I wonder about this; theoretically elites who control capital no longer "need" masses in such numbers to retain power/wealth. It would be much simpler to manage a smaller population and extract surplus production from technocapital instead (automated factories, solar, ag etc).

If you are mainly constrained by externalities of production / industrialisation one way to maximise the resources available to you is to have fewer other people.

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alexashka a day ago | parent | next [-]

Are you quoting the rationale for China's one child policy?

You misunderstand what the elites do. They prevent change because the status quo has been setup by their parents and grand-parents to benefit them at the expense of everyone else already.

They are not agents of change, they are agents of preventing change.

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xyzzy123 a day ago | parent [-]

Ok, my definition of "elites" is they are the people who wrest control of the systems that sustain us all and bend them towards extracting value for themselves. They're the people who live up on the hill and extract grain from the peasants at the point of a sword. It's generational.

Peasants are not very productive and you need a lot of them, and you're continually running the risk that they're going to revolt or want a better deal.

Under conditions of wider stability I absolutely agree with you that in general "elites" want to slow or block change. The system is rigged to support them already and change is risky. When there is significant external competition (threat of war or impending social change that would overturn their control), I believe it turns out to be surprising what can be done...

If automation can replace labour as the main productive input, the "masses" and welfare seem largely redundant and significant degrowth might be seen as preferable.

I am not claiming this is pre-ordained or a definite outcome, I am saying that this line of reasoning seems plausible to me.

The tipping point would seem to be where the marginal return on investment in capital (automation, AI, machines) exceeds the marginal return on investment in humans (labor, welfare, training, etc.).

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alexashka 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Automation replaced labor decades ago.

A 32 hour work week was suggested by USA politicians almost a century ago. Read that again - a century ago.

You're trying to reduce complex human issues to a single metric of input vs output. I struggle to convey why this is um, not smart without being insulting.

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xyzzy123 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree neither I nor my ideas are very smart.

Think like Zuck on a private island. The thing that matters to you is economic output that is available for you to direct and consume. From a certain point of view, everything else is just resources spent for no benefit - inefficiency. Naturally you need some other people because a) the unit of human survival is a community and b) status remains the ultimate good and that is unlikely to change.

My working definition of AGI is when humans and robots become roughly fungible.

The structure of the economy seriously changes with the introduction of a robot slave class.

You can cut out the middleman in terms of production. At a certain point it stops making sense to think about things in terms of money because robots don't need to be paid. You have to think about the inputs you have and the goods and services you want them to produce for you.

It's pretty rational to start asking questions about "what's the desired human/robot ratio" under these circumstances.

The only political questions that matter become "who controls the robots" and "who controls the land", but perhaps they become the same question.

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KPGv2 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the population shrinks, their capital isn't worth much. Meta, Twitter, etc. all lose value when the user base shrinks, we've literally seen it already. If the population gets smaller by design, naturally this same thing would happen.

Amazon, Uber, owners of apartment complexes, commercial real estate titans, Fox News, etc. What do their powerful owners/managers do? Rupert Murdoch's family doesn't think "if only our viewership dropped by 90% we'd really be doing great!"

Elites are where they are because the current system has benefited them. They wouldn't want to risk that by shaking things up so dramatically.

	▲	xyzzy123 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		All those things you described are proxies to control resources and produce security. The money, the attention, the influence etc. Yes, structurally those things become less important if there are fewer people. But it doesn't matter! People are unpredictable and difficult. You don't meet most of them anyway! You don't need to think about money in the same way anymore if you can produce the goods and services you need directly, using land, productive capital and robots that are approximately as capable as humans.
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