Comment by drivebyhooting
5 months ago
The trick is bypassing the human consumer as well. Companies satisfy (human) consumer needs as a byproduct of profit maximization. But human consumers are inefficient. They have to sleep, require medical care, etc.
A purely machine economy would be far more efficient. Therefore in the limit we should eliminate reliance on human labor and consumption to build a more perfect and efficient world.
Idea! Maybe these now redundant humans can be turned into a kind of battery, so they serve as a source of energy for the machines?
Perhaps it's then smart to make the humans have a brain/computer interface, to make then dream/think they are living in a normal society so they don't revolt.
Agents everywhere!!
Do you like what I've done with the place?
A tragedy is that supposedly the original idea was to use human minds for processing power, which would have been far superior to the thermodynamically laughable idea to use them as power sources.
You jest, but isn't this the logical conclusion? A sufficiently smart AGI has no need for humanity, at all.
I know people like to make Matrix jokes about what the future of AGI would be like, but I suspect it would be more like the relationship between humans and Cheela in Dragon's Egg.
But then, what need do we have for the AI?
At this rate, I'm convinced our future AI overlords will put humanity down much more humanely than we are/will
viz. Iain M. Banks culture, where the AI keep humans as pets
The "economy on a chip" thought experiment .
The humans consume to fulfill needs, how do those needs get fulfilled in a post human economy?
Large populations of humans not getting their basic needs fulfilled is a feature. That way, those who do have lots of resources get to have even more intense feelings of superiority and that of having high status. That is, after all, the point of wealth accumulation (at least a certain point where more money does not change your life quality meaningfully). For status, its the delta between you and others that matters most. If raising your own wealth has diminishing quality of life returns, then lowering other peoples is the only effective way of increasing the delta.
Elon way overpaid when offering that lady a horse in exchange for an erotic massage
Having large amounts of people with unfulfilled needs is not exactly a novel idea.
Just train machines on the huge corpus of human needs so they can need things like no human has needed things before.
What can possibly go wrong
>The humans consume to fulfill needs
That's not how the capital class thinks of human consumption.