Agree 100%

The value of money, and the ability for average people to have influence on future events, ultimately is tied to the fact that the labor of an average person has inherent value.

Once that is no longer true, all bets are off: All promises of compensation become meaningless, and it's easy for those in power to rationalize to themselves why they no longer are beholden to their earlier promises. They will say to themselves "The situation ended up more nuanced than we expected"

(Which is exactly what Google said in February 2025 when they reneged on their pledge not to use their AI for military applications)

> The value of money, and the ability for average people to have influence on future events, ultimately is tied to the fact that the labor of an average person has inherent value.

We also have the power of the vote, at least for now. I understand that that is limited, but it isn't nothing.

There is also just the power of having a lot of people. We don't yet have the technology where one person with a lot of machines can dominate a society. It still takes people.

Then we regress back to relying on the fact that the ability of an average person (not) to be violent has inherent value. This has been the dominant factor in many moments in history.

Although if you have killer robots, then all bets are truly off, and we go the way of the dodo, literally.

(I don’t actually believe in this LessWrong-esque rhetoric, reality is more complicated, but it’s fun to muse about.)

EDIT: If oligarchs with magic AGI really don’t need our labor, nor are they concerned by our violence, then perhaps we become more like ants rather than dodos: we organize to help each other, creating a somewhat traditional economy around the scraps that don’t matter to the oligarchs, relying on obscurity and harmlessness to avoid getting toyed with a magnifying glass. I suppose that’s slightly better.

So far anthropic can't 1) grow food 2) build things 3) do anything physical. Software engineers often fatally misunderstand that their code does nothing, it just coordinates.

You might lose your value, others might gain.

Agreed, except it's not labor, it's violence.

All real world power, including ownership (both physical and intellectual), is based on the ability to use violence.

As long as the majority - normal working people - have the potential to do more violence than those who want to control us, we have negotiating power. Minimum wage, 8 hour day, etc - those were all negotiated with the alternative being that those who wanted to pay us less and work more got killed.

What people aren’t realizing is that at some point, it just becomes cheaper and easier to be fully benevolent than to keep cooking up nefarious schemes to make people’s lives miserable.

I know it seems laughable, but we’re in an era right now of extreme competition where you cannot afford to just be nice to people.

But eventually there comes a point where companies have enough power that they don’t need to keep people in line by force: just give people their bread and circus, watch your little AI videos and talk to your AI friends and enjoy your standard housing and provisions. Do some work if you want, no one cares if you do or don’t, it’s largely performative. This basically kills all motivation for resistance or lashing out. Why go out and risk your life fighting for vague reasons when you can be perfectly comfy at home instead and have all your needs met?

If you can control the masses without their complaints, you can solidify power for a long time.