Comment by baron816
5 hours ago
This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output.
People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.
But that's just the thing, productivity is so much higher than, say, 50 years ago, while the average worker has less of a perspective (to own a home, start a family, etc. anything stable to work towards essentially). The profits mostly don't go towards the now more productive workers and ensuring their rights and well-being and a habitable world to live in, do they.
My view is that AI's productive power will allow more individuals to be independent from powerful corporations, and that will significantly weaken those corporations.
It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work.
As more people start companies, more competition will drive down prices for everything, making the things people want more accessible.
That "freedom" has a cost, a very high one (in the form of tokens), and that money is going to powerful corporations anyways.
I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive.
The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.
Yes. To sledgehammer it home, it's not desire for things that makes consumption happen. You need money. And if bots are doing the work, where's the money coming from?
The argument implies that there's some kind of balance point in there. But I'll bet it's not one where the general populace is living remotely well.
The window of uncertainty is absolutely massive. I could also equally see a world that looks mostly like ours today because it becomes illegal to use sufficiently intelligent AI (Mythos is already generating guardedness, and it’s not smart enough to replace capable humans). Eg if ai that is sufficiently intelligent to truly replace humans is as dangerous as an atom bomb (or chemical weapon, or even a machine gun) then it could just be illegal to use except for use by the governments of the world.
Or high intelligence, enough to replace all humans, becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of energy and data compared to humans that we maintain a kind of biological advantage on a large category of economically valuable tasks.
Or training sufficiently advanced ai to replace us requires judgements and training data that is essentially beyond us (eg if we can’t figure out what the right answer is, how can we train or judge an AI)
No one has any real idea what is going to happen. What we need tho is a collective promise, through our democracies and communities and governments, that we will make it right. Institutions and laws that make sure the benefits are distributed broadly, that we stay safe, that we have a better world because of it. If people get that I think everyone will be mostly excited by ai, not opposed.
People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh
> People need to Google Jevons Paradox, smdh
You're talking to a group who has seen a comment similar to yours every day of the week for two years.
That also means that they have already seen the rebuttals. So have you, too, maybe?
That’s what the growing hoards of permanently unemployable people will do, sit around and google jevons paradox and the lump of labor fallacy and ponder whether economists have ever been wrong in the past about such matters, and whether AGI is really all that different from the steam engine anyway. Tech sector is just tech, like it’s always been.
I think you have no idea what Jevons Paradox is if you think it is a retort to what I just said.
Is that so? What if machines can fulfill all the economically valuable wants?
> People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff.
The danger arises when people want stuff but cannot afford it as there is no more work and what remains of available work (i.e. trades and sex work) is being fought over heavily, driving down the prices.
When that "cannot afford it" extends to necessary stuff such as housing and food too much, eventually there will be a revolution once people are fed up.
The US is in a particularly bad spot here - in contrast with other countries that experience utter poverty (e.g. Afghanistan), most of the population lives in urban areas and has zero opportunity to at least engage in subsistence farming. Whoops.