> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.

Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.

Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.

> The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?

> If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.

This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.

▲

qsera an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need..

How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?

>Who owns the robots though..

I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

▲

crabmusket a minute ago | parent | next [-]

> Isn't that the idea?

No, I think the article is not considering a utopian post-scarcity future. It's considering a fully automated paperclip future except the paperclips are bank balances for the 1%:

> corporations and banks do billions of virtual transactions every day with companies that have no product, no service, and not a single employee. The transactions and loans they move back and forth in off-shore accounts do not directly correspond to physical money, or gold, or any actual resource.

The argument in TFA as best I can tell is that "the economy" can be decoupled from "real things". I assume the trillionaire class would each have a few private farms to keep themselves fed, or just eat entirely synthetic produce - but their production needs would be tiny compared to the rest of this "economy" which would mainly be doing... something else?

I can't quite follow it, honestly - despite the author's arguments about what's logical, I can't imagine or believe in a sustainable system not intimately tied to real resources and production.

Even if the trillionaire class uploads their brains into silicon, that silicon has material needs such as electricity. Can't escape the material world.

But that's still not "abundance for all".

▲

ares623 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> How will you starve when the robots will produce food for everyone, for free? Isn't that the idea?

If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?

> I think may be the government. The population will have to pay taxes for their maintenance. But it will be vastly less.

Taxes from what?

▲

qsera an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>If the people aren't needed then why dedicate robots and land to feed them, for free?

As I said in another comment, I think the governments should see to it that people are comfortable. It will also make it illegal to privately own combat robots. Someone could try to build a massive combat robot army in some secret lair, but governments will watch out for that.

>Taxes from what..

Maintaining robots, may be. When that too becomes automated, then no more taxes, I guess.

	▲	shimman 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The US government has two political parties that are both entirely opposed to expanding the welfare state. Both parties are against medicare for all [1]. Both parties are against universal childcare [2]. Both parties are against free student school lunches [3]. Both parties against free higher/tertiary education [4]. Both parties are against a universal jobs program [5]. All these programs poll above majorities in the US (see citations below) and yet both political parties are against these programs. The US government is already seeing that people not only stay uncomfortable, but you have to pay for the privilege too. If you haven't heard of the book "Four Futures" by Peter Frase I'd check it out. There is one future that is extremely prescient is the "Exterminism" future. It's exactly what you think, a group of elites decide that "Hey! Maybe we are better off with 30% less people." It sounds extreme but if you take a few moments to truly think about it is very believable, some already governments have it as its end goal for various policy positions. Now imagine a scenario where the elites are openly disdainful of humans (they even believe that the human race shouldn't exist; or that the end goal of humanity is to turn humans into computers), now they have the means to not only control production + its consumption but also have the military means to enforce it. Is that scenario really science fiction? That a few dozen people would forcibly slaughter and enslave others for personal self gain, is that truly confined to the realms of science fiction and not history (both lived and present)? People need to wake the fuck up and realize that solidarity may be the only thing that saves the human race. [1] 65% https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/11/medicare-for-al... [2] 82% https://www.ffyf.org/2026/01/28/new-national-poll-shows-stro... [3] 60% https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/7/23863415/polls-support-un... [4] 60% https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/11/democrats... [5] 60 https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cwcp-job-guarantee-poll

▲

casey2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

For all the other economic activities that robots don't run? 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it.

As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought.

	▲	fakedang an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 40% of Humans work in the food supply chain, the more automation, the more jobs. That's how it's always worked. X for doubt. When automation entered agriculture, we started producing way more for way less. Agriculture stopped becoming a significant part for most developed economies in terms of both GDP contribution and employment. > All those people who were previously working are now spending their time looking for work, and they will find it. X. The people who lose jobs rarely find something anew - they'll simply become part of an expanding labour pool, further depressing wages. All while some numpty politician would be telling them they need to stop farming and start learning how to code (never mind there's absolutely no point in doing that either). > As for LLMs, language is a tool for communication, not thought. That's why APL's "notation as a tool of thought" failed. And it's why LLMs will fail to replace human thought. A cursory browse through an X or reddit thread would show you otherwise. LLMs already replace human thought.

▲

markdown an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The government will need to buy control of (or merely seize under eminent domain) the bots and the ai that runs them.