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Discussion (38 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Even if I get unemployed, I don't see how I can opt-out when it comes to everyone everywhere using it.
Governments historically have considered humans as assets - it's even called "human capital", and they require us for tax revenue and to run the state. What happens when we aren't needed? Even if the AI is magically aligned to the state, I don't see how I end up the winning side of that. It's not like we're getting a voice in how this is shoved down our throats today. Why would it get any better when AGI can do everything humans can do? What still gives us a voice in the world?
1: verbal/literary labour with your vocal cords, or the use of an output tool, to playback existing or newly created works in environments where mechanical methods are disallowed or disfavored,
2: aesthetic labour through precise recreations of other's mental labour in the performing arts,
3: legal labour in acting as an agent to help or hinder existing legal processes in systems that give humans standing,
4: biological labour as a substrate for growing certain transplantable products,
5: smuggling labour (either non-invasive or surgically invasive),
6: political labour to incrementally sway electoral results in any polity where you are still enfranchised,
7: security labour as a canary for infohazards (such as 'diplomat' programs produced by another ASI) inside of a quarantined environment,
8: frontman work as a deniable patsy to enable economic forgery, deception, revenge or warfare by some hypergraph of patron AGIs and the superorganisms they compose with, or without, your knowledge of what your work entails.
Some of these have a strong factor of supply and demand. You can increase your market value by reducing the supply of other humans competing for these revenue sources.
L. Randall Wray, "What Are Taxes For? The MMT Approach" (2014):
> Sovereign government does not really need revenue in its own currency in order to spend. It is the tax that 'drives' the currency. If we eliminated the tax, people probably would not immediately abandon use of the currency, but the main driver for its use would be gone.
And I do not have much faith in the charity of the most powerful 1%. Charitable people often do not make it into that group.
Game theory is a helluva thing.
Not much different from the feudal era. You still need access to good lands (energy production, minerals) but an army of computers and robots instead of serfs and knights. Like Asimov's world of Solaria.
This seems like asking what's the last major decision you made without at least doing a web search. There's nothing wrong with doing a search. The trouble is when you rely too much on what you read, without checking it.
And that's the case today - new AI being a sufficient programmer replacement is enough of a statement to do layoffs with record profits without impact on stock prices.
This could happen all by itself if the major LLM players coordinated (i.e., formed a cartel), or if they were forced to to recoup investments (we all know this is coming to some degree, at least for the western companies), or because ~all major nations' governments start taxing AI use (which seems eminently a good idea to me in any case).
There's still the issue of local LLMs, but this could be addressed with taxes on GPU hardware, etc.
One would hope maybe boring things like healthcare, better living conditions, better functioning societies, and so on.
Not as exciting as flying cars and thinking machines for sure.
Forgive me if I'm naïve. But wouldn't people just vote for UBI in this case?
Personally I think that's likely the case _today_, but who knows if that would hold if/when there comes a time when UBI becomes an economic necessity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Nicaraguan_general_electi...
yeah it's obvious the author has a really high IQ who can keep himself busy with intellectual pursuits and a nice social life of other smart people . His experience will not map to the general population, who find themselves with idle time. Also, a barebones UBI will be hardly sufficient to cover other expenses unless the AI also solves housing, healthcare, insurance, childcare, transportation etc.
As ecological concerns and automation eliminate a large chunk of production it's pointless to maintain a system that only knows how to finance exactly that stuff, so socialize the gains of those and start redirecting them to socially necessary labor. There's much more to do than just playing boardgames.
Until then it is vulnerable to disruption. So of course you will need the robot army to forcibly take and defend resources around the world. How will that war turn out?
Robot labor will be more valuable than humans for a very long time. Heck, we still have many towns in the US that have humans running around throwing trash bags into the back of the truck, because they haven't switched to the standardized containers and hydrologic arms. Let's not even get started on the rest of the "developing" world.
I, for one, would have welcomed our green energy revolution overlords.
Also, VR/AR, before the Great Powers deep-sixed any real efforts. Growing up on .hack, GitS, and SAO, it really is a bummer. How come I must know, where the techbros lead me to go?
"It might be slop but at least it's human slop!" - would the author argue in turn, probably:
> People used to argue online, flame each other, get angry. And that wasn’t good, but at least it was human. [0]
Another perspective though could be that one's thoughts were never meant to be guaranteed high-entropy curio for others to encounter, so they're really under no obligation to be found "original", if that even means anything. [1] And sure, that is true.
Just also not any less true than the former.
[0] emphasis theirs, I don't even need to mock it like this; the secondhand embarrassment comes built-in
[1] this is to say, these may be genuinely candid and original thoughts from the author, that simply happen to coincide with the many thoughts already expressed in this genre of writing, which they may or may not have seen
I don't think this person has a firm enough grasp of economics to be writing on the subject.