because they aren't really a charity, and they aren't really interested in aligning AI. In the end, it's all an attempt to profit - with the initial marketing about charity/alignment that those with wishful thinking all bought into.

I've been watching the Y Combinator YouTube channel recently, and people in the room when OpenAI was founded were saying "… until these big companies solve AGI, it's going to be their first, second, and third goal" — not that OpenAI or Anthropic would succeed, but that this is their goal.

Before the industrial revolution, land was paramount; after, capital. AGI is likely to be as significant a change, and make money (as we understand it today) less important in a similar way.

Money is just a unit of accounting. Land is still just as important, as is labour. And in any case, capital is accumulated money. In the end these all amount to power, and capability to direct that power towards a goal.

Even if AGI becomes some form of new capital, it is still the same as capital as we know it today. Until the day humanity transcends and we no longer face the human condition of course.

> Land is still just as important

"Important", but not "just as important". Land used to be synonymous with wealth, because you needed land to support the peasants who grew the surplus that fed your army. Now? Now we have enough spare land to have national parks and substantial re-wilding programs.

Labour is still important, but also not "just as important" — all the improvements from each of the three industrial revolutions to date have been about getting more stuff done per person, and we're starting to get "lights out" factories[0].

My comparison is to say money will be "relatively less", rather than "not" — to the extent that money is a fungible token of power, sure, that's probably still going to be useful to someone at some point — but if we've all got our own personal yachts[1] with all the on-board hydroponics, bioreactors[2], and CNC manufactories needed to meet our material needs, even if money is still around, it becomes no more important to our personal experience of life than it is for people today to be personally concerned that the harvest is brought in on time or that the ore veins in the mine might run out[3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)

[1] Snow-Crash style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)

That said, given we've already got some lights-out factories making more robots, it's a reasonable assumption they'd actually look more like this even without human-level AGI: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/265026/why-dont-th...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aMo2jVKmeoY

[3] Which isn't to say that nobody will worry, just that most won't. Me 15 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

We're already at that point though, at least in the developed world. Everyone's fed, clothed and housed even if they earn no money. But people still want money! They want more than the minimum. If we all have those yachts and personal factories, that'll be the default for unemployed people and everyone will still want money for whatever the poorest still can't afford, which I guess might be paying other people to do things, just like it currently is.

If humans really do become completely redundant, then maybe we've reached the end state of humanity and might as well just die out.

Over-consumption is a one-way implication with unbounded desire, not a two-way implication.

We're fed to the point we have obesity, but most of us still stop eating at a certain point.

We're oversupplied with material goods to the point that storage lockers for excess stuff is a big industry, but most of us don't hoard to that degree, and it's weird when we see people who do.

We're oversupplied with light to the point that we've got to remind ourselves to turn them down at night, but we do turn them off.

We do reach saturation points with these things, despite over-consumption.

Sure. And we're over-supplied with breathing air to the point that nobody bothers to store it in bottles for a low-air day. I don't think we can reach saturation supply of everything we might possibly want because we're naturally competitive, explorative and status-seeking and will just invent new things to want, even if they're zero sum. Those things will probably be able to be bought with money.