to be moved into tiny apts same size and give up their luxuries?
If not, how do you define who gets what? Who gets to live in the fancy house, etc?
The distribution of goods will probably be maintained until others lower the gap over time.
Using the metric of “4 earths of resources” is confusing and easily misunderstood. What that metric means is that if everyone were to have the same consumption as the average U.S. person tomorrow, we wouldn’t have enough renewable resources to meet demand.
This is not an insurmountable problem. It just requires increasing production everywhere else. Your cited metric isn’t a stat on the theoretical limit of global production, it’s one that describes its current limits.
The stat also factors in carbon emissions, but this is also easily addressable in a world where labor and maintenance is cheap.
Land, energy infrastructure, mineral deposits, grid capacity, etc.
Who gets to live in the nice parts of the world? Who has a national park as a neighbour? Who gets to be ravaged by hurricanes every year?
Who gets to have more energy production closer to then? Who will own the land that has the finite resources that are used to create abundance? Where will people with the most power live?
There are so many reasons beyond production why certain areas fare better than others inherently, I have not seen any answer to this apart from that all rich people will just fold and we will all be moved into soviet skyscrapers which I find improbable.
This is more an organizational/political problem than a technology problem.
Our current oligarch-capitalist system (wherein most of the world is dictatorship or plutocratic) is not capable of equitable resource distribution. However, future, better systems of organization will likely provide better mechanisms for distrubtion.
Capitalism is an old and dying system. It is clearly unfit for the 21st century. It's best thought of as anachronistic, like feudalism. Once it's been excised from our societies, we'll be able to answer your questions.
Any planned economy is inherently built upon a bias and ideology that is culturally specific to the creators of it. There is no way that the US will accept a planned economy ran by China, or by India. However these countries followed by Africa will be the most populated areas of the world.
Meanwhile capitalism bases itself on game-theory and evolutionary selection. You compete with power, sexual selection and resources. It's sadly a system more aligned with the natural order of things. If you strip away all banks, hedge funds, etc, you are again going to get people who want to mate with the hottest fit partner, get the most resources to ensure survival of their offspring, etc.
The organizational/political problem you describe above with the land use land in the same bucket. Who gets the best land, etc. Historically this has just been decided by war and killing each other. Maybe you're right and that's where we end up, but that is very far from the utopias talked about in the comments above.
I don't think "abundance" is a stable state. There are always ways to use more resources and more energy, so no matter how much we have, it will never be "enough" -- abundance is just a transition state where a population or system has not yet figured out how to grind the surplus. The faster the progress, the shorter I would expect these periods to be.
Money will become unnecessary. The future Anthro Park will no doubt provide a safe enclosure, feeding at regular intervals, and an enriching environment for you and your fellow semi-evolved simians.
We could feed the whole population of the world if we decided to, we definitely have enough production[1]. If we pretend AI-assisted automation can do most work - which still currently is an highly dubious claim - we could just provide food and shelter for free to everyone, if we so desired. It would require quite a lot of restructuring and dietary changes, but it is possible.
You're right that we could already feed everyone with a different distribution of produced wealth. That part is not something that AI will change (although it would raise the resulting standard of living).
What it does change is the basic equation underlying capitalism as an economic system: a few people concentrate capital in their hands, but capital by itself is useless without labor, so they have to hire workers to produce something useful with all that capital that they own. The workers get a shit sandwich, comparatively speaking (given the amount of wealth they generate), but they do get something out of it. The system is stable overall because, while a better arrangement is possible, most people - even low-wage workers - have too much to lose to riot.
With AI that can do most work, the capital no longer needs labor. People who own all the robots can just have them produce whatever they need. Everybody else is then "economically redundant", and the whole system collapses because people aren't going to sit around and starve because there are no longer jobs to be had - and at this point they have nothing left to lose and everything to gain by rebelling and taking over the capital.
> Everybody else is then "economically redundant", and the whole system collapses because people aren't going to sit around and starve because there are no longer jobs to be had
This is a non sequitur. People being economically redundant doesn’t necessitate a system collapse. It assumes our existing systems can’t handle an increase (assuming we have economically redundant people today) in those who are economically redundant.
Capitalism defines who owns the means of production scoped to the definition of ownership in a particular governance structure. In the U.S., for example, full ownership gives people the right to produce as much as they want with rules in place to seize the rights of ownership if broken.
One rule of ownership is that taxes must be levied on the positive return of capital. This today is what helps funds the welfare state. The idea that the system collapses implies we won’t be able to scale this welfare state up which seems unlikely to me.
There’s already a deficit caused by welfare spending. An increase in abundance (of work, resources, etc.) can reasonably alleviate this if we consider the possibilities in removing inefficiencies within the government itself and their biggest cost drivers like public health.
If this is true, you would think that companies would be opening shops in the middle of (some shithole country) so they can make money (or someone else would grab it). But they don’t, why is that?
Referring to countries as "shithole countries" does not help in understanding the current dynamic between rich and poor nations. So perhaps it is helpful to understand what that is, without the pejoratives.
Firstly, each country is different. So the relationship between say the USA and Mexico is different to the relationship between the USA and say Ethiopia.
By "richness" we might also be better off thinking as less "spare cash" and more "standard of living". Which includes food, housing etc but also security, safety etc.
In truth much of the US "richness" depends on other nations. If there was no Latin labor the US would have a fresh produce problem. Indeed the very premise of DJT is that the US has a trade deficit with just about everyone. Much of US "richness" is thus dependent on the "poorness" of others.
Yes automation, cheaper energy, AI can reduce the labor content of goods and make them universally cheaper. Yes I believe in a future where the overall standard of living increases.
But it would be a mistake to believe the US is "leading" US there. The US achieved its current position at the barrel of a gun, and uses the military (and threat of military) to interfere with countries and regions either overtly or covertly. The entire premise of the cold war (outside of western europe) was premised on interventions to resist countries switching their political model to something the locals preferred.
And yes, maybe the locals preferred wrong. But the US didn't promote democracy, they promoted "willingness to keep supplying us". Countries which were leaning away from the US had to be punished. (Shah in Iran, Vietnam etc.)
I could go on, but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that an equitable standard of living is not in the (current) interest of most US citizens.
Exactly, it is already priced in. Try setting up shop in the middle of some really bad country and you will soon realize why food is not getting there.
The companies do not do this, because equal distribution of resources is poison to capitalism. The world where everyone are fed, and their basic needs - shelter, medication etc. - are taken care of, does not have trillionaires. Possibly not even billionaires.
It is not profitable to give people humane standards of living. You work a lot harder when you see the homeless on the street on your way to work.
The current approach to resource distribution worked so far. When it stops working because we have too much abundance, we'll settle on another one.
That doesn't mean the transition will be smooth. It doesn't mean that certain classes won't be worse off. I can certainly imagine programmers being among the losers. And there certainly are futures where we slide in dystopia. So let's try building the good futures. Alea iacta est.
Agree, it’s not the graph representation that’s valuable, it’s the attribution and business logic of the workflows themselves. The concrete values and weights that go into making these deterministic decisions.
I still think is the angle they are after. Get these things locked down, and then force through the lockdowns with their endless cash. Otherwise, their market becomes commodified with plentiful competitors. It’s a strategy to create an oligopoly.
Most people who comment positively on AI are either shills or people working in the AI industry (gotta keep the bubble expanding). The OP experience matches mine with most models for any kind of serious work. In fact, it was the reason why Claude was previously successful because it was the most railed model.
I've tried the latest models across OpenAI, Claude, Chinese, etc. They just do stuff. That's not how work is though. You want them to do specific work, at which point it's a real hassle to follow up on all the garbage they have been outputting.
I’m a fan for sure but everything is said is true. If the products were bad I’d say that. The majority of people here at the complete opposite and exist to dump on Elon related companies for no reason other than they don’t like him personally.
I think it would work well as a multi-emoji compiler too. Some phrases pair well with N emojis, and you’d be able to produce arbitrarily many emojis per phrase
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