Comment by orangecat
21 hours ago
they realize that meant a real human artist probably didn't get paid to make it so society is worse off
This is a form of the broken window fallacy. Society is not worse off when production requires less labor, any more than it's worse off when someone uses an open source library rather than paying someone to reimplement it.
> This is a form of the broken window fallacy.
I’m not sure I see it, can you elaborate?
The broken window fallacy is the idea that it's good when your window gets broken because you have to pay someone to fix it and it increases their income. If that were true, then it would be bad if you could easily repair windows without spending time or money. It's false because we're better off if we can spend our resources on things we actually want rather than constantly maintaining our windows, even if that means some window repairmen need to find other jobs.
What do we do when former window repairman can't find other jobs? Just fuck em, right?
The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
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Sure, but if we run AI all the way to its endpoint, it’s not just about window repairmen anymore. Our current notions about economics assume there’s always another job class for people to move to, here eventually there won’t be.
So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.
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> Society is not worse off when production requires less labor
Society is definitely worse off when people who exchange their labor for capital have no opportunities to do so
>Society is not worse off when production requires less labor,
Not objectively in every situation. But that does seem to be the case and objective here.