Comment by nickpp
4 days ago
There is absolutely no guarantee that Claude takes your job either. But if you believe so much in AI, investing in it is accessible to pretty much any pocket, you don't have to be rich to partake.
And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less.
Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a wall and thin like a book, electric cars, flights to anywhere I dream of traveling, investing with a few clicks on my phone - all made possible to me by those evil and greedy rich in their race for riches. Thank you rich people!
> you don't have to be rich to partake.
You still need to be rich to partake. Most business ventures will still require capital even in the age of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless.
> And when did "the rich" hoard anything for themselves only?! Usually I see them democratizing products and services so they are more accessible to everyone, not less.
There are plenty of examples of rich people hoarding their wealth. Countries with natural resources often have poor citizens because those citizens are not needed to extract that wealth. There is little reason why super-intelligence will not lead to a resource curse where the resource is human intelligence or even human labor.
> Computers in my pocket and on my wrist, TVs as big as a wall and thin like a book, electric cars, flights to anywhere I dream of traveling, investing with a few clicks on a website - all made possible to me by those evil and greedy rich in their race for riches. Thank you rich people!
Those rich people didn't share with you out of the goodness of their heart but because it was their best strategy to become even richer. But that's no longer the case when you can be replaced by super-intelligence.
> You still need to be rich to partake.
Again, you can invest, today, in AI stocks and ETFs, with just $100 and a Robinhood account. No need to be rich.
> Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless.
If the labor is worthless, the great majority of people will be poor. Due to the law of supply & demand, property will be worthless since there will be very little demand for it.
> Countries with natural resources often have poor citizens because those citizens are not needed to extract that wealth.
Countries with or without resources often have poor citizens simply because being poor is the natural state of mankind. The only system that, historically, allowed the greatest number of people to exit poverty is capitalism. Here in Eastern Europe we got to witness an astonishing change of fortunes when we switched from communism to capitalism. The country and its resources didn't change, just the system and, correspondingly, the wealth of the population.
> it was their best strategy to become even richer. But that's no longer the case when you can be replaced by super-intelligence.
How can they become richer when most people are dirt broke (because they were replaced by AIs) and thus can't buy their products and services? Look at how even Elon's fortunes shrink when his company misses a sales forecast. He is only as rich as the number of customers he can find for his cars.
> Again, you can invest, today, in AI stocks and ETFs, with just $100 and a Robinhood account. No need to be rich.
And then? I'll compensate the loss of thousands of dollars I don't earn anymore every month with the profits of a $100 investment in some ETF?
> If the labor is worthless, the great majority of people will be poor. Due to the law of supply & demand, property will be worthless since there will be very little demand for it.
Property has inherent value. A house I can live in. A farm can feed me. A golf course I can play golf on. These things have value even if nobody can buy them off me (because they don't have anything I want). Supply and demand determine only the _price_ not the _value_ of goods and services.
> Countries with or without resources often have poor citizens simply because being poor is the natural state of mankind. The only system that, historically, allowed the greatest number of people to exit poverty is capitalism. Here in Eastern Europe we got to witness an astonishing change of fortunes when we switched from communism to capitalism. The country and its resources didn't change, just the system and, correspondingly, the wealth of the population.
None of this has any connection to anything I've written. I'm talking about the concept of a resource curse. Countries rich in natural resources (oil, diamonds, ...) where the population is poor as dirt because the ruling class has no incentive to share any of the profits. The same can happen with AI if we don't do anything about it.
> How can they become richer when most people are dirt broke (because they were replaced by AIs) and thus can't buy their products and services?
Other rich people can buy their products and services. They don't need you to buy their products and services because you don't bring anything to the table because all you have is labor and labor isn't worth anything (or at least not enough to survive off it). Put differently: Why do you think rich people would like to buy your labor if using AI/robots is cheaper? What reason would they have to do that?
> Look at how even Elon's fortunes shrink when his company misses a sales forecast. He is only as rich as the number of customers he can find for his cars.
You're proving my point: Elon still lives in a world where labor is worth something. Because Elon lives in a world where labor is worth something it is in his interest that there are many people capable of providing that labor to him. This means it is in his interest that the general population has access to food and water, is well eduacated, ...
If Elon were to live in a world where labor is done by AI/robots there would be little reason for him to care. Yes, he couldn't sell his cars to the average person anymore, but he wouldn't want to anyway. He could still sell his cars to Altman in exchange for an LLM that strokes his ego or whatever rich people want.
The point is: Because rich and powerful people still have to pay for labor, their incentives are at least somewhat aligned with the incentives of the average person.
2 replies →
I feel like you're fighting the fallacy of "the rich" being collectively blamed for every problem, by giving them credit for everything instead.
We know that none of the goods you listed would be available to the masses unless there was profit to be gained from them. That's the point.
I have a hard time believing a large group being motivated and mutually benefiting towards progression of x thing would result in worse outcomes than a few doing so. We just have never had an economic system that could offer that, so you assume the greedy motivations of a few is the only path towards progress.
> We just have never had an economic system that could offer that
Please propose it yourself.
> you assume the greedy motivations of a few is the only path towards progress
No. I assume the greedy motivations of the many is the best path towards progress. Any other attempts to replace this failed miserably. Ignoring human nature in ideologies never works.
That's extremely difficult. I just don't assume something is impossible because it hasn't been done yet. Especially when there is an active battle to undermine and destroy such ideas by almost every powerful entity on earth.
Literally none of what you just said is true. All of those things happened because there was a market opportunity, there was a market opportunity because wealth was not just in the hands of the rich.
If you want to look at what historically has happened when the rich have had a sudden rapid increase in intelligence and labor, we have examples.
After the end of the Punic wars, the influx of slave labor and diminution of economic power of normal Roman citizens lead to: accelerating concentration of wealth, civil war and an empire where the value of human life was so low that people were murdered in public for entertainment.
> All of those things happened because there was a market opportunity, there was a market opportunity because wealth was not just in the hands of the rich.
Yet those things did not happen in communist countries (or happened way less in socialist ones), during the same time period, even though the market was there too. That is why EU's socialist countries consume high tech products and services from the USA and not the other way around.