> The government pays Raytheon for missiles, the money cascades down the economy through factories, aluminium smelters, mines, transport companies, all staffed by AIs buying and selling from each other.

This seems too simplistic of a description of how money would work in such a world. Money is just a way to distribute your power to influence people. You never pay for machines or software. Think about buying anything, say a pen. You do not really pay for the metal in the pen. You pay the cost associated with extracting and processing the metal by humans along the production chain. If there were no humans along the chain, the cost could go down to zero.

So far, there are no “AIs” being paid.

▲

zetalyrae 14 hours ago | parent [-]

A corporation that is fully staffed by AIs and only retains humans for legal reasons (as directors, for liability etc.) still needs money to coordinate. You need to pay for inputs, you need to pay to run the AIs, which consumes resources. Why would costs go to zero? The market is still a valuable tool for allocating resources even if no market actors are human.

▲

znpy 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> A corporation that is fully staffed by AIs and only retains humans for legal reasons (as directors, for liability etc.) still needs money to coordinate.

i see developer starting to develop apps from scratch using ai. they aren't really doing "ai-assisted coding", the LLMs are doing pretty much most of the work.

and the company is shedding people off (as in: voluntarily not not keeping up with the natural people turnover).

as a sysadmin/cloud/devops engineer this is weird because i see people that after a week of development have a decently complex app working... but they have no idea how it works. they're largely unable to troubleshoot it.

Why am I writing this?

Because i have a very strong feeling that people in other positions (directors, managers etc) are doing a very similar job, meaning they essentially have no idea what's going on at all.

How long can this go on? I don't know really, i think this is uncharted territory for humanity.

▲

psychoslave 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To my mind the article is excellently written, but it comes with many bigger "if"s than the one it states.

That said, taking for granted some of its premisses, indeed saying that cost goes to zero in term of money is no big deal.

That is, money is purely human conventions. So if humans are put out of the loop, not only monetary cost goes to zero, the whole notion can skipped.

Of course, there is still some energy and material needed to run data centers, which do have costs in whatever unit one might measure them with.

A market is a place where human encounter to trade. Without humans, there is no market.

We do with mere local scalar currency because using vectorial computation taking into account everything that can be probed and measured into account integrated into a single whole is out of reach for human representation, even for the most intellectually gifted human person.

Money is a stupid unit, that tries to conflate everything in a single scalar and proves every single time that it's not able to deem what something is worth in all its intricated relationships. But somehow humans seem unable to leverage at scale on any tool that would be more sophisticated in all their socioeconomical exchanges. Once again, if one eliminate humans from the equation, or isolate as a ridiculously marginal factor, money and market become irrelevant.

All that said, once again, that stand on a very large set of "if"s.

	▲	zetalyrae 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> All that said, once again, that stand on a very large set of "if"s. Yeah, probably I should have listed some more premises, i.e. that corporations maximize profits, the state maximizes power and security (I don't entirely buy the Realist framework, but if you want to predict how things work out "in the limit", rather than tomorrow, it seems alright?). And naturally every "therefore" becomes weaker the further out into the future you try to predict.