Comment by GMoromisato
1 day ago
How much do you think it will cost to provide for "economically useless people"?
If AI does all the work, then the cost of everything drops down to energy cost. And if robots are generating energy (via solar power or whatever) then that's free too.
That means it won't cost any human labor to provide food, water, even medicine. It will be effectively free. You might say, "but the people who own the robots will charge money." But why? What do the people who own robots need money for? And remember that if we're assuming all jobs are gone, robots are building other robots. The government (or even a philanthropic rich person) could just give everyone a robot (or two or ten).
There will still be an economy, because people will charge each other for unique, human-specific art/services/whatever. But that money will only be spent on human art/services/whatever. You won't need money for anything robots can create.
> What do the people who own robots need money for?
For the same reason they currently “need” more money than they require.
This is straight-up Mr. Rogers political economy. This whole thing assumes primates aren’t gonna primate.
I do agree with this in some sense. I personally don't think we'll make it to the AI utopia era, but assuming we do, I agree there will be relative resource abundance.
The problem is we're already in an era of relative resource abundance and hunger is still problem, and the super wealthy who have almost unfathomable levels of resource abundance are still doing everything they can to pay as little tax as possible. And this isn't just an issue with the super-rich I myself am no better, and if you're honest, nor are yo. I am relatively very well off, but do relatively very little to help kids starving to death around the world. Somehow I rather take my family on holiday.
But okay, let's ignore this too. Let's just assume we'll be less selfish in the future or something.
Well now, we have another issue – AI has a cure for aging and populations are now exploding. Every beach and tourist attraction has a decade long waiting list. Huge amounts of green land are being built on to accommodate all the unemployed humans who have nothing better to do than have kids. People start to see that the human race resembles something more like a parasite, endlessly spreading and consuming while contributing nothing.
So now what? I'd argue the incentives to provide infinite resources to the economically useless human race doesn't make sense for the AIs or humans in charge. Absence of poverty and disease you simply have to do something to keep the numbers of human parasites under control and/or limit their consumption.
Correct. AI doesn’t magically smuggle in a totally different species of human. Scarcity is merely one layer of the human clusterfuck.