And my comment was cynical: when has lots of prosperity lead directly to its fair distribution? Almost every redistribution process required lots of people dying, first.
Many many times. Guns can hunt and fight better than unarmed humans. Automobiles can transport people and things much more quickly than humans on foot. Computers can perform mathematical calculations, store and organize information far faster than any human. Mechanical textile and sewing machinery could make clothing far more quickly than any human by hand.
> Superintelligence is a different beast entirely to anything from human history.
Like each of those above inventions and many more things, all were their own different beasts.
From sewing, tending, harvesting, and processing plants for food by hand to using machinery and factories and chemicals, the human effort per calorie of food has decreased at least 3 maybe 4 orders of magnitude. 9,999 in 10,000 farming jobs have been lost to technology! Anywhere you look, the story is the same. Transport, construction, communication, lighting, heating and cooling, medicine, entertainment have all gone through unimaginable revolutions over the years, all have been entirely different to anything else in human history, all created tectonic shifts in humanity and how we live and organize. What we create and produce has multiplied thousands of times.
One constant throughout all this is that people generally don't feel they have enough and don't want to have less. It's not just a few billionaires and corrupt politicians and CEOs at the top who just need to be disposed of before we enter the kumbaya age. It's the human condition. Do people give away the income from their labor and their productive assets today? Why would they tomorrow?
That's a different question, I was answering your earlier question.
> They can do stuff faster or stronger but aren't more complex and require humans to use them.
Self driving harvesters and lights out factories do not.
> Superintelligence does not require humans at all.
Depends on what you mean by require, and what you imagine it does. What are you trying to argue? The effect is the same, if you had to produce something using 10,000 human hours 100 years ago and it costs 1 human hour now, then that might have caused a much bigger change for society than going from 1->0.
Post-scarcity won't be a thing, and superintelligence certainly won't make it. It's not because people don't have their basics met, they do. Global poverty has plummeted and in western countries people don't starve to death -- poor people are actually obese. "Oh but if they could just be a bit more comfortable without working", "oh but if they could just be given a bit better food and clothes without working", "oh but iphone and internet should be a human right without working"... No. That's well and good but that isn't the problem. As I said the problem is that people don't have enough. People want big houses in the best areas of the most desirable cities and leisure locations. Superintelligence won't suddenly give everybody that wants it Manhattan penthouses and private jets and their own tropical islands, so there will always be people feeling they don't have enough, and people unwilling to have less. That's just the way it goes. There is no technological solution to it.
> Post-scarcity is a theoretical economic situation in which most goods can be produced in great abundance with minimal human labor, so that they become available to all very cheaply or even freely.
> Post-scarcity does not mean that scarcity has been eliminated for all goods and services. Instead it means that all people can easily have their basic survival needs met along with some significant proportion of their desires for goods and services. Writers on the topic often emphasize that some commodities will remain scarce in a post-scarcity society.
Which is what? Something being complex or not by your arbitrary definition does not cause it to have an impact on society.
> Post-scarcity is not defined how you are defining it so you are arguing against a straw man,
No that's right, I am pointing out where the post scarcity people are always wrong about their utopian result where capitalism dissolves, and always move the goalposts because their are staggeringly and willfully ignorant about humanity.
> it's not where anyone can have anything infinitely.
Right. The bigger problem for the utopia is that it is also not where anyone can have the things they really really badly want and are angry and envious and resentful of "capitalism" if they are not given it.
I'm not. And you can think what you like, but this a non-sequitur even if it was true.
> My point is superintelligence will cause post-scarcity the likes of which have never before been seen in history,
We are well in post-scarcity by some placements of those goalposts. Many advancements in production have caused gains never before seen in history.
> precisely because it's not humans making the decisions anymore.
Humans ceased making decisions about lots of means of production that they previously had to. What is it about SI you think will make the difference? It won't be deciding to give away its owners' wealth.
> Or it will kill us all, one of the two is almost guaranteed.
Neither is likely at all. It's much more likely to be like the industrial or computer revolutions.
And we're much more likely to go extinct by a death cult creating germ weapons than at the hands of "SI". They'd no doubt use LLMs and other technology to help with that, but the technology would not be making decisions about anything.