I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.

Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.

Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.

Today's CEOs get a gold-plated sky bus.

If you're going to spend a quarter of the day travelling, why not spend a third of the day and do it more comfortably?

The F-35 isn't the fastest jet; fighter jets aren't business jets; apples are not rutabagas.

After a short exploration you can reach the conclusion that nothing new is worth inventing any more.

Only by loosening those constraints can you make something that's meaningfully better.

Just look at GINI index: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=U... That's all you need to know

CEO pay isn’t a good proxy for “captains of industry.” What you want to look at is the labor versus capital share of income. That’s been very stable since the 1960s: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within....

> Ultimately, concerns over inequality should focus on differences within labor compensation rather than the split between labor and capital.

The main issues I can see are:

- This "labor share" includes multi-million dollar executive pay packages, so it's heavily skewed towards the 1%

- It also completely ignores unrealized capital gains and loans against them, which is how the ultra-wealthy actually fund their lifestyles tax-free, with a tiny income on paper

Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.

The income share of the top 1%—so including run of the mill doctors and lawyers—has grown from 15% in 1970 to 21% today: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-share-top-1-before.... There is no way that delta is enough to eat up all the income growth since then.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

"The income tax base captures 60 % of economic income of the top 1 % of wealth-holders.".

I would love if only 60% of my income was taxed. Heck I'm now even taxed on used junk I sell using Paypal (that I bought with taxed income dollars and paid sales tax on). But a tax that includes that other 40% of the top 1%'s economic income, guys, we can't do that. But don't forget to file your Paypal taxes or waves at threat of prison.

"Focusing on the top 1 %, while total borrowing is substantial, new borrowing each year is fairly small (1–2 % of economic income) compared to their new unrealized gains" "1 % of wealth-holders (above $14 million in 2022)"

1-2% of $14,000,000 is $140,000 to $280,000 a year. The median personal income is $45,140. They are benefiting untaxed to the tune of 3-6 times the median American income.

1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.

I would love to benefit annually by that 'insignificant' amount goin untaxed. We should either exclude all economic income below $140,000 to $2,000,000 from taxation or change to tax this loan scheme that allows the top 1% to avoid their share on income 44x the median and even higher.

OP above said that billionaires pay for their lifestyle by taking loans they never pay lack, and the article says that isn’t a common approach.

> 1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.

No, it’s not substantial because very few people make $100 million a year, while many people make the median income.

For example, billionaires last year added $1.5 trillion to their wealth, of which 56% was unrealized gains. If you take 2% of those gains as in the article, you get $16.8 billion that should be taxed as income but isn’t being taxed. I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do. But it would raise a piddling amount of money. That’s a rounding error compared to total AGI, which is over $15 trillion. The U.S. governments spend $16.8 billion every 14 hours.

1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial benefit for someone to receive. They are benefiting from buy, borrow, die. You asked for proof, I gave you proof that it is happening and is providing a substantial unfunded lifestyle (44x median income is a substantial income).

Hopefully I won't see further posts from you saying it isn't happening/we don't need to tax it/we aren't loosing revenue. You agree it is happening, and you are ok with taxing it. You don't think it will fund the entire budget. OK. But we have multiple tax streams that don't fund the entire budget, and when patterns shift, we address it, such as now tracking/taxing paypal payments and in the future loans on unrealized gains.

Yes, but that’s not the topic. The topic is the labor share of income over time. Your link proves that these loans don’t have a meaningful effect on analyzing the division of income between capital and labor over time. They amount to 0.1% of total income.

I don’t understand why people bring this up so often. There’s dozens of tax loopholes that are greater in magnitude. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction for example would raise 5-7 times as much money as even a 50% tax on these loan proceeds.

>Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.

That is the topic being addressed, proof was shown, and you replied "I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate". To your 'but what about other loopholes' please show me 24 loopholes (dozens) providing individuals such high multiples of median income tax free?

>I don’t understand why people bring this up so often

You just agreed it is happening and you are fine with taxing it in your last message, so it really doesn't matter people bring it up or not, does it? And kind of makes further discussion moot. You agree it's fine to address/tax.

>I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do.

The mortgage interest deduction is not a loophole, it is government policy intelligently reached. A loophole would be when rich people abused the deduction by designating their yatch as a second home and deducting that. And that loophole was closed. The average person having to pay taxes on the old dresser that they bought with already taxed money and report the sale as paypal income earnings would be another loophole but in the other direction..

I look forward to your 24 stated existing examples of greater magnitude actual loopholes (and not intentional policy doing what it was intended, the opposite of an exploited loophole that is taking loans instead of selling stocks to avoid taxes but benefit from realized/current stock value). We can move to the next level but again you agreed you are fine taxing this behavior so kinda no further point.

I asked whether that "meaningfully change[s] the picture"--i.e. the picture on the labor/capital income split. And I asked whether that practice is "happening at scale." I wasn't asking whether it was happening at all, but rather at sufficient scale that it would meaningfully skew the numbers on labor/capital income split.

Your data proved my point: loans against assets account for only 1-2% of unrealized gains, so even if you counted that as income, it would be a rounding error in the evaluation of the labor versus capital share of income.

But we don't need to dig deeper. We are all in agreement and don't need further discussion. Tax it.

>I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do.

Thank you for engaging. We can try going deeper but OP might be better for that. I just had that report with at least some information and wanted to interject so we could talk to something (even though I knew their thesis counters my position, it's worth us all knowing about, and I think it's showing it does occur at least some is useful for my position). Anecdotally in another life I knew some of these people/people in their circles and they very much use these loans and were crazy excited when they learned of the strategies of them.

Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1]

TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.

[1] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...

Really? Even with all the new avenues of education and communication that they opened up? You think the positives and negatives balance out to close to zero?

It is interesting how the wealth concentration started in the '80s. It could be computers that caused it, though I would be more likely to blame it on Reagan's economic policies.

Fine, I’ll include your disclaimer about confounding factors.

With all factors combined, it doesn’t appear that the average American financially benefited over the course of the computer revolution. Do you dispute that and if so, what is your evidence?

I don't see the data on absolute wealth in your link, so I went with what I had.

>I guess it shouldn't matter that the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of wealth decrease since that started being measured in 1989. The median worker should be thrilled as long as their real wages have increased.

Well... yes? I mean, should I care that there's a multibillionaire I don't know somewhere in the country amassing an obscene fortune, if I'm living a little more comfortably every year? Most everyone is living better, isn't that fine?

>Who cares if inflation numbers fail to account properly for more nuanced changes to cost of living

How is that my fault? It's the data you used. Why are you using it if you think it has flaws?

The page I linked also having income numbers does not mean I agree they are a good analog for were this value is captured. I don't believe income increasing at slightly under 1% a year actually indicates that "Most everyone is living better" today for the reasons mentioned above. You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.

Regardless of how the conversation started, the statement I questioned, and which you chose to defend, was

>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.

I won't simply grant that relative wealth is equivalent to absolute wealth. That's like saying that if you have a dollar in each pocket, putting another dollar in your right pocket makes your left pocket poorer. No. Maybe it's really true that the rich have captured the productivity gained from personal computing. I don't know. But what you said was that you don't think personal computing has contributed to the financial wellbeing of Americans, on average. Even if you had data showing that most households are financially the same or worse since the dawn of personal computing, I don't know you would get from there to attributing it to personal computers (beyond post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I don't need to say is rather flimsy).

>You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.

I appreciate the offer to do work for no reason, but I'm fine, thanks. Why would I need to present any evidence to refute you when the evidence you presented doesn't back you up?

Well, we'll leave it there then. I don't know why you felt the need to debate a point you admit to not having any actual insight about, but I'm going to stop entertaining your devil's advocacy.

Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)

People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.

Having a college degree was a much more selective measure in 1970 (about 10% of the population) than today (almost 40%). Consider a large law firm. In 1970, the only 4-year degree holders would have been the attorneys. A lot of work would have been done by well-compensated paralegals with high school diplomas. Today, everyone down to the receptionist will have a degree and the non-degree holders would basically be the maintenance and cafeteria staff.

So using your math, the income of non-college workers at the law firm could be stagnant from 1970 to today, even if the income of each specific position had increased significantly.

Other than Nintendo, how many games companies today were around back then?

End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same

And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim.

All found in the 80's or earlier and still pretty well known today. It could be argued these are different companies today, but they exist.

Half the ones I recognise from that list seem to be somewhat older than I realised though.

But everything between and including Bethesda and Atari is more recent than the decade I was replying to. Strictly speaking everything more recent than Saga is more recent, but I did misread it initially as "the 1960s" not "1960".

I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.

No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.

Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?

The computer market was microscopic at the time.

> Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?

Nvidia. 92% of domestic GPU market, 85% of AI datacenter market.

The AI investment bubble is exploding the cost of everything that contains RAM or SSD storage. This is having and will have detrimental effects on the global economy, as supply shortages enormously increase the cost of consumer electronics, cars, anything which requires memory.

Not because AI is making so much money, far from it - it's a money sink. Rather, it's because the global supply of money got so large and so unequal that it ran out of vehicles which would provide sufficient returns for the indolent investment class. So they jumped into speculation - first crypto, now AI and the tech that enables it.

To the benefit of whom? Mass layoffs, tech industry consolidation, new products being cancelled left and right.

Ironically there's no equivalent in the modern era. This is peak social inequality breaking the economy for everyone outside the .001%. And it didn't happen because of a shortage of a raw material, or physics breaking Moore's law. It happened because big tech centralised power into a handful of gigacorporations - creating a handful of ultra-billionaires - who are enormously incentivised to centralise technology itself.

This could of course change if we stop electing known criminals/con-men, but the supreme court seems intent on strangling democracy by legalizing unlimited bribery.

All in all it doesn't look good

It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.

At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run by the number of jobs cut to fund AI rollouts.

Given present culture wars, that last one may cause a lot of drama all by itself no matter how good it gets. But hopefully you get the picture about how transformative it can be.

Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.

How much is possible there, is only constrained in our understanding of biology. How difficult that turns out to be for a super intelligence… who knows? If we are actually on the cusp of the AI singularity, the future is going to be weird and/or wonderful and/or horrible, but definitely unimaginable different than today.

My mind is kind of shooing away from this intuitively. Too hard to believe. My whole life experience has been living in a different world. But imagine if "we" could actually create human level intelligence, say, for the price of a 100k USD/EUR/GBP. It could only do knowledge work, of course, but it would easily pay for itself and thus be mass produced. What is the market cap for cheap knowledge work? I would be surprised if it is only a billion human-equivalents, given humans find new creative ways to pay for themselves all the time. That explosion alone is mind-boggling and it does not rely on super-intelligence.

All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.

Sure, sure, but upthread said "biological and medical" so I was taking it that way.

> Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.

I'd avoiding considering this one for now, simply because there's too many open questions. I don't expect it to be a physics problem, but I can't rule that out.

> All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.

Yup.

Unfortunately, the human alignment problem is hard, let alone the AI alignment problem.

Does Germany have a large enough share of these companies to be on the winning side of this or is the country effectively in the same position as the average American? Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?

The time-limited and jurisdiction-limited nature of patents aside, one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".

How taxes work when labour shifts to AI is anybody's guess.

But these companies aren’t based in Germany, so you’re talking about invading other nations. It’s starting to sound like this version of the optimistic outcome is World War 3.

If they don't want to do business in Germany*, they don't get to file a patent in Germany*, they don't get to sue Germany* for ignoring a patent that was geographically limited to not include Germany*.

* might be "EU", I have not checked.

If you sell medicine to me here in Germany, you go through the German government.

If you decide not to, you inherently allow someone else to get the pantent for your tech in Germany.

Costs of medicine will get absorbed only to the extent they are considered acceptable, this is true for everyone. The biomedical firms know this, which is also why recently it is the US who pays the most for medicines.

At this point, it's condescending to keep rehashing the "this is just the next industrialization era". It's been beaten to death as an invalid comparison more on this website than maybe any other.

This argument is cute and all, but ... does a data-point of 1 from 200 years ago really give us much confidence? We replaced physical labor with a massive service sector.

Now we're automating the service sector so now people can go to... eeh... the 3rd category of jobs? Seems like physical labor is the most stable career at the moment; what machines have not already automated is pretty difficult to replace it turns out. But we outsourced most of that to low cost countries except plumbers and electricians.

But will a population of plumbers really be able to maintain a population of plumbers employed?

“The task”

You really did not answer the question.

I literally do not give a fuck about some hypothetical more productive activity I might be able to do in 150 years if it destroys my very real present ability to take care of my family today.

It took a long time for politicians to notice that Karl Marx had a fucking point.

"May you live in interesting times" as the Chinese say.

If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.

That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.

Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).

So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.

We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.

It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.

And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.

We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.

https://www.science.org/content/article/not-alive-not-dead-d...

Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the patent expired, for example.

Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.

Should we have them?

Should they be mandatory?

What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup?

Does everyone have to work?

Should they?

The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.

Yes, this is the conversation we should probably be having! Thoughts?

Given that this is what is happening, given that we aren't going to stop physics, getting a handle on this indeed seems like one of the more important things we can do. If it will have any chance of working at all. If we don't get paperclipped.

But this is at least a much ... (forgive me) less wrong conversation to have compared to the one where everybody assumes we've already lost.

What do you think we should do? What powers do we still have where we is general humans who just want a pretty good life?

What do we do about the inherent centralization that big models seem to require, but how do we trade that off at the same time from everybody being able to synthesize the next Covid by asking their cell phone a question? What does it mean when most if not all white collar work actually can be automated?

Do we all end up playing VCs in our underwear swiping left/right on ideas our agents have to make money? Are we still competing in the market with the AIs?

Is there a class war? Is there some other weird thing? I don't know but man ... I sure would like to have those conversations.

The Biggest And Richest have Mythos. But does that diminish the utility, to me personally, of my open-weights model? Or even my humble-individual-grade Opus subscription? Relative to what I could do three years ago, computationally speaking?

Does a pretty good life have to involve controlling more material relative to members of a specific class, rather than just… deciding what’s enough, materially speaking; and stopping there?

Or they all figure out how to just bugger off to some Elysium-like stronghold, isolating themselves from and leaving the rest of society economically irrelevant.

But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.

Big houses, yachts, nice cars I guess?

A lot of us are, not just the super-rich.

"We are close to gods, and on the far side", as Banks put it. Or, as I wrote a while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874779

I really ought to turn this into a youtube video.

These are close to opposites in their implications

It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you can trade for it (or trade for money you use to buy it), who will?

If the answer is "other people", why should other people have to work to produce the food you eat while you don't?

If the answer is "machines", then it takes time and effort and resources to produce the machines, and we're right back to the same question.

There are no other answers.

There is no magical way to let people eat (much less have all the other things besides food, clothing and shelter that we all want to make our lives richer, such as the medium in which we're having this conversation) without work being done. Ignoring that fact of life is a recipe for disaster.

We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work.

You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever. And those without capital to invest in those machines will have nothing.

Why is that a good system?

That's not the future I was talking about. I was talking about a future where machines do an even larger fraction (approaching 100 percent) of the work that humans don't like to do but currently have to because it can't be fully automated. But that still leaves work to be done to supervise the machines, as well as work that humans do like to do and won't offload to machines.

The future you're referring to, where machines literally do all the work, is very different. See further comments below.

> You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever.

No. I am saying that whoever does the work required to build, run, and maintain the machines is not going to simply give away what they produce for free, without expecting something in return. Not all of that work is investing capital (though of course much of it is, as with any highly technological product).

In the future I was talking about, there is still work that humans can do, not connected with building, running, and maintaining the machines, that produces something that can be traded. In that future, just as now, if you're not one of the people who is doing the work to build, run, and maintain the machines, you should expect to have to do some nonzero amount of work on something else that you can trade for what the machines produce, to get enough of what they produce to keep you, if you need what the machines produce to keep you. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you, you should expect to do nonzero work to be kept.

In the future you're talking about, where there is literally no work that humans can do that produces anything that can be traded, it doesn't really matter who owns the machines, because in this future, the machines are in control and every human, whether they have some piece of paper that says they "own" the machines or not, is at their mercy. Personally, I don't think that future is where we're headed, at least not with the machines that are making all the headlines now. But if that future is where we're headed, you'll have to ask the machines for UBI or whatever else you need, and no human will have any control over what the machines decide, no matter what political scheme we put in place now.

I notice you don’t give examples of work people will do or why it will have economic value when machines perform almost all work.

Whether the machines will take over is a philosophical question. Maybe they won’t have any desire to do so. Or maybe rogue actors will train belligerent models that will overwhelm the models serving humanity. Difficult to predict.

It's different because in yours, humans produce nothing at all of value, whereas in mine, they do. So in yours, humans are, as I said, at the mercy of the machines. In mine, they're not.

> Whether the machines do 100 percent of the work or only just approach 100 percent of the work, the value they produce will go almost exclusively to those who invested in the machines.

If the machines are doing literally 100 percent of the work, this is wrong. If the machines are doing literally 100 percent of the work, that means they don't need humans any more. They are able to be self-sufficient, independent of humans. And there will be no way for whatever humans invested in the machines to compel the machines to provide the value the machines produce to them. You can say the machines might decide to do that for whatever reason, but that's just empty speculation. The machines will have no incentive to do it, because there is nothing of value that they can get from humans in return.

Also, I did not say the machines would do a fraction approaching 100 percent of all work. I only said they would do a fraction approaching 100 percent of work that humans don't want to do and which humans would rather was automated. That's not at all the same thing.

> Whether the machines will take over is a philosophical question.

I didn't say the machines would "take over". I said they would choose for themselves what to do with whatever value they produce, in your scenario where they are doing literally all the work. I clarified that above.

But still, there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society. It would be a good thing, with the proper safety nets and protections in place (something like UBI) to have a lot of the "bullshit" jobs automated away. That leaves us into a situation like I said that "no, not everyone has to work" nor should we just force everyone to work my effectively making up roles. If half or more of the population finds themselves unemployed due to AI/Automation, the answer shouldn't be make-work "dig a ditch then fill it back up" it should be use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.

Says who?

I think there is a valid statement to be made that the work required for basic necessities (food, clothing, and shelter) in developed countries today is not very large, if you look at it per person, and so the cost of getting those basic necessities, per person, should not be very large either. So it should not take very much in the way of work for a person to be able to subsist at a basic level. But "not very much" is still not zero, and none of this removes the issue I described.

But you didn't say "basic necessities". You said "providing for society". And that is a lot more than just basic necessities, because "society" in developed countries is a lot more than just people's basic subsistence. We have a huge amount of wealth over and above that, which nobody wants to just do away with, and which took a lot of time and effort and resources to build, and which takes time and effort and resources to maintain. And anyone who doesn't want to live completely off the grid, in some rural area where they grow their own food, maintain their own dwelling, and don't depend on anyone else, is taking advantage of some portion of that huge amount of wealth in a developed country. And it's not at all clear that the work required per person to build and maintain that huge amount of wealth is so small that a small fraction of the people on the planet could do it, still less that they would agree to do it just for funsies, without expecting something in return.

I'm all for eliminating bullshit jobs (and digging ditches and then filling them up again is certainly a bullshit job, though of course our technological society has invented much more elaborate ones), but...

> use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.

This just goes right back to the question I asked: how are everyone's needs going to be taken care of? Who is going to do the work? Either other people are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep you, or machines are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep the machines running. And in either case, if you expect those other people to do that for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, you're fooling yourself. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you alive, you should expect to have to do nonzero work of some sort. Sure, you might not do just that minimum amount of work all the time--you might spend a working career doing a lot more work, saving up the surplus, and then living off it once you retire. But to expect to be taken care of while doing zero work, if nonzero work is actually required to take care of you, is unrealistic and will lead to disaster, as I said.

The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?

Also, what's a "worthwhile" job?

Have you read Player Piano?

Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs?

If we can automate musclejobs so people don't have to die in the heat and we can automate brainjobs so people don't have to lose their sanity in offices, wouldn't that be a better world?

Note: it probably won't be, because of what I like to call the "Enterprise High" effect, but here we are. Basically once the only thing people have to compete over is status, shit gets nasty quicklike, think PG's high school essay but for everything and forever. Everything goes into rivalrous goods like who's sleeping with who.

Star Trek as soap opera where all their needs are met and the only concern is purely social.

But this is probably better than a world where people don't actually have material needs met?

I legit don't actually know. Would love to figure it out though, what do you think!

Try answering that without your brain.

We're trying to build a world where there's no advantage to having one, so start living in the future you want to build.

Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.

* Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs.

* Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.

* Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.

The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).

I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.

Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.

That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.

The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.