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atleastoptimal 4 hours ago

Many people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.

The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)

If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.

coderenegade an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.

What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.

I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.

dodu_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).

This timeline is straight ass.

mawadev 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.

Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?

annzabelle 3 hours ago | parent [-]

"AI training data generator" already exists and is absorbing some of the unemployment in the last couple waves of CS and writing grads. So far it's generally Uber-style independent contractor no benefits gig work, pays noticeably less than any kind of professional software development, and the various metrics involved require so much focus when you are working that it's much more intensive per hour than most proper dev jobs.

xg15 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?

jstanley 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's like asking of the Internet "communication for whom?"

The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

Why is it so hard to imagine that humans may not be a necessary component in the economy?

magicalist 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel like I might be missing the point of your comment.

> The vast majority of bytes sent over the internet are neither from nor to a human writer or reader.

I don't believe that's right. Without even breaking down the remaining percentage, aren't the majority of bytes for video?

> It turns out that humans are not a necessary component in communication, although that proposition would have sounded very weird even 50 years ago.

But these bytes are in service of a human? Unless we're talking like intermediate steps which seems kind of vacuous.

Meanwhile whales sing to each other, birds too, bees are dancing to communicate food sources...

But if a large number of bytes were being transmitted on the internet from no one and to no human benefit, "communication for whom?" seems like a very reasonable question.

jstanley 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was imagining that the bulk of traffic was things like docker image layers etc. being sent around incidentally but not actually looked at by humans. Things that are to do with the running of the systems rather than directly for human consumption.

Or web pages serving megabytes of Javascript code to display kilobytes of text.

You may be right that most of the bytes are video however.

Still you must agree that there is some level of communication that is not directly for humans, and that the proportion that is not for humans is increasing?

And the same could easily be true or economic activity. Maybe there is some supposed human benefit at some point in the chain of causation, but it can be so far away that no human actually knows or cares.

lazide 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Bots defrauding bots while training new fraud bots.

ethersteeds 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds terrible

AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Fully agree with this

My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term.

Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL