Comment by scarmig
1 day ago
"Forcing redistribution" doesn't always happen. Typically, redistribution happens when negotiating leverage has increased such that the beneficiaries of any redistribution can make it more painful to not redistribute than to redistribute. I.e. they have labor power, which can be converted to force if necessary.
In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.
Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.
It doesn't have to be all that dramatic. Just ensure that they don't reproduce at replacement level. In fact that's already happening. Crank it up a bit more, make things South Korea++ and it's just not a problem. If nobody shows up in the next generations out of whatever reasons, there's no risk of some kind of uprising you'd have to crush with a robot army. Just wait, push cultural messaging that encourages individualism and implicit antinatalism and it will seem perfectly humane. Legacy humans will simply go away, without any major incident.
I think your first equilibrium would be hard, for two reasons. First, empirically insurgencies are extremely difficult to exterminate; over the long run they tend to win. Second, in the U.S. at least, people tend to look at politics up close, and when you're myopic like that it appears that the government is a force onto itself. But zooming out, U.S. government actually mirrors the will of the people extremely well (with the exception of some issues on the margin). If there is overwhelming political support for redistribution it would be very difficult to resist.
The second equilibrium seems more likely-- the capitalist class grants the public a bare minimum to keep us from forcing political action. In the AI world "the minimum" is probably a much better standard of living than we have now, as the marginal cost of many products and services approaches zero. So we end up living much better material lives, but are still not free. Maybe this is stable, or maybe the ruling class loses dominance over time. At that point, who knows.
The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus, so they're not really worried about "political action." Through their ownership of government, they also own and control the military and police, so they are not worried about a violent uprising. So, what will actually happen when all economically relevant activity can be done cheaper than human labor, by a mixture of AI and robotics, and 99% of us are economically irrelevant?
> "they also own and control the military and police"
I'm always amused by how some intellectuals dehumanize the armed services, as if they were no more than mindless robots instead of humans with their own families and community ties.
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> The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus
That is not nearly so uncontested, not even in the US. Did you forget how all the tech bros went to Trump's inauguration, bowing their heads and kissing the ring? With Trump being very small fry on the scale of "capital-owning class" this means there are other factors at work than just wealth dominating politics.
Also, the situation gets much more unclear in other countries. Otherwise, why wouldn't the most capital-friendly party rule in each and every country?