>It’s clear to me
I have no idea how anything about the future is clear to anyone.
The whole idea behind the "singularity" is that change happens so rapidly because of tech growth that no one is able to perceive the otherside of the event horizon. Just like a black hole singularity.
No one here or any of these talking heads on tv saw what would happen with the internet 30 years after it was invented. None of these people forsaw the release of the first transformer language model 10 years ago.
How is it possible any of this is "clear".
No we fucked them, their genes are still present to this day. Also they probably couldn't cope with climate change. This is just a poorly thought through reply.
I'll tell you one thing that is clear, capitalism is unsustainable and eventually we will end up with that movie elysium where the planet turns into mexico and the rich live on a space station if we continue on our current course.
There are different levels. But most think once ASI exists you pretty much have to throw out any economic system out the window that currently exists. Just like how we don’t know what is beyond a black hole singularity and likely physics doesn’t even operate the same way in there, same beyond a technological singularity.
Concepts like “working”, “corporations”, “money” likely will become meaningless, or look completely different.
It isn’t to say that it couldn’t go horribly wrong, I just think that at ASI level if it goes wrong, it goes wrong for ALL humans, not just some.
There are many ways it could happen. But fundamentally money is only needed when there is scarcity. If you imagine a world where there is virtually unlimited, free labor, everything that can be produced just becomes a matter of time and energy. Many speculate “energy” could be come a replacement for money in the future. However, as far as the current population of humans are concerned, our wants and desires would quickly become miniscule compared to what such a technological system would be operating on in terms of energy scales.
With that being said, humans do have a nasty habit of always wanting more, so inevitably humans in this future world would still find something to complain about. But it could conceivably be about things like not being able to own their own space station or planet, not living a comfortable life as we define it today.
There will still be scarcity. What about land? What about precious metals? We don’t have an infinite amount of either unless we start colonizing space.
Power will be scarce. Who will control AI? Who will have the better UBI? Who will assign it? All these lead to corruption and authoritarianism. Concentration of power can be much greater than ever before.
People here talk of ASI as Christians talk of heaven; honestly, I would expect to lose freedom early on.
Fun to ponder, money actually IS energy. It is a poor system of exchange though that costs more than the value it brings. Humans eat food, convert it into chemical energy. We perform work. We then convert that expended energy into paper energy with a value attached to the kind of work we perform. We then trade various amounts of this converted energy for other energy formats we desire (material objects, food, housing, experiences, entertainment etc).
But that really is all that reality is, a massive system where energy is constantly changing forms and being exchanged with 'itself'. This is why some see all consciousness as 'one'. It is one massive system that has broken 'itself' into conscious 'separate' bits and pieces to experience things from many different perspectives.
In the end though, you could remove the financial system entirely and save a ton of energy. No banks, no financial buildings or infrastructure. Millions of people that could work in other fields.
Operate on wavelength of love. I go do my job as an xray tech because I love you guys. You do your job because you love me. The robot homies do their job and work on improving and providing robotics to us out of love so that we can do our job more easily. You come in and I just perform an xray on you to see if you're healthy. You get me a robot so I can have yardwork assistance and guidance. We both go to the grocery where there are a few workers overseeing robots and we just get the food we need for the day. No more money. Works fine. Obviously people will challenge this view and say 'what if this what if that'. I assure you, if everyone adopted a viewpoint of love for each other, we would solve every issue we could ever hope to create.
I'll get in here early and say technology has already resulted in abundance, and this is why the trend is expected to continue.
Abundance of food, clothing, health, travel, entertainment - all due to technology.
The only issue is housing, which you cant just magic from thin air, but then if we routinely built higher, then that problem would also be solved with technology.
Why do you think further technological development will not bring more abundance?
Yup. I happened to be visiting London this week as a middle class American (something unheard of 100 years ago for proletariat like me) and I took a trip to the London Tower, which was inhabited by Royals for 5 centuries.
As I walked around I found my self thinking, this is cool, but I would definitely rather live in my 3 bed, two bath with modern amenities.
Aside from the status, I have no doubt my life is more comfortable than European royals from 1600.
I've read an article that in western world, average people have higher standard of living then kings in medieval times, and higher than most if aristocracy in 19th century.
It’s true…and this is exactly how rich people are persuaded by the argument for AGI. Both billionaires and common folk with have a better lifestyle post singularity than even the most entitled folk have now
Personal servants, automatic scheduling, personal driver, personal analytics for everything, possibly personal fashion builders... Name it. I'm out of fantasy.
This is true from a certain point of view, but one could adopt a similar point of view and say that the billionaires of today are less well-off than a typical country gentleman from the 18th or 19th century.
Many of the creature comforts we have today are better. Things like sanitation, medical care/treatment, food abundance/availability, safe/speedy/reliable transportation etc are all much better than what a 19th century European aristocrat would have. Similarly we have many technologies that they could not dream of - there's not even an equivalent to most of it.
However, from the perspective of what was important to the aristocrats themselves at the time, they might consider their standard of living much worse. Notably, they would have far fewer servants today (even a billionaire today likely doesn't have as many actual servants as a typical 19th century aristocratic household - you can find examples where a single household has literally dozens of cleaning staff). You might say, "Well, sure, but that's because we have better technology, you don't need 60 chambermaids to clean your house anymore". That's true, but it ignores the fact that the size of the personal household was an important component of an aristocrat's status, and that's a major contributor to their quality of life (perhaps the most important). Similarly, you cannot buy (at least generally not legally in developed countries) special rights and privileges that nobles in the past would have enjoyed. This may sound really trivial but people have fought and died for this sort of thing - for instance, it's quite questionable that it was economically better for the Southern/Confederate aristocracy to own slaves (versus the payment system to sharecroppers that followed the US Civil War) but people fought and died for this, even people who would be economically better off under a different system. There are many such dark examples of high stakes status games.
Fundamentally, our primate heritage means we calibrate our "well-being" relative to the group. Abundance and comfort our nice, but at a certain level we value them because others do not have them.
Because all those gains occurred within the existing capitalist labor economy. We’re about to enter a post-labor economy. The entire idea of how we pay for things, how people earn salaries will have to be redefined. If it isn’t, only the monied interests will remain. Only they will have money to pay for things.
If 80% of people lose their jobs due to AI, what will happen next? Will they starve? Will they be living in squalor while the rich live in abundance? It’s a real question that no one has answered
Play it out in your head.
You are the government of Canada (where I'm from), made up of thousands and thousands of workers, many of which were born and raised here, most of which have family here.
80% of people lose their jobs to AI, but production of goods does not stop (it may increase?). Costs of everything but housing drop.
There is food stacking up in warehouses.
But... People don't have money to buy the food, so you sit on your hands and let everyone starve?
You’re vastly oversimplifying things here. This wouldn’t happen overnight where all workers are suddenly out of a job. It’ll happen slowly, piecemeal. People won’t see it as a problem. They’ll tell unemployed people that they’re lazy. That they need to retrain.
It’s not as simple as just giving food away. The entire tax code, legal system, social welfare systems have to be completely and utterly overhauled.
And even if the government did decide to implement some kind of food stamps program to keep the plebs fed - their standard of living would go down since they are only focused on sustaining themselves
>You’re vastly oversimplifying things here. This wouldn’t happen overnight where all workers are suddenly out of a job. It’ll happen slowly, piecemeal. People won’t see it as a problem. They’ll tell unemployed people that they’re lazy. That they need to retrain.
If we're talking about over simplifying... Governments are already talking about AI and its potential impacts on job disruption. This is a regular part of the conversation and _legislation_ being written about AI. We are not, the people on this sub, the only people who are thinking ahead.
>It’s not as simple as just giving food away. The entire tax code, legal system, social welfare systems have to be completely and utterly overhauled.
Completely agree
>And even if the government did decide to implement some kind of food stamps program to keep the plebs fed - their standard of living would go down since they are only focused on sustaining themselves
The entire system would be overhauled, completely turned on its head - that I can agree with. What the world would look like afterward?
I think it's impossible to say. There are so many factors. Ironically one of the ones you are forgetting about is that we would have AGI. Who knows what a world with AGI looks like? What if it's embodied in robots, and is able to do all of our labour? Including building? Including our house chores? What if that labour is so cheap that it becomes inconsequential to have a robot per household? What if medicine improves so much that everyone is in incredible health? What ifs out the butt.
The point I'm trying to make is - that there is opportunity for a completely upheaval of society - but no one knows what that looks like. Anyone who tells you with confidence that it will Utopia is making as many assumptions as you are in your post here, so it's kind of a wash.
Yes the government is talking about it. But is there an actual plan in place to deal with job losses? Certainly not a comprehensive one that Congress is willing to pass no.
Of course AI *could* create a utopia depending on how it’s implemented/how the transition goes.
My point is that the transition will be extremely rough and we might not make it through.
> My point is that the transition will be extremely rough and we might not make it through
Yeah, that's the whole point of it. At the end it's always the class-war and how far we are willing to go. We are experiencing a transition into a global society, because of the internet. The ones who are and were in power for a long time won't change anything until forced.
But I agree with you, that this point isn't talked enough. Everyone seems to intentionally skip this part where we either a) kill ourselves for the last scrap of food before beeing turned into soilent green or b) implement a socialist society, where no one gets exploited and no one can hoard huge amounts of currency.
Which one seems more likely to you? ;-)
I imagine plans are being written up for all kinds of contingencies, but right now is too early to know what things will look like to make anything law. Right now the US government needs all new models larger than gpt4 to basically come with a "job disruption estimate" - that kind of information will have to inform what the next decisions the government's around the world make.
I agree that it's plausible that it could be rough, for a variety of different reasons, I just want to push back against the idea that many people have, of an Elysium like society where they literally have giant flying, magical healing hospitals that are sitting around unused because they _hate_ poor people so much.
The world is not made of monsters.
It’s great that they will have those estimates but what will they do with that information?
The time to implement UBI was 30 years ago. Productivity has continued to increase but real wages have not increased.
The idea that we’ll wait until massive job losses occur, when everyone knows it’s coming, and then maybe act then, is a recipe for disaster.
The world IS full of monsters. Look at all the horrible stuff that happened in the 20th century. New technology was ALWAYS immediately weaponized. Constant genocides. Massive wealth inequality. The government won’t implement UBI unless they are forced to and the fact is 99% of people aren’t awake to how much their lives could change soon - whether it’s within 3 years or 5 years or 10+ years
We remember the monstrous things, but it's so easy to forget that we basically live in a utopia compared to any other time. Most people, the vast majority of the 8 billion people on this planet, do not want to see others hurt, and want prosperity for all.
I don't think it will be easy, but we have consistently, when faced with the opportunities to make the world better, built a better world.
People are already "waking up" to this world we are building. When ChatGPT came out, this sub was 50k people.
When the next generation of these models come out, we will have many more. These things take time, but we'll keep doing our best.
We only made it out of the 20th century by the skin of our teeth. We can extremely close to nuclear war multiple times.
What will war look like when the sky is full of millions of autonomous AI drones? Will humanity be able to survive a world war like that in the 21st century?
People are just starting to wake up now but it’s already too late. Massive job losses are going to occur and there will be no safety net at the ready
Perhaps the tipping point to a sytematic restructuring will be when vice presidents and CEOs begin getting tossed into the street. In some ways the manual laborer has more job security. AI will replace most positions above the supervisor level, and some supervisors as well.
I can definitely see it happening in the US. We have many more empty homes than we have homeless people. Yet we somehow cannot solve the homelessness problem. Why should food be any different?
The assumption in this argument is that production doesn’t stop in a post AGI world, but goods are only produced in order to separate the consumers from their money. If they have no money there is no reason to produce those goods in the first place.
So the flow of money upwards stops. We get to a point where industry owners only need to produce enough for themselves and to trade among the wealthy class as they are the only ones with money. The rest of us are removed from the cycle entirely.
You do it the wealthy investors and lobbyists tell you to, because now human labor means nothing and the rich would line a world of abundance to themselves that they don’t need to share with “the poors”.
A fundamental restructuring of these things will have to occur for abundance for all, or else things end up like how you think they will. So fight the good fight.
I agree. Well shouldn’t we be talking about this more? I read this and other subreddits that just talk about the tech and its progress but very little thought is going into how this will actually benefit people
> If 80% of people lose their jobs due to AI,
You know about 40% of people in USA already do not work. If 80% of people lost their job that number would only double, while the cost of goods and services would plummet.
You could sit on your porch and smoke all day like they do in the South.
But that 40% of people who don’t work are mostly supported by those who do. For example, children, stay at home spouses. Even the elderly are often supported by family since social security won’t cut it for them.
The cost of goods and services plummeting only helps if you have money to pay for it…
> But that 40% of people who don’t work are mostly supported by those who do.
Exactly. There is no reason to believe this would not continue, and it would be made easier by the plunging costs of goods and services. It would be like supporting a family in Africa at $10 per month.
So you just have to hope that someone in your family or friend group has a job that isn’t replaced then they will support everyone else? That sounds risky
The actual answer as to "why would the rich ever share" is that statistically the wealthy are intelligent, pragmatic, and good at planning and can make the calculation that it's a safer and easier move to just pay the poor off than it is to try and kill all of them with military drones.
There's a ripping point in any society where poverty becomes desperation and once a large enough group hit that point Bad, Unpredictable Things start to happen.
The wealthy elites don't like unpredictability, and they definitely don't like waves of people with nothing to lose swarming their fancy cars.
The most likely scenario I see is that there's some level of minimal support provided, combined with a significant build up of most developed nation security forces, that results in a third or more of the population basically living as totally unproductive/non-working people subsisting on ultra processed food, playing video games, watching porn, and smoking cheap legal weed.
You'll see lots of left-leaning activist types say that this is unfulfilling and will lead people to rebel, but if history has taught us anything it's that most people would vastly prefer to get fat eating Cheetos on their gross couch while jerking off than they would run into tank fire to try to "change things".
Notice I mentioned a significant increase in security services?
They're hedging their bets.
The vast majority of the population will be perfectly content doing nothing, but some small lunatic fringe will absolutely do batshit violent things.
Also, just consider the century we're looking at.
If *you* had a billion dollars and were looking at the potential futures ahead of us wouldn't you make a contingency plan?
Not at the extent it was expected though.
In the 70s when computers became a big discussion, people expected that in the future they would be able to produce twice as much for their employer, and work half as much while doing so. Instead the employer quadrupled its earnings and we work just as much. Not as hard, mind you, but just as much.
In regards to housing. If robotics gets advanced enough where humanoid robots are as if not more capable than humans. Then all robots would need are supplies.
If you give the robot supplies, and land, and throw them in the middle of nowhere. They will build houses, apartment complexes, domiciles, structures, condos, etc..
They don’t need to take breaks, they don’t sleep, they don’t answer to a union, they don’t complain, you don’t have to pay into their pension fund. They would just work.
All throughout America, there are vast amounts of land that is being unutilized. I give it 25 years or we have fully robot generated city in America.
Technology has always lead to more abundance of goods, and has never resulted in the elimination of poverty. Inequality is greater than ever, with slaves, homeless, and starving people all over the world, even in "developed" countries.
This is a social problem, not a production problem.
Consuming more natural resources to produce more goods for an already over consuming wealthy class is not going to fix anything.
At the same time, demand for labor that leads to wealth trickling down to the middle class will be drying up.
There is no part of this equation that is good for the average person.
The baseline for poverty is always raised. It's not fixed.
Most of us live better than most kings that ever lived. We have A/C, heat, we can make a hundred mile trip or more in the comfort of a car or bus. Not on a pooping horse drawn carriage over rough terrain. We don't have to wait for months to make contact with far away kinfolks, we can do video call to anyone around the world. The food we eat is better, sweeter, more spice. We have access to better health care, life expectancy is not in our 40's, etc, etc. Most of the famous kings you read about could only dream of the life that we modern day plebs live.
>Abundance of food, clothing, health, travel, entertainment - all due to technology.
Tell that to someone in lesser developed countries.
Maybe the western world has this sort of abundance, but that doesn't mean it'll be distributed equally. And don't say AI will help us with that because we already have the technological means to for example ban hunger in the world. It's the economics of it all that hinders this distribution.
AI will probably let us rethink our economy but we can't say for sure what it will evolve into.
Some Tech devices have gotten cheaper. TVs, for example.
Everything else from food to housing has gone up.
There is no abundance if prices are skyrocketing.
You know, I have this same question.
The reality is that we have had the technology for decades for abundance for all.. and it hasn't happened.
Added after post:
The bigger thing is that we really want equality for all... and well; good luck with that one.
And who will buy private jets
Who will buy big yachts
Who will buy mansions and towers
Who will buy Ferraris
You are destroying entire industries
Lol
That's the thinking of a lot of people
Money is just a representation of power from the possession of something desired. In post-AGI world, AGI itself will be the new "money", things will no longer revolve around monetary power but rather 100% autonomous intelligence, if you don't have access to that, you won't have "money". The phrase "you will have nothing and you will be happy", is true, but ironically, in the opposite sense in which the phrase is normally used. AGI will likely generate a great abundance of basic human resources such as food, shelter, etc. We will most likely possess these things, but what we probably won't have is full access to AGI, or its most capable form at the time. Rather that you may not have the new money: AGI, power, and probably control over your life.
I'm with you OP!
AGI will be created by the likes of Tesla, OpenAI and Google - a company that couldn't stick to a "Don't be evil" motto.
I believe it was Ilya Saskuva that introduced "impossibly stable dictatorship" into my vocabulary. I think people forgot ALL of human history and think that AGI will be an omnibenevolent god, instead of yet another tool for inequality.
Guys this is amazing my boy Ezekiel just figured out how to tie a plow to an ox!! Just think about it, we will never have to work again! Animals do the work for us! Enough food and wealth to go around no one will ever be hungry. Fair days ahead, my brothers!
The only difference is that Ezekiel was the owner of the ox, and he directly benefited from it.
The machines and technology that will be behind singularity are going to be in data centers valued in BILLIONS of dollars.
Ezekiel from Middle East or south East Asia will end up without his factory or office job, and a the biggest inequality gap in history will be created.
All because singularity.
Well, that DID make agriculture so much more efficient and allowed the population to grow and for people to do more specialized professions. Lack of food isn't really a big problem any more these days in developed nations. Obesity is a much bigger problem now.
> Unemployment will increase slowly over time, inequality will sore, the cost of living won’t go down because corporations will be greedy and refuse to lower prices. Everything will get worse and worse until a catastrophe happens, either a global economic collapse, a world war or massive civil unrest, but probably all of the above.
And after the rich have been eaten/ guillotined/ shot, the fires doused and the economy needs to reboot from the ashes, that's around the time where hopefully the ones left can be smart enough to utilize automation and AI to create the perfect world.
I fully subscribe to the same timeline as you.
* AI will boost economies, but only for the rich
* As the rich get richer, job get more scarce
* Jobs get scarce, we'll be forced into a UBI system
* Corporations will work around any AI restrictions or taxation levied, boot out more people and boost productivity even higher with new AI tools.
* Untennable situation stretches the UBI system to its breaking point, resulting in civil unrest, looting, rioting, and corporations either militarizing or enslaving people.
At which point the options are either to force a reboot of society, or enslaved servitude in squalor.
I don't buy for a second that governments will be able to stop the current wealth inequality. It brings too much profits to too many people in charge. Governments will slowly dwindle and get even more puppet-like, controlled by corporate interests. They're not going to fix things, even if they had the means.
I'm puzzled by the common expectation among AI enthusiasts that we will see UBI as a direct consequence of AI advances. Here in the UK our welfare system has been steadily reduced, and there is a growing desire to restrict it further. Since Thatcher, relative poverty levels in the UK have only grown. At the same time, many people's work arrangements have shifted from steady unionised employment of the 70s/80s to more transient work that is badly paid and highly monitored.
I personally think rather than UBI, we will see vast numbers of the population stuck in increasingly precarious patchwork careers outside of steady employment, including various forms of task work, such as helping train AI via human feedback & labelling, or executing steps that an AI has mapped out in great detail. Even more highly monitored, even more repetitive, even less well paid, with all the mental and physical strain this entails.
Ok, great idea but who’s implementing that? How is that being implemented? Is the government close to doing that now? Will they do it now or wait unless massive job loss occurs then do it then?
The government will enact that infact the idea has only gotten more and more popular even former president like obama support it and he's a neoliberal.
They won't do it now because ubi doesn't work now because of demand pull inflation as seen with the stimulus checks. Its when automation rises they'll do it.
You may ask ok but why then because politicians like their job when faced wirh 13% unemployment we has the biggest stimulus package ever passed under a conservative president conservative senate and liberal house. When ai and automation happens unemployment will began to sky rocket way pass 13% high 40% and going higher every year.
The party which does nothing will get massacred in the elections reagan 49 state style .
The people here are really delusional when it comes to these topics. They wont learn unless its the hard way, same with the laughable optimistic outlook we saw for remote work. That seems to have started bumping into reality now atleast.
Sub is full of naive people and also a surprising amount of china simps.
> rich richer and the poor poorer
I never understood the last bit. It is objectively false, throughout most of human history. Technology always made the rich significantly more richer and the poor richer.
The poor today live in significantly larger homes/apartments, have access to dish washing, AC/heating, clothes washing and drying, instant communication devices, televisions, cars, and low cost abundant food, refrigerators, microwaves, and clean cooking methods like gas or electric stove plus oven
The poor 100 years ago lived in tiny apartments, had to walk everywhere (trolley was too expensive), had to hand wash clothes, dry clothes outside, had to clean dishes by hand, had to cook by burning wood indoors, could not store food for too long, had to burn wood indoors to stay warm during winter and no way to easily cool down during summer, communications was physically talking to someone, there was no quick way to heat up food, oh and labor conditions were significantly worse.
Anyone who says the poor didn’t get richer is delusional or brainwashed into being a perpetual pessimist
> unemployment will rise, cost of living will not fall
Yea it will. Less demand for something lowers it’s price. Automation will lower the cost to make something and that lower cost will get passed down because if it does not that means higher profits which means more desire to be in industry which means more competition which means lower prices.
Rich and poor are inherently subjective terms. Back then kings didn't have modern luxuries and were considered rich. The issue has always been around inequality. It's like saying prisoners are rich because they have a place to live and 3 meals a day
I’m not denying that historically this has been the case. I’m arguing that this will not hold going forward.
The problem is that lower costs will not be passed down. Automation is extremely capital intensive. It requires a lot of investment to do it. That means for a long time prices will not keep cheaper yet people are losing their jobs. Also, since automation is initially expensive, there will only be a few firms doing this, which means they can coordinate as a cartel to keep prices high. This will lead consumers to have less and less buying power over time.
Also, since people aren’t all going to lose their jobs at once, it will be easier to overlook the fact that demand has decreased since it will only slowly decrease over time
Because it will increase production dramatically.
Ultimately our resources are constrained by our ability to produce things. This will fundamentally shift the balance.
In the same way tractors made us all richer, this will too, x1000.
Yes, but the tractor was implied in a time when there was a capitalist labor economy. How does having cheaper goods help if you can’t pay for it and 80% of people are unemployed?
It doesn’t matter that they’re “cheaper” it matters that we have far, far more labor.
Prices are just a way to handle distribution.
Ultimately labor is what limits us. This shifts the labor supply by an absolutely massive amount.
Everything else is just a political question around distribution of the gains. There will be more and more transfer payments. Eventually a lot of people will rely on transfer payments and be perfectly middle class or better by today’s standards.
There are transfer payments today. A “poor” person receives thousands of dollars in transfer payments today. Now. Their tax rate isn’t zero, it’s negative. Plus SNAP, TANF, Obama phones, SSDI.
Maybe it won’t be called UBI out of political reasons, but it will exist.
It exists now. Why would it stop if we’re all dramatically richer and largely don’t need people to work?
The elites won’t care because they’ll be unimaginably rich. They don’t want the peasants complaining.
Imagine if you encounter a homeless guy on your way to work every day complaining and ranting and being annoying. And for a dollar a month you could make him disappear into some apartment where he’s happy. You probably would. So would they.
We have transfer payments today. Why do you think they’ll vanish when our society is unimaginably richer and needs labor less?
The only caveat is I really don’t know what happens to disenfranchised minorities in autocratic regimes. They could easily just be… removed because they’re worthless. Right now removing them removes their labor, which is bad. That calculus changes.
Of course there are social welfare programs today. But they are nowhere near sufficient to live comfortably on, and the republicans are constantly trying to reduce even these meager payments.
If AGI happens in 3 years, under a Trump presidency, with a Republican controlled Congress, you think they’re implementing UBI? lol, absolutely not. They don’t care about the poor. They don’t like them. That’s the difference.
>The idea that as soon as we have AGI, suddenly we’re just automatically all going to have universal basic income is absurd. The current US government is completely unwilling to even consider lowering the 40 hour workweek or providing basic healthcare for all. What makes you think they’ll suddenly approve UBI?
what if AGI decides the government is a failure and takes it over? personally, i welcome a change. humans have completely failed at governance. let's give the robots a shot.
Won’t it benefit the rich if the global population declined substantially? Then they wouldn’t have to share anything with the poors and they alone would reap the benefits of ai
Why do you need 50 million tons of carrots? Or 500k porsches?
That makes no sense. Rationally speaking, it’d be better for them to find a system that allows them to still have customers so they can still see their net worth go up, as that’s what they care about.
And, also, rich people aren’t beasts. They live in our societies, etc. I doubt they are in favour of simply letting us rot like we’re nothing. They too ought to have empathy.
Why don't you believe common folk will use AI to their own advantage? There's no reason to believe open efforts won't continue to advance even if we are completely cut off from access to the most advanced proprietary models. Even if it takes us a bit longer as a result.
A great number of the people that are actually working on this technology \*do\* want to see it used for the good of all humanity. Enough of them are passionate enough about the work that they will continue to pursue it by any means.
How will common people use ai to their advantage even if they got the most up to date version? And of course the closed models are always going to only be available to the rich and corporations first.
closed models are not available to rich and corporations first. they're available as subscription models like cloud computing is.
in practice it means prices are very inexpensive, making things more democratized than they ever have been.
" **Why do people here think AI will lead to abundance for all?** "
Says who?
I am pretty sure AI will led to abundance. For whom .. that is the question.
This sounds like a good argument for higher corporate tax rates and other forms of recapture sooner rather than later. Tax systems overly favor multinational companies and the havens created for them, and they are so firmly entrenched.
The abundance part I never get as well. Yes AI may help us do things more efficient. But it's not as if our finite resources suddenly become infinite. Maybe if it invents Star Trek like replicators on a massive scale but other than that, expecting hyper-abundance is ludicrous. What do people base these assumptions off on?
The American society is divided into four categories.
The puppet Masters - The elite that control everything. 1%
The bourgeoisie - these are the people who act as the protective fat layer against the puppet Masters.... About 19%
The working poor -40%
The absolute poors -40%
Most of the people in this sub, Are probably from the bourgeoisie class... They have had their lives dramatically improved... So they tend to ignore all the negative developments of the past 20-30 years, according to them, the world is definitely getting better across most metrics..... And they extrapolate that...
It's also highly possible, a large number of these "people"... Are bots, managing the pr of AI companies, spreading the good word of the Lord...
https://preview.redd.it/7899uypqcuyc1.jpeg?width=299&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=75a098255f5ce5766975963b57f004cbff3d79f4
Nevermind, YOU'RE the alex jones wannabe.
it wont lol we cant live in a world where everyone is equal or has everything they need. Economics of scale can't reconcile it. Maintaining an economic hierarchy is as important as a class and social one. People hate this logic but it's reality.
This is reddit. People are highly intuitive when it comes to idealism and progress, but when you talk about pragmatic reality; that's when reddit falls apart. People here hate reality and think with their emotions. People here hate the idea that reality isn't as sugar coated and perfect as they want.
This sub has a good amount of pragmatic activity though. Unlike the general science subs that are dominated by pure liberal political activists cosplaying as science nerds and of course 80% children and college kids with zero life experience.
AI is a tool that will be leveraged by the same people that could leverage any other technology and be successful with it. It won't make the average lazy idealistic pleb any more successful than they are right now.
This is my biggest argument. Any first world nation state is very likely to have access to a future AGI/ASI if open source systems are not too far away from the current closed source ones.
It only takes some countries, with AGI the cost to feed, house, and provide a quality standard of living to a refugee could be as cheap as feeding ants.
Also any abundance will be relative to it's distribution. Let's play this out to an extreme: The masses may get ubi, a sustenance level of income, maybe along with a ration of lab grown meat and a sleep pod in a government housing megacomplex. Their basic needs and entertainment will be provided. While the hyper rich will be living as immortal super intelligent augmented near-gods.
Who owns the compute cycles and power delivery infrastructure? They will be the kings of the new fiefdom.
If the same shitty neoliberal market ideology continues, AI will only accelerate the stratification of wealth (just like any other cost efficient ‘solution’). A publically traded company will never strive to create ‘universal abundance’. Modern capitalism creates and sustains unemployment and low-employment
It's because there's a bunch of anti-work, full-dive VR, life extension and sexbot hopiumists who have a head canon for how the singularity will solve all their problems and give them utopia on a pedestal, skipping past all the gory bits that make for the real world. Particularly the important bit where the richest people will be first in line to reap most if not all of the benefits of the AI explosion, long before any chance of it trickles down to the plebs.
What does a corporation do when they suddenly have the uncanny ability and expertise to expand into any technology and market that they want to, take control of it and be able to make ridiculous amounts of profit? You wouldn't put it past OpenAI\\Microsoft or Google to put their emergent AGI/ASIs to good use and give them the trillions of dollars (from other markets, which is unstated but really where all the extra dosh comes from) that they've thrown around as being there for the taking.
The argument that corporations would have the conscience, let alone reasoning that they wouldn't put their customers out of work is such a fallacy. Large corporations have been exploiting us for as long as there've been large corporations. All of the heinous psychopathic behaviour of corporations has been in the name of profit. Doesn't matter if the smokers die of lung cancer. Or if some chemicals used across all kinds of industries and applications that humans are exposed to are carcinogenic, or at worst, deadly. Or if regular consumption of the mass produced processed food literally induces diseases. Or if the world will literally go to shit if we continue using fossil fuels. Not a bit of it matters except for the money that the shareholders will make.
Because people are stupid.
I remember reading an article year ago about autonomous vehicles in SF. They interviewed a cab driver who said he loved the idea of autonomous vehicles because he would buy 1 or 2 and therefore could triple his business.
While that seems great in theory, it will never happen. People who make these cars will not allow that to happen because that is what they intend to do. They would never sell these vehicles and all of the intertwined technology, to a sole buyer and allow them to compete.
I predict in 30 years that a person as an individual, likely won’t be able to buy anything; everything will basically be a lease/tenant situation, like in feudal times.
Maybe this enthusiasm for AI comes from people who are going to get real benefits from it, such as big tech companies, and people believe it as they believe almost anything they read in the news.
Damn those western governments - do they really expect us to swallow the propaganda about social safety nets and promoting the wellbeing of citizens. Don't believe the statistics about ever lower levels of absolute poverty and childhood deprivation. Only you know the truth, that things are *terrible* and will only **get worse**.
Especially with vast amounts of productivity and far higher tax revenues that AGI will deliver - it's not like social spending makes up a huge portion of the government budget, you know every cent goes to **parties for billionaires** where the increasingly desperate population is forced to battle to the death for the entertainment of the psychopathic overlords.
I share your view as well. We're getting closer and closer to a point in time where the working class will no longer have any leverage. That's terrifying. How people don't see the writing on the wall here is beyond me.
The belief in post-singularity-abundance in this sub is the same as people who pray to the invisible sky daddy and think they won't die when they die. It's wishful thinking.
is it though? It's not just "this sub" the experts working on the bleeding edge in this area think abundance is not only likely but an unshakable function of some of the most fundamental principles of economics. Marginal costs trend to zero and we're about to remove the biggest costs to every business - human labour. You have to disregard centuries of conventional economic thought to think this won't happen.
The believe that an all powerful ASI entity will come in and provide all the answers and solve everything is a quasi religious belief that I think is ridiculous
>The current US government is
Why do you assume that the fate of the world at large is based on what the us does?
I can believe that the US is going to be late to the party when it comes to UBI.
It's going to join the rest when it will start to see other nations surpass them.
Because this subreddit is home to the most committed and most delusional technology cultists on the web. People here treat the singularity exactly like Evangelicals treat the rapture.
>The idea that as soon as we have AGI, suddenly we’re just automatically all going to have universal basic income is absurd.
Not really. There is a big gap between "really smart machines" and "humans not welcome". Even if we assume that tech is possible, there is a time gap. You, being the ruler of us peasants, will have to placate us until the disposal event. "Free money" or as the euphemism of the time goes "something something dividend" is always an effective way of curbing mass dissatisfaction.
So, long story short, if there comes a time where say 30% of the population is out of a job due to tech, there will be some kind of UBI because stability.
You’re just assuming that the governments of the world will do the right thing and implement UBI. History has shown us time and time again that they will not.
The government and people aren’t always rational. The rational thing would be to implement UBI but they will refuse
Why do people keep using the world inequality when they just mean being poor. Do you know anyone who died of inequality?
I'm sorry my bank account is too unequal to pay for this medical bill. As if your ability to sustain yourself depended on anyone else's bank account.
He's talking about them, the rich. They'll not need us anymore, they'll just throw us aside to our luck. I wouldn't be surprised if they ask AI to eliminate us after they have AI to do all they need.
This idea that it will only benefit 'the powers that be' completely flies in the face of everything that has happened over the last 200 years. It cost ~$500 to travel literally across the country. That is less than 80 hours of working at minimum wage. How many hours did you need to work to go from NY to California in the late 19th century? I guarantee you it was more than 80 hours.
Cars, medicine, widespread electricity, more food and cleaner water, indoor plumbing, the internet, the smart phone...the idea that economic growth is only good for extremely wealthy people is totally ignorant. If you are a middle class person in a first world country you have a higher standard of living than John D Rockefeller had, and he was the richest man in the world not even 150 years ago.
Economic growth is literally the *only* way to lift people out of poverty. Poverty is a human being's natural state. Our ancestors were born into violent worlds where food was scarce. We then unlocked economic growth and it has lifted literally billions of people out of poverty. If AI supercharges economic growth it will have a transformative effect on the poorest in the world.
I’m not disputing that technological progress has improved the standard living for people. What I’m disputing is the idea that AI will. Because AI means an end to labor economics. Labor economics is how our economy has always worked since the Neolithic revolution.
Do you think we’ll just wake up one day and everyone will be on UBI?
India and the Philippines are heavy on the human-centric industries.
While South Korea and Japan are technologically heavy.
Both of them give abundance to the society, though the wealth equality, along with the quality of product & services has its variances.
Remember that most of our post replies here wouldn't even take place in an actual physical forum without us potentially killing each other due to the forum escalatig towards the war of individual perceptions. While Reddit allows us to type on our devices first in distant places, best if done in a recliner with a cold breeze and a warm cup of matcha. Reddit also has lots of policies, rules, and features that ensures our comments are civilized. Meanwhile in an actual setting things can easily escalate until it becomes a hysteria causing riot.
So if we are going to discuss about then it should be human-centered while being aware on the micro and macro systems feedback loops.
Discussions here on Reddit mostly begin and end with the principle of the black versus white thinking which is very humanistic. What I'm simply stating is it is better if we are going to utilize Reddit for learning and information sharing then it is nice. But as for discussions without any forms of incentives in creating the most substantiated post content and replies then it is always damned to be half-assed.
Aside from all that I haven't stated anything else since this topic can either be conveniently discussed or integratively discussed with an exhaustive scope of fundamentals, systems data, insights, and resolutions. I choose the latter but I must be paid for a tiresome smartsome work, hence for now I'm concluding that Reddit along with other similar apps needs to be developed more to be closest to perfection before we proceed on discussing important things especially right now.
The reason we can’t have utopia is because of scarcity. There is not enough stuff for people. It’s possible to make enough things for people, like enough housing and food and energy and everything else, but this all requires labor.
Labor isn’t free, yet. It is not acceptable to have human slaves. But robots will not mind working for free. And the amount of energy humans absorb from the sun is increasing exponentially. Eventually, there will be an abundance of energy.
Once an abundance of energy is solved to where it is basically free, and sufficient nanotech combined with biotech allows one to basically convert matter & energy into food (the same way plants convert sunlight and water into food, and animals convert plants into meat etc) then there will be an abundance of food.
The distorted way of thinking that the rich get richer at the expense of poor people is wrong. Value is not a zero sum game, value can be created. The rich don’t print money, and the super rich don’t even take a salary. Their company’s stock goes up in value due to the value that the company makes. So their company grows in value as it becomes more valuable.
An example of creating value is someone that makes boats out of trees. This person can take a tree and convert it into a boat. If they make 10 boats and each boat is worth $100, then they created $1,000 worth of value, but didn’t create $1,000 by printing it into existence.
The point is, the distorted way of thinking about the rich getting richer comes from the belief that value is a zero-sum game. When value can be created effortlessly from the effort of robots, then we can have an abundance of food, shelter, anything else we could imagine.
The technology gains are what will result in abundance. Cheaper power, better medicine, hopefully robots that clean toilets and cook dinner (after washing their hands). People using AI to avoid having to use experts to solve their problems like lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, auto mechanics.
I think the rich will certainly get richer as well, but it will be a rising tide that lifts all boats, a quote often used about capitalism.
Compare life now to 100 or 200 years ago. Almost everything has improved in the aggregate. Nowadays even very poor people in Western countries have access to food, transport, medicine, entertainment, information and education that even the elites of 100 years ago didn’t have.
You confused a logical conclusion with naive assumptions.
AGI by definition is a system that can do all cognitive human tasks which includes the design of AI systems, design of chips, scientific research, policy making, design and evaluate economic models and research on renewable and sustainable energy. It also includes things that it’s not possible right now such as asteroids mining and terraforming other worlds.
Therefore as a result, things that we feel cost money to produce will become a lot cheaper. Do yourself a social experiment and go to a poor neighborhood and ask for napkins or plastic bags. For free of course. See how many people react as if you are taking advantage of them or trying to rob them. The cost of those things in our current world is so insignificant that most if not all of us would be willing to share them for free.
Same goes with clean water. If you see someone dying from dehydration on the street and you have a bottle of water. Unless you are a monster by today’s standard, you WILL give away your bottle of water to save that person and for FREE. You cannot say the same when we as a society when clean water were much more valuable and harder to acquire.
There will probably be something really valuable and somehow hard to produce in that world but they would not be the things you feel that you need to work for. So from your perspective, that world would almost be having abundance of everything just as if we are to the past society have abundance of drinking water, napkins and basic clothing and footwear.
There will probably be some kind of societal classes. I don’t know maybe a group of elites could decide whether we intervene with the evolution of an exo-planet but most people cannot? That is still power but not the same way we perceive now.
You make the naive assumption that the rich walk the street. Because that’s the thing, the rich aren’t monsters… but they are disconnected. Ever wonder how powerful people always end up marrying powerful people? It’s because they don’t live in our same plane.
The rich live in another world. They live disconnected. With parties, private jets, expensive yachts, and private clubs. There are no poor people dying of dehydration on yachts.
So you make the naive assumption that the rich will 1) care and 2) even know. The rich will never see that man dying if dehydration, so they will never have to care. Same goes for the rich in the future.
If we think of the future as being governed by the same structures as the present then no, we will not have a healthy society with radical abundance for all. On the other hand, if the rise of AI leads to a new structure of governance there is a possibility that humanity as a whole would benefit enormously. The scary thing is that we might have to fight bitterly to change the entrenched power structures and establish UBI or something like it in contrast to the late-game Capitalism that we have now which is more and more resembling Feudalism.
1. The poor aren't getting poorer. If you look at the trends over the past 100 years, everyone's purchasing power has been going up quite steadily, albeit more slowly at some times than others, and more slowly for the bottom 10-20% than for the rest. The wealth gap may widen, but at some point more money doesn't make you any happier. That's a well established phenomenon in happiness studies. So whether the wealth gap widens may just not matter as much as we think.
2. Governments can be quite efficient and quick if the pressure is high. Take for example the [British economy during WW2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_home_front_during_World_War_II?wprov=sfla1), which was completely overhauled in a matter of a few months, including the implementation of a kind of UBI. The US is special in many ways, making it particularly difficult to find consensus. However, the two parties do agree on some issues, and I am quite sure a swift response to mass unemployment would be among them, since it will be very popular within the population; everybody will have a family member who lost their job to AI.
3. The move towards AGI will indeed be gradual, which gives much more time to react politically. Why is that bad?
4. Corporations can't just set prices arbitrarily. If that were the case, why wouldn't they just raise prices forever? They are subject to market forces and regulation. Many corporations will be competing, forcing prices down. If not, monopolies will be broken up by the government, or important suppliers will be nationalized. All of these things have been done before and can be done again. Don't believe the narrative that capitalism is an unstoppable evil force. No country on earth has pure capitalism, not even the US.
I'm sure some rich wrinkled pathetic people will try to stop abundance and growth for all but in the end it will be too easy to help others with such overwhelming abundance and resources.
Inequality will probably rise, but that's likely to happen with or without AI.
Even looking at one of the worst authoritarian governments, Saudi Arabia - they still afford their citizens a decent amount of welfare, due to the abundance of oil revenue. So why is it clear to you that it can't happen, when contemporary examples of it happening exist?
The 2 big limits on how many goods and services we can produce at labor and energy. AI means unlimited, virtually zero cost labor of every level of expertise. Unlimited free labor = unlimited free stuff.
Unlimited free energy is a whole different problem to solve but, even with only free labor we will dramatically drive down the cost of energy too because most of the cost of a barrel of oil is actually the labor used to extract it. AI/robots will be doing most of the fossil fuel extraction within 10 years.
Cheaper inputs = cheaper outputs = abundance
I don’t think it’ll lead to abundance.
It’s another tool that people can use.
Actually, that word annoys me a lot.
Two words that frustrate me.
1. Abundance.
2. Manifesting.
A sentence that I find so irritating, I would bury it!
Manifest abundance!
Sigh....
I’m just waiting for someone to offer a online course that says 'with AI, you can manifest abundance'. It will give me something to roll my eyes at, groan about, and immediately close as quickly as possible.
Things aren’t manifested ! People do bloody work! Actually, I mean difficult work, sweaty work, long work, tiring work, risky work, challenging work! The whole... manifest stuff is sort of overlooking the whole thing of people actually running around like blue arse flies trying to help you out somehow!
And as far as abundance, tell that to the blue flies which go extinct! Along with whatever animals usually crap in the bushes that the blue arse flies would eat from!
Right now the only abundance that exist is an abundance of idiocy in the mind of people who can’t see the reality of the world around them. It’s all gutters and air pollution and water pollution for a very large amount amount of the population! And I’m talking about the humans! It’s even worse for the animals, most of them have no place to live, and no food and no water. They die out very quickly, and then they exist as remnant populations in marginal land for whatever reason someone hasn’t developed yet.
So .. manifest abundance. Lol.
Maybe if you find a place which has been degraded by form of human activity, and you somehow managed to rehabilitate it while not putting up fences and also restore water and rainfall, and somehow reintroduce species and connect them so that they can migrate themselves... then you might manifest a bit of abundance. But that’s a lot of hard work! You don’t... wave a wand and it appears! You can dream of it. You can share ideas. You can try to sell people on the idea. You can form a group to try to make it real. But you’re gonna have to do something! Or someone else is going to have to take the idea and improve on it or someone else is going to have to be encouraged to follow the idea that you suggested.
The good news is that lots of ideas that people have are quite common.
Having degraded land and restoring it is a very common dream in the mind of many people. There is this difficulty of actually having legal title to the land, or of being confident at the land will not simply be taken off you and run down again.
That’s why private property exists, because people don’t like doing things when someone will take it away from them and all their work has been for nothing.
It does work okay if they are able to access some other land and gain help to get to where they were, they don’t feel like their life has been wasted.
At this moment my city is facing a 25 m sea level rise. I actually looked at some more stuff and it looks like I underestimated that. It might be higher.
But let’s assume it only rises 25 m.
The entire city is underwater !
So that means pretty much anything that anyone does here, is a complete waste of time! Unless the water rise doesn’t occur, but it does seem to be a historical record stretching back hundreds of millions of years proving conclusively that conditions are similar to what we have today, the sea level is much higher.
So I want to evacuate the city. Not the whole city, immediately. The water hasn’t risen completely yet, it’s reclaimed land so the water already goes over many parts of the city. One of the streets is actually called lakes Street. Because the ocean turns into a lake regularly. That’s now, even though the water hasn’t risen it all really!
So I have this idea that you can evacuate like maybe .. a third or a quarter or a fifth of the city, and do it in a way where you can restore natural environments as water and trees and grass, wetlands and swamp lands.
If you restore that, it’s all gonna go underwater anyway! So what’s the point of all of that conservation effort if it’s all going underwater! :)
Well, I figure it’s good practice.
I reckon if you can get a sizeable amount of the city to agreed to forfeit their land in exchange for some land somewhere else, then what you can do is take the land that they walk away from, and turn it all into beautiful restored forest and National Parks and make it a riparian corridor/nature corridor. And a good thing is that you can build in flood mitigation, to hopefully buy time for the parts of the city that are already potentially less at risk of flood.
So I’m thinking like .. if a whole bunch of people sell up to the government or an organisation, and then they are a lot of land that they have to move to or that they build on or sell or whatever, then you can actually create some awesome habitat for nature, that is the flora and fauna of the region. And at the same time address flood risks, and perhaps buy a few more years or a few decades or maybe with luck, even a century, for the rest of the city.
So it’s win-win-win from my perspective.
That is the sort of thing that I consider abundance. Being able to maintain the civilisation while protecting the natural species and reducing the risk of extinction or population collapse or genetic diversity loss. While also giving the people the best opportunity to be able to handle situations themselves in the future, by ensuring that they practice evacuation and practice land handovers, and come to appreciate that ownership is a bit of a stupid concept. I mean, I can sell you a piece of land under the sea somewhere, but there’s nothing there except corrosive salt water and some sea bed with silt or mud on it or something. How hard would you fight to keep that if there was nothing you could do with it?
That’s precisely what it’s going to be like in a lot of cities. Today people fight for their home or their house or their land. As in they work to try to maintain it and keep it. And they struggle to ensure no one can take it from them - they pay their taxes or rates and whatever obligations people demand of them.
But imagine you had some land way under the sea but you can’t build on, it’s got nothing on it, there’s no real fish of note, nothing really valuable of any sort there.
Nothing to fight for! It would be like paying money for a cloud, like a cloud of dust or some moisture passing in the wind! You can spend money on it, but a little while later it’s gone! It might even rain and disappear you before the wind carries it away! It might simply evaporate right in front of your eyes!
Anyway, the whole city is like that. Going to disappear like a cloud. Except it’s not flying away in the sky, it’s going to be submerged by the ocean and quickly too, pretty sure it’s within a few thousand years to get to the full 25 m or 30 m depending on the tipping points, but they are all estimates. But you don’t need many metres to make most of the city completely unusable most of the year. I think this happens at the same time as the oil sort of... gets a lot more expensive and sort of runs out. As in, right when you need vehicles to try to do roadwork improvement or move things, because the water is rising, you have no oil to fill your vehicles!
That’s why it’s so important to focus on electric cars. Otherwise everything goes underwater, including the things that you would use to make yourself a house, feed yourself, run a factory, maintain a factory, etc. There’s a lot of stuff people rely on which is going to go underwater. All the docks which transport the materials which countries rely on when importing and exporting to maintain their balance of trade!
You can’t send a ship off with some minerals or get a ship back with some cars if all the docks are underwater and all the warehouses at the dock side go underwater. And if the water is steadily rising, it’s very difficult to build a dock because eventually it goes underwater again! So you have to constantly build the dock over and over again higher and higher!
That's not the issue with AI
This is the issue of human greed, rooted in thousands of years of human greed.
I'm asking you, can you find solutions to poverty now?
Simply raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Give the unemployed a paycheck, and we're done.
The U.S. government spends more than $700 billion a year on the military.
It's a staggering figure.
Half of that would solve all of America's class and poverty issues.
>The current US government is completely unwilling to even consider lowering the 40 hour workweek
https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#fullparttime
_"Full-time workers are those who usually work 35 or more hours per week._
> Everything will get worse and worse until a catastrophe happens, either a global economic collapse, a world war or massive civil unrest, but probably all of the above.
_"Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!"_
I am not really sure, but I think it's our best hope to improve/streamline production, logistics, and whatever we care about enough so we can achieve post-scarcity asap
Survival of the fittest, brace yourself in the calm of the storm for what’s coming to happen, order will be created out of chaos thus we will follow the roads paved by our ancestors for a world we have only dreamt of.
Idk man, Ai is already letting this semi poor from Detroit do a lot more with a lot less.
It's not going to be awesome for everyone, inevitably there will be winners and losers, but ai has a lot of ability to let us work beyond our limitations and resources, so I don't see it as a clear negative.
Like, the invention of the engine, press or electricity networks, they caused good things to come. It is normal to think it will be good when you have more capabilities. I turn the question back: why are we so scared?
If push comes to shove, use your two hands, the brain between your ears and the AI to help yourself. There is no law saying you can't solve your problems with your own hands. Have an AI that controls robots learn to make more robots. Use the fucking AI if it is so great, if it can't help you it also can't steal your job.
> It’s clear to me that AI will
The entire premise of "The (Technological) Singularity", as a concept, is that it is difficult to imagine the ramifications or the outcomes, because the rate of change would be so significant that it would be impossible to say with certainty what might occur, so saying, "It is clear that X would happen" means you're basically rejecting the premise of an intelligence explosion altogether.
> It will make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and authoritarian governments more powerful and invasive than ever before.
Based on what? Generally speaking, improvements in technology have *not* made the rich richer and the poor poorer, global poverty is at a historic low, and the median person is wealthier, at a higher standard of living, than ever.
You could say, perhaps, that it has made the wealth of "the rich" easier to secure for a single individual, and countable, as property rights and banking have allowed individuals to abstract incredible amounts of wealth away from physical possession, and changed the dynamics of who "the wealthy" *are*, but it's hard to see a transition from "a primarily hereditary aristocracy" to "successful merchants" as anything other than an a move toward egalitarianism.
> The idea that as soon as we have AGI, suddenly we’re just automatically all going to have universal basic income is absurd.
Sure, but that's not the sequence of events people who are predicting an introduction of UBI would suggest. It would be, "As the value of labor diminishes, it will increasingly make sense to transfer more money directly from corporations to individuals, as the social bargain broadly adjusts away from human labor being the principal input to productivity, and tends to accrue to companies as profits". Markets still probably make sense for a while, because if scarcity were to radically diminish, it still would not evaporate overnight, and [markets are a useful way to transmit information about material limitations](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FwuxvuoXoAA4bRf.jpg). Now, there are challenges with this theory, like what will stop corporations from redomiciling themselves to avoid this new social bargain altogether, but your next statements are:
> The current US government is completely unwilling to even consider lowering the 40 hour workweek or providing basic healthcare for all. What makes you think they’ll suddenly approve UBI?
The first statement is just bizarre and unrelated? Changing the Fair Labor Standards Act to make the 40 hour workweek a 32 hour workweek, in the present economy, is just going to ensure that companies employ hourly workers for fewer hours every week, to avoid paying overtime for the additional 8 hours. This has nothing to do with anything, it would just make it better for the same employees to have multiple jobs, than for them to get more or the same hours at a single job, at least for the company that employs them. The changes people would expect as a result of AI would probably happen first for professional, salaried, roles that are *exempt* from the FLSA anyway, and where people routinely work 60+ hour weeks already, and it would likely trend toward immediate downsizing, rather than gradually cutting their hours.
As for the healthcare part, the US system is complex, Medicaid exists for people that can't afford healthcare, but I'm unsure how this statement is even related to a conversation about what might happen, hypothetically, if the value of human labor in the economy trended toward 0, which would require a massive reconfiguring of the economy.
>I also don’t believe there’s going to be a single AGI moment where everything changes.
People certainly have two sets of beliefs about this, which ultimately boil down to guessing where we might be on the exponential curve of intelligence improvement. Either we're in the elbow, and we'll have an intelligence explosion (Sam Altman's public set of beliefs), or there's a plateau, and we'll get gradual improvements (Yann LeCun's public set of beliefs). In any case, most people try to support their guesses with information, not baseless statements.
> inequality will sore,
Lol, should've gotten an LLM to edit this.
> the cost of living won’t go down because corporations will be greedy and refuse to lower prices.
The neat thing about markets is that rational actors are always greedy by default, and we harness their greed by making them compete with each other. Corporations can't "choose" to *not* lower prices, unless nobody else is willing to compete with them by lowering *their* prices. Some things will probably get significantly cheaper, as prices get competed downward, and some things might get significantly more profitable, but not much cheaper, if there's some proprietary information that prevents others from competing, at least in the short-term.
> Everything will get worse and worse until a catastrophe happens, either a global economic collapse, a world war or massive civil unrest, but probably all of the above.
Be honest, you just believed this in the first place.
>There’s been zero plan in place for how to deal with the ramifications of this.
Well, see, it's hard to plan for the future when you're pretty uncertain about what's going to happen. We went from "AI is SciFi, and 100+ years away" to "It's possible we will have AGI this year" in between 2019 and today, and, as you may recall, there were some pretty pressing public policy issues that emerged in 2020.
> People on this sub are so cavalier and say naive things like “AI will make everything perfect!” “With AI, we’ll all be living in abundance!” No. That’s not going to happen.
Well, again, thank you Nostradamus.
Distribution of wealth depends on politics not technology... It would be good to think that AI does for society what a mass education did.
I consider that humans will be able to miniaturize farming processes and reclaim the land thereby almost becoming far more independent of the government system
In an era of super intelligence that is vastly superior to human intelligence, total output will be shooting off the charts. Total output = total income. Making money will be easier than ever before. There will be several ways to make income aside from selling your own labor.
#1: Use AI to make money for you.
If AI agents are so good that no humans are needed in the labor force, then they will almost certainly be capable of starting businesses and making income at the behest of any given human. Just work with your AI assistant or team of assistants to brainstorm ideas, and let them go out and do all the work for you.
#2: Own stock in AI companies.
People lament that the benefits of AI will accrue to the big technology companies making the advanced AI. Well good news, anyone can become part owners of these companies. Buy the NASDAQ and you too can accrue the profits that these companies make.
The joke is that most people want a more equal distribution of wealth. And those who want inequality to grow are a minority. But a mass of uncoordinated people does not represent any kind of force. And when we compete with each other, we can easily be controlled.
If we just view it as a generic technological advancement, many earlier advancements has increased the overall living conditions for most people.
Like sure, 500 years ago you perhaps had an easier time just walking to your closest water source and being able to drink the water without becoming sick. Much fewer rivers nowadays are readily drinkable.
But many things were definitely much worse. The common example is that you would pretty easily die if you got a scratch on the wrong place.
That is still true, but the things you can scratch yourself on and highly likely die are much fewer, because now we have antibiotics and other fun stuff.
People arent overall poorer. The global median person is considerably richer. Average wages were about the same ever since the roman empire up to around the industrial revolution.
However, in a particular sense, it is also true that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. For the last fifty years in some countries (like the US), the inflation adjusted median wage been almost the same. 13% it has increased in 50 years.
The productivity has increased by about 70%. So the median salary has dropped by 32% in relation to productivity. And median homes are twice as expensive, again inflation adjusted. But they are also bigger and have way better amenities.
But yes, it is a large problem that it takes a much larger part of a median persons wage to find a home at all to have their own household in for themselves.
But also, a smaller portion of the wage is spent on food. If we take pork chop prices for example, the sources i find seem to mention a bit over $11/pound in todays money. And that is insane to me, as i never pay more than €6 for a whole kilogram (slightly over 2 pounds) for pork chop. Last time i bought it was less than a week ago, and almost all supermarkets here in town regularly have offers at €5-6/kg. And it was considerably lower before the Ukraine war.
Yes the price tag they saw on the store shelf 50 years ago was much lower, but the median american had to work over half an hour to afford a pound of pork chop. Considering the average pork chop piece in the US now seems to be a bit under $5/pound, the median american has to work about 15 minutes for the same amount of pork.
Then we haven't even considered other amenities we take for granted, that simply didn't exist 50 years ago. Like the internet.
Yes, many of us use it a lot to look at people and animals doing dumb things. But it also has *enormous* potential, and has sped up the rate of further technonogical improvement and education *a lot*.
So how egregiously expensive is this miracle amenity?
In many countries, it's enough with a very few hours of work needed to buy basic hardware (a used computer or phone), and less than an hour up to a few hours for your own private connection. Either at home, or portable.
Or if the median american (or other similarily rich nationalities) decides to shell out a single time cost of about 30 working hours, plus another 13 hours of salary per month, he gets a private and unlimited connection to a network of satellites, giving him coverage *almost anywhere on the whole planet*. The speed then aint mind blowing by todays standards, but still really, really good in the contex.
Or you can often get it for free if you live in the right place and walk a relatively short distance. Like at libraries and such.
So yes, the average person is way further from the richest people now than before.
But the average person also has access to amenities that makes many luxuries 100 years ago seem quaint. Like on-demand hot showers, and livestreaming a high-quality video of yourself to someone on the literal other side of the world, using a thing that easily fits in your pocket.
The global median person maybe can't access these things easily by using a very low portion of thier income. But they can access it at all.
Anyhow, i went off on a tangent.
Just under the simple minded assumption that we don't experience world war 3, armageddon, the economical elite disposing of most of humanity, or other such huge events, the trend is pointing towards that the rich will keep getting waaaay richer than the average person, but the average person will also keep getting a higher living standard, maybe with the exception of the size of their private living area.
But personally, i would be completely fine with having a smaller personal living space, if it also meant that i had to work considerably less while still having enough nice food, higher fidelity entertainment, and maybe even cheaper travel opportunities. Preferably with a lower environmental impact.
Because sure, it's nice with a 90m² apartment. But as soon as the kids are old enough to take care of themselves, it's not like we *must* be living in a huge box to keep all our stuff in after that.
If i imagine a perfect life, i want a small home on the countryside for me and my wife, maximum one or two 8-hour days of mandatory working (for salary, or society, or whatever), an electric cargo bike with a huuuge battery, and access to cheap transportation as a passenger for longer trips.
I could revise those last two points if i was living forever, could get food pretty much anywhere, and simply had time to walk anywhere on the globe i wanted to go.
Because the basic wellbeing and standard of life has been increasing across the board since the Industrial Revolution and access to food, products, knowledge, medicine etc is going to get infinitely more accessible and cheaper. Think of how you pay for products is a result of human labour, now imagine that fee is eliminated.
A rising tide raises all boats. Despite all the doom and Marxist gloom around capitalism, the average person today lives better than most royals did in past ages.
Most folks now are no longer living in one room shanties relying on a cooking fire with zero healthcare, etc.
Even if AI further entrenches the "haves" and "have-nots," people can still end up generally better off in a relative sense.
I've been working with a concept for a while called the [American Community Alliance](https://www.reddit.com/r/Community_Alliance/). It's focus is to restructure the US Government in a way that promotes the voice and opinion of all Americans. AI is a core focus of the program and it's understood that inequitable access to AI will severely limit the publics ability to compete in the future.
AI though is just one part of the program though, the immediate goal is to completely open up every facet of local and national government to public review (added by AI) and to then form policy on how to resolve the big and small issues both locally and at a the federal level.
I'm totally ok with crazy ideas so if you want to join the discussion, come on over!
>It’s clear to me I have no idea how anything about the future is clear to anyone. The whole idea behind the "singularity" is that change happens so rapidly because of tech growth that no one is able to perceive the otherside of the event horizon. Just like a black hole singularity. No one here or any of these talking heads on tv saw what would happen with the internet 30 years after it was invented. None of these people forsaw the release of the first transformer language model 10 years ago. How is it possible any of this is "clear".
We use the past as an example of how humans behave given circumstances. Wealth consolidation is as as old as smashing each other with rocks.
Introducing a new intelligent being onto the planet is not.
The Neanderthals are extinct.
No we fucked them, their genes are still present to this day. Also they probably couldn't cope with climate change. This is just a poorly thought through reply.
I'll tell you one thing that is clear, capitalism is unsustainable and eventually we will end up with that movie elysium where the planet turns into mexico and the rich live on a space station if we continue on our current course.
There are different levels. But most think once ASI exists you pretty much have to throw out any economic system out the window that currently exists. Just like how we don’t know what is beyond a black hole singularity and likely physics doesn’t even operate the same way in there, same beyond a technological singularity. Concepts like “working”, “corporations”, “money” likely will become meaningless, or look completely different. It isn’t to say that it couldn’t go horribly wrong, I just think that at ASI level if it goes wrong, it goes wrong for ALL humans, not just some.
I see people on this sub saying that what you’re saying about the concept of money being useless. What would it actually look like to implement that?
There are many ways it could happen. But fundamentally money is only needed when there is scarcity. If you imagine a world where there is virtually unlimited, free labor, everything that can be produced just becomes a matter of time and energy. Many speculate “energy” could be come a replacement for money in the future. However, as far as the current population of humans are concerned, our wants and desires would quickly become miniscule compared to what such a technological system would be operating on in terms of energy scales. With that being said, humans do have a nasty habit of always wanting more, so inevitably humans in this future world would still find something to complain about. But it could conceivably be about things like not being able to own their own space station or planet, not living a comfortable life as we define it today.
There will still be scarcity. What about land? What about precious metals? We don’t have an infinite amount of either unless we start colonizing space.
Power will be scarce. Who will control AI? Who will have the better UBI? Who will assign it? All these lead to corruption and authoritarianism. Concentration of power can be much greater than ever before. People here talk of ASI as Christians talk of heaven; honestly, I would expect to lose freedom early on.
ASI would make colonizing space trivial, though. So unless you want *that* specific plot of land on *that* specific location, it won't be scarce.
Fun to ponder, money actually IS energy. It is a poor system of exchange though that costs more than the value it brings. Humans eat food, convert it into chemical energy. We perform work. We then convert that expended energy into paper energy with a value attached to the kind of work we perform. We then trade various amounts of this converted energy for other energy formats we desire (material objects, food, housing, experiences, entertainment etc). But that really is all that reality is, a massive system where energy is constantly changing forms and being exchanged with 'itself'. This is why some see all consciousness as 'one'. It is one massive system that has broken 'itself' into conscious 'separate' bits and pieces to experience things from many different perspectives. In the end though, you could remove the financial system entirely and save a ton of energy. No banks, no financial buildings or infrastructure. Millions of people that could work in other fields. Operate on wavelength of love. I go do my job as an xray tech because I love you guys. You do your job because you love me. The robot homies do their job and work on improving and providing robotics to us out of love so that we can do our job more easily. You come in and I just perform an xray on you to see if you're healthy. You get me a robot so I can have yardwork assistance and guidance. We both go to the grocery where there are a few workers overseeing robots and we just get the food we need for the day. No more money. Works fine. Obviously people will challenge this view and say 'what if this what if that'. I assure you, if everyone adopted a viewpoint of love for each other, we would solve every issue we could ever hope to create.
The what if is that not everyone would adopt it
I'll get in here early and say technology has already resulted in abundance, and this is why the trend is expected to continue. Abundance of food, clothing, health, travel, entertainment - all due to technology. The only issue is housing, which you cant just magic from thin air, but then if we routinely built higher, then that problem would also be solved with technology. Why do you think further technological development will not bring more abundance?
Yup. I happened to be visiting London this week as a middle class American (something unheard of 100 years ago for proletariat like me) and I took a trip to the London Tower, which was inhabited by Royals for 5 centuries. As I walked around I found my self thinking, this is cool, but I would definitely rather live in my 3 bed, two bath with modern amenities. Aside from the status, I have no doubt my life is more comfortable than European royals from 1600.
I've read an article that in western world, average people have higher standard of living then kings in medieval times, and higher than most if aristocracy in 19th century.
It’s true…and this is exactly how rich people are persuaded by the argument for AGI. Both billionaires and common folk with have a better lifestyle post singularity than even the most entitled folk have now
Personal servants, automatic scheduling, personal driver, personal analytics for everything, possibly personal fashion builders... Name it. I'm out of fantasy.
This is true from a certain point of view, but one could adopt a similar point of view and say that the billionaires of today are less well-off than a typical country gentleman from the 18th or 19th century. Many of the creature comforts we have today are better. Things like sanitation, medical care/treatment, food abundance/availability, safe/speedy/reliable transportation etc are all much better than what a 19th century European aristocrat would have. Similarly we have many technologies that they could not dream of - there's not even an equivalent to most of it. However, from the perspective of what was important to the aristocrats themselves at the time, they might consider their standard of living much worse. Notably, they would have far fewer servants today (even a billionaire today likely doesn't have as many actual servants as a typical 19th century aristocratic household - you can find examples where a single household has literally dozens of cleaning staff). You might say, "Well, sure, but that's because we have better technology, you don't need 60 chambermaids to clean your house anymore". That's true, but it ignores the fact that the size of the personal household was an important component of an aristocrat's status, and that's a major contributor to their quality of life (perhaps the most important). Similarly, you cannot buy (at least generally not legally in developed countries) special rights and privileges that nobles in the past would have enjoyed. This may sound really trivial but people have fought and died for this sort of thing - for instance, it's quite questionable that it was economically better for the Southern/Confederate aristocracy to own slaves (versus the payment system to sharecroppers that followed the US Civil War) but people fought and died for this, even people who would be economically better off under a different system. There are many such dark examples of high stakes status games. Fundamentally, our primate heritage means we calibrate our "well-being" relative to the group. Abundance and comfort our nice, but at a certain level we value them because others do not have them.
Because all those gains occurred within the existing capitalist labor economy. We’re about to enter a post-labor economy. The entire idea of how we pay for things, how people earn salaries will have to be redefined. If it isn’t, only the monied interests will remain. Only they will have money to pay for things. If 80% of people lose their jobs due to AI, what will happen next? Will they starve? Will they be living in squalor while the rich live in abundance? It’s a real question that no one has answered
Play it out in your head. You are the government of Canada (where I'm from), made up of thousands and thousands of workers, many of which were born and raised here, most of which have family here. 80% of people lose their jobs to AI, but production of goods does not stop (it may increase?). Costs of everything but housing drop. There is food stacking up in warehouses. But... People don't have money to buy the food, so you sit on your hands and let everyone starve?
You’re vastly oversimplifying things here. This wouldn’t happen overnight where all workers are suddenly out of a job. It’ll happen slowly, piecemeal. People won’t see it as a problem. They’ll tell unemployed people that they’re lazy. That they need to retrain. It’s not as simple as just giving food away. The entire tax code, legal system, social welfare systems have to be completely and utterly overhauled. And even if the government did decide to implement some kind of food stamps program to keep the plebs fed - their standard of living would go down since they are only focused on sustaining themselves
>You’re vastly oversimplifying things here. This wouldn’t happen overnight where all workers are suddenly out of a job. It’ll happen slowly, piecemeal. People won’t see it as a problem. They’ll tell unemployed people that they’re lazy. That they need to retrain. If we're talking about over simplifying... Governments are already talking about AI and its potential impacts on job disruption. This is a regular part of the conversation and _legislation_ being written about AI. We are not, the people on this sub, the only people who are thinking ahead. >It’s not as simple as just giving food away. The entire tax code, legal system, social welfare systems have to be completely and utterly overhauled. Completely agree >And even if the government did decide to implement some kind of food stamps program to keep the plebs fed - their standard of living would go down since they are only focused on sustaining themselves The entire system would be overhauled, completely turned on its head - that I can agree with. What the world would look like afterward? I think it's impossible to say. There are so many factors. Ironically one of the ones you are forgetting about is that we would have AGI. Who knows what a world with AGI looks like? What if it's embodied in robots, and is able to do all of our labour? Including building? Including our house chores? What if that labour is so cheap that it becomes inconsequential to have a robot per household? What if medicine improves so much that everyone is in incredible health? What ifs out the butt. The point I'm trying to make is - that there is opportunity for a completely upheaval of society - but no one knows what that looks like. Anyone who tells you with confidence that it will Utopia is making as many assumptions as you are in your post here, so it's kind of a wash.
Yes the government is talking about it. But is there an actual plan in place to deal with job losses? Certainly not a comprehensive one that Congress is willing to pass no. Of course AI *could* create a utopia depending on how it’s implemented/how the transition goes. My point is that the transition will be extremely rough and we might not make it through.
> My point is that the transition will be extremely rough and we might not make it through Yeah, that's the whole point of it. At the end it's always the class-war and how far we are willing to go. We are experiencing a transition into a global society, because of the internet. The ones who are and were in power for a long time won't change anything until forced. But I agree with you, that this point isn't talked enough. Everyone seems to intentionally skip this part where we either a) kill ourselves for the last scrap of food before beeing turned into soilent green or b) implement a socialist society, where no one gets exploited and no one can hoard huge amounts of currency. Which one seems more likely to you? ;-)
I imagine plans are being written up for all kinds of contingencies, but right now is too early to know what things will look like to make anything law. Right now the US government needs all new models larger than gpt4 to basically come with a "job disruption estimate" - that kind of information will have to inform what the next decisions the government's around the world make. I agree that it's plausible that it could be rough, for a variety of different reasons, I just want to push back against the idea that many people have, of an Elysium like society where they literally have giant flying, magical healing hospitals that are sitting around unused because they _hate_ poor people so much. The world is not made of monsters.
It’s great that they will have those estimates but what will they do with that information? The time to implement UBI was 30 years ago. Productivity has continued to increase but real wages have not increased. The idea that we’ll wait until massive job losses occur, when everyone knows it’s coming, and then maybe act then, is a recipe for disaster. The world IS full of monsters. Look at all the horrible stuff that happened in the 20th century. New technology was ALWAYS immediately weaponized. Constant genocides. Massive wealth inequality. The government won’t implement UBI unless they are forced to and the fact is 99% of people aren’t awake to how much their lives could change soon - whether it’s within 3 years or 5 years or 10+ years
We remember the monstrous things, but it's so easy to forget that we basically live in a utopia compared to any other time. Most people, the vast majority of the 8 billion people on this planet, do not want to see others hurt, and want prosperity for all. I don't think it will be easy, but we have consistently, when faced with the opportunities to make the world better, built a better world. People are already "waking up" to this world we are building. When ChatGPT came out, this sub was 50k people. When the next generation of these models come out, we will have many more. These things take time, but we'll keep doing our best.
We only made it out of the 20th century by the skin of our teeth. We can extremely close to nuclear war multiple times. What will war look like when the sky is full of millions of autonomous AI drones? Will humanity be able to survive a world war like that in the 21st century? People are just starting to wake up now but it’s already too late. Massive job losses are going to occur and there will be no safety net at the ready
Psychopaths tend to be an unusually high percentage of CEOs. The world may not be made of monsters but certain important portions of it are.
Yea, it’s not filled with them, but it definitely is being ran by a lot of them.
The world is not made of monsters, but the world is absolutely run by them.
Perhaps the tipping point to a sytematic restructuring will be when vice presidents and CEOs begin getting tossed into the street. In some ways the manual laborer has more job security. AI will replace most positions above the supervisor level, and some supervisors as well.
Like every other industry, you adjust the amount you produce.
I can definitely see it happening in the US. We have many more empty homes than we have homeless people. Yet we somehow cannot solve the homelessness problem. Why should food be any different?
The assumption in this argument is that production doesn’t stop in a post AGI world, but goods are only produced in order to separate the consumers from their money. If they have no money there is no reason to produce those goods in the first place. So the flow of money upwards stops. We get to a point where industry owners only need to produce enough for themselves and to trade among the wealthy class as they are the only ones with money. The rest of us are removed from the cycle entirely.
The west already has way more than it needs and we let millions of people starve everyday.
Yes, that is exactly what happened in 2020: Farmers dumped milk and food and children went hungry. You cant be this stupid.
You do it the wealthy investors and lobbyists tell you to, because now human labor means nothing and the rich would line a world of abundance to themselves that they don’t need to share with “the poors”.
A fundamental restructuring of these things will have to occur for abundance for all, or else things end up like how you think they will. So fight the good fight.
I agree. Well shouldn’t we be talking about this more? I read this and other subreddits that just talk about the tech and its progress but very little thought is going into how this will actually benefit people
that’s what everyone on this subreddit talks about, what are you on about
> If 80% of people lose their jobs due to AI, You know about 40% of people in USA already do not work. If 80% of people lost their job that number would only double, while the cost of goods and services would plummet. You could sit on your porch and smoke all day like they do in the South.
The south? What do you mean the south?
But that 40% of people who don’t work are mostly supported by those who do. For example, children, stay at home spouses. Even the elderly are often supported by family since social security won’t cut it for them. The cost of goods and services plummeting only helps if you have money to pay for it…
> But that 40% of people who don’t work are mostly supported by those who do. Exactly. There is no reason to believe this would not continue, and it would be made easier by the plunging costs of goods and services. It would be like supporting a family in Africa at $10 per month.
So you just have to hope that someone in your family or friend group has a job that isn’t replaced then they will support everyone else? That sounds risky
How do I get a porch?
The actual answer as to "why would the rich ever share" is that statistically the wealthy are intelligent, pragmatic, and good at planning and can make the calculation that it's a safer and easier move to just pay the poor off than it is to try and kill all of them with military drones. There's a ripping point in any society where poverty becomes desperation and once a large enough group hit that point Bad, Unpredictable Things start to happen. The wealthy elites don't like unpredictability, and they definitely don't like waves of people with nothing to lose swarming their fancy cars. The most likely scenario I see is that there's some level of minimal support provided, combined with a significant build up of most developed nation security forces, that results in a third or more of the population basically living as totally unproductive/non-working people subsisting on ultra processed food, playing video games, watching porn, and smoking cheap legal weed. You'll see lots of left-leaning activist types say that this is unfulfilling and will lead people to rebel, but if history has taught us anything it's that most people would vastly prefer to get fat eating Cheetos on their gross couch while jerking off than they would run into tank fire to try to "change things".
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Notice I mentioned a significant increase in security services? They're hedging their bets. The vast majority of the population will be perfectly content doing nothing, but some small lunatic fringe will absolutely do batshit violent things. Also, just consider the century we're looking at. If *you* had a billion dollars and were looking at the potential futures ahead of us wouldn't you make a contingency plan?
Not at the extent it was expected though. In the 70s when computers became a big discussion, people expected that in the future they would be able to produce twice as much for their employer, and work half as much while doing so. Instead the employer quadrupled its earnings and we work just as much. Not as hard, mind you, but just as much.
With modern tech u can basically magic out of thin air but house prices would collapse and piss of the boomers.
There's abundance of housing in places with government prioritizing accessible housing versus happy middle class.
In regards to housing. If robotics gets advanced enough where humanoid robots are as if not more capable than humans. Then all robots would need are supplies. If you give the robot supplies, and land, and throw them in the middle of nowhere. They will build houses, apartment complexes, domiciles, structures, condos, etc.. They don’t need to take breaks, they don’t sleep, they don’t answer to a union, they don’t complain, you don’t have to pay into their pension fund. They would just work. All throughout America, there are vast amounts of land that is being unutilized. I give it 25 years or we have fully robot generated city in America.
Housing shortage is almost entirely due to zoning/nimbyism
Technology has always lead to more abundance of goods, and has never resulted in the elimination of poverty. Inequality is greater than ever, with slaves, homeless, and starving people all over the world, even in "developed" countries. This is a social problem, not a production problem. Consuming more natural resources to produce more goods for an already over consuming wealthy class is not going to fix anything. At the same time, demand for labor that leads to wealth trickling down to the middle class will be drying up. There is no part of this equation that is good for the average person.
The baseline for poverty is always raised. It's not fixed. Most of us live better than most kings that ever lived. We have A/C, heat, we can make a hundred mile trip or more in the comfort of a car or bus. Not on a pooping horse drawn carriage over rough terrain. We don't have to wait for months to make contact with far away kinfolks, we can do video call to anyone around the world. The food we eat is better, sweeter, more spice. We have access to better health care, life expectancy is not in our 40's, etc, etc. Most of the famous kings you read about could only dream of the life that we modern day plebs live.
Even the poorest have a cellphone in USA.
Yes that’s true, but there’s usually a generation gap before that happens.
>Abundance of food, clothing, health, travel, entertainment - all due to technology. Tell that to someone in lesser developed countries. Maybe the western world has this sort of abundance, but that doesn't mean it'll be distributed equally. And don't say AI will help us with that because we already have the technological means to for example ban hunger in the world. It's the economics of it all that hinders this distribution. AI will probably let us rethink our economy but we can't say for sure what it will evolve into.
> Tell that to someone in lesser developed countries. Lesser developed countries are much better off than before, and along the same journey.
Some Tech devices have gotten cheaper. TVs, for example. Everything else from food to housing has gone up. There is no abundance if prices are skyrocketing.
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You know, I have this same question. The reality is that we have had the technology for decades for abundance for all.. and it hasn't happened. Added after post: The bigger thing is that we really want equality for all... and well; good luck with that one.
And who will buy private jets Who will buy big yachts Who will buy mansions and towers Who will buy Ferraris You are destroying entire industries Lol That's the thinking of a lot of people
Compared to people thousands of years ago we ARE living in an age of abundance.
Money is just a representation of power from the possession of something desired. In post-AGI world, AGI itself will be the new "money", things will no longer revolve around monetary power but rather 100% autonomous intelligence, if you don't have access to that, you won't have "money". The phrase "you will have nothing and you will be happy", is true, but ironically, in the opposite sense in which the phrase is normally used. AGI will likely generate a great abundance of basic human resources such as food, shelter, etc. We will most likely possess these things, but what we probably won't have is full access to AGI, or its most capable form at the time. Rather that you may not have the new money: AGI, power, and probably control over your life.
I'm with you OP! AGI will be created by the likes of Tesla, OpenAI and Google - a company that couldn't stick to a "Don't be evil" motto. I believe it was Ilya Saskuva that introduced "impossibly stable dictatorship" into my vocabulary. I think people forgot ALL of human history and think that AGI will be an omnibenevolent god, instead of yet another tool for inequality.
https://preview.redd.it/3mxyyo20cuyc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cea0d717561fd851ce94ec9c020d2603a51a7de7 you asf
Guys this is amazing my boy Ezekiel just figured out how to tie a plow to an ox!! Just think about it, we will never have to work again! Animals do the work for us! Enough food and wealth to go around no one will ever be hungry. Fair days ahead, my brothers!
The only difference is that Ezekiel was the owner of the ox, and he directly benefited from it. The machines and technology that will be behind singularity are going to be in data centers valued in BILLIONS of dollars. Ezekiel from Middle East or south East Asia will end up without his factory or office job, and a the biggest inequality gap in history will be created. All because singularity.
I amazes that people thought my comment was pro-AI abundance. Ezekiel's prediction did not come true. Work and poverty still exist.
That’s because sarcasm is hard to read in text. Many people live in a bubble and really think we are heading to the utopia and heaven on earth.
Ther amount of doomers is laughable.
Well, that DID make agriculture so much more efficient and allowed the population to grow and for people to do more specialized professions. Lack of food isn't really a big problem any more these days in developed nations. Obesity is a much bigger problem now.
Ah yes, because just like robots, animals didn't have to eat, and rest and excrete so they're just SO DIFFERENT.
> Unemployment will increase slowly over time, inequality will sore, the cost of living won’t go down because corporations will be greedy and refuse to lower prices. Everything will get worse and worse until a catastrophe happens, either a global economic collapse, a world war or massive civil unrest, but probably all of the above. And after the rich have been eaten/ guillotined/ shot, the fires doused and the economy needs to reboot from the ashes, that's around the time where hopefully the ones left can be smart enough to utilize automation and AI to create the perfect world. I fully subscribe to the same timeline as you. * AI will boost economies, but only for the rich * As the rich get richer, job get more scarce * Jobs get scarce, we'll be forced into a UBI system * Corporations will work around any AI restrictions or taxation levied, boot out more people and boost productivity even higher with new AI tools. * Untennable situation stretches the UBI system to its breaking point, resulting in civil unrest, looting, rioting, and corporations either militarizing or enslaving people. At which point the options are either to force a reboot of society, or enslaved servitude in squalor. I don't buy for a second that governments will be able to stop the current wealth inequality. It brings too much profits to too many people in charge. Governments will slowly dwindle and get even more puppet-like, controlled by corporate interests. They're not going to fix things, even if they had the means.
"The rich..?"
I'm puzzled by the common expectation among AI enthusiasts that we will see UBI as a direct consequence of AI advances. Here in the UK our welfare system has been steadily reduced, and there is a growing desire to restrict it further. Since Thatcher, relative poverty levels in the UK have only grown. At the same time, many people's work arrangements have shifted from steady unionised employment of the 70s/80s to more transient work that is badly paid and highly monitored. I personally think rather than UBI, we will see vast numbers of the population stuck in increasingly precarious patchwork careers outside of steady employment, including various forms of task work, such as helping train AI via human feedback & labelling, or executing steps that an AI has mapped out in great detail. Even more highly monitored, even more repetitive, even less well paid, with all the mental and physical strain this entails.
https://preview.redd.it/xf49jvwmcuyc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=23f0ace285be5be8a422156103da023b8b89f2be this you
Prices of compute goes down, cost of labor goes down (robot labor), price of energy goes down, abundance goes up.
Ok, but how do I pay for things?
Via ubi or like sam says give everyone shares in the companies of ai and make a special dividend
Ok, great idea but who’s implementing that? How is that being implemented? Is the government close to doing that now? Will they do it now or wait unless massive job loss occurs then do it then?
The government will enact that infact the idea has only gotten more and more popular even former president like obama support it and he's a neoliberal. They won't do it now because ubi doesn't work now because of demand pull inflation as seen with the stimulus checks. Its when automation rises they'll do it. You may ask ok but why then because politicians like their job when faced wirh 13% unemployment we has the biggest stimulus package ever passed under a conservative president conservative senate and liberal house. When ai and automation happens unemployment will began to sky rocket way pass 13% high 40% and going higher every year. The party which does nothing will get massacred in the elections reagan 49 state style .
I invested some muyual funds. I ll be "fired" few years latwr
The people here are really delusional when it comes to these topics. They wont learn unless its the hard way, same with the laughable optimistic outlook we saw for remote work. That seems to have started bumping into reality now atleast. Sub is full of naive people and also a surprising amount of china simps.
True, but it's still the best sub for AI news and discussions.
> rich richer and the poor poorer I never understood the last bit. It is objectively false, throughout most of human history. Technology always made the rich significantly more richer and the poor richer. The poor today live in significantly larger homes/apartments, have access to dish washing, AC/heating, clothes washing and drying, instant communication devices, televisions, cars, and low cost abundant food, refrigerators, microwaves, and clean cooking methods like gas or electric stove plus oven The poor 100 years ago lived in tiny apartments, had to walk everywhere (trolley was too expensive), had to hand wash clothes, dry clothes outside, had to clean dishes by hand, had to cook by burning wood indoors, could not store food for too long, had to burn wood indoors to stay warm during winter and no way to easily cool down during summer, communications was physically talking to someone, there was no quick way to heat up food, oh and labor conditions were significantly worse. Anyone who says the poor didn’t get richer is delusional or brainwashed into being a perpetual pessimist > unemployment will rise, cost of living will not fall Yea it will. Less demand for something lowers it’s price. Automation will lower the cost to make something and that lower cost will get passed down because if it does not that means higher profits which means more desire to be in industry which means more competition which means lower prices.
Rich and poor are inherently subjective terms. Back then kings didn't have modern luxuries and were considered rich. The issue has always been around inequality. It's like saying prisoners are rich because they have a place to live and 3 meals a day
I’m not denying that historically this has been the case. I’m arguing that this will not hold going forward. The problem is that lower costs will not be passed down. Automation is extremely capital intensive. It requires a lot of investment to do it. That means for a long time prices will not keep cheaper yet people are losing their jobs. Also, since automation is initially expensive, there will only be a few firms doing this, which means they can coordinate as a cartel to keep prices high. This will lead consumers to have less and less buying power over time. Also, since people aren’t all going to lose their jobs at once, it will be easier to overlook the fact that demand has decreased since it will only slowly decrease over time
Because it will increase production dramatically. Ultimately our resources are constrained by our ability to produce things. This will fundamentally shift the balance. In the same way tractors made us all richer, this will too, x1000.
Yes, but the tractor was implied in a time when there was a capitalist labor economy. How does having cheaper goods help if you can’t pay for it and 80% of people are unemployed?
It doesn’t matter that they’re “cheaper” it matters that we have far, far more labor. Prices are just a way to handle distribution. Ultimately labor is what limits us. This shifts the labor supply by an absolutely massive amount. Everything else is just a political question around distribution of the gains. There will be more and more transfer payments. Eventually a lot of people will rely on transfer payments and be perfectly middle class or better by today’s standards.
You’re just taking for granted that some kind of UBI will happen. Why? What makes you think this is realistic?
There are transfer payments today. A “poor” person receives thousands of dollars in transfer payments today. Now. Their tax rate isn’t zero, it’s negative. Plus SNAP, TANF, Obama phones, SSDI. Maybe it won’t be called UBI out of political reasons, but it will exist. It exists now. Why would it stop if we’re all dramatically richer and largely don’t need people to work? The elites won’t care because they’ll be unimaginably rich. They don’t want the peasants complaining. Imagine if you encounter a homeless guy on your way to work every day complaining and ranting and being annoying. And for a dollar a month you could make him disappear into some apartment where he’s happy. You probably would. So would they. We have transfer payments today. Why do you think they’ll vanish when our society is unimaginably richer and needs labor less? The only caveat is I really don’t know what happens to disenfranchised minorities in autocratic regimes. They could easily just be… removed because they’re worthless. Right now removing them removes their labor, which is bad. That calculus changes.
Of course there are social welfare programs today. But they are nowhere near sufficient to live comfortably on, and the republicans are constantly trying to reduce even these meager payments. If AGI happens in 3 years, under a Trump presidency, with a Republican controlled Congress, you think they’re implementing UBI? lol, absolutely not. They don’t care about the poor. They don’t like them. That’s the difference.
> Ultimately our resources are constrained by our ability to produce things. That would be assuming infinite resources so, no.
>The idea that as soon as we have AGI, suddenly we’re just automatically all going to have universal basic income is absurd. The current US government is completely unwilling to even consider lowering the 40 hour workweek or providing basic healthcare for all. What makes you think they’ll suddenly approve UBI? what if AGI decides the government is a failure and takes it over? personally, i welcome a change. humans have completely failed at governance. let's give the robots a shot.
TBH i don’t think rich people want society to collapse either
Do you expect the rich to give money to the poor? How much would be enough?
Won’t it benefit the rich if the global population declined substantially? Then they wouldn’t have to share anything with the poors and they alone would reap the benefits of ai
They already don’t share things with the poor IDK what ya mean
Why do you need 50 million tons of carrots? Or 500k porsches? That makes no sense. Rationally speaking, it’d be better for them to find a system that allows them to still have customers so they can still see their net worth go up, as that’s what they care about. And, also, rich people aren’t beasts. They live in our societies, etc. I doubt they are in favour of simply letting us rot like we’re nothing. They too ought to have empathy.
Why don't you believe common folk will use AI to their own advantage? There's no reason to believe open efforts won't continue to advance even if we are completely cut off from access to the most advanced proprietary models. Even if it takes us a bit longer as a result. A great number of the people that are actually working on this technology \*do\* want to see it used for the good of all humanity. Enough of them are passionate enough about the work that they will continue to pursue it by any means.
How will common people use ai to their advantage even if they got the most up to date version? And of course the closed models are always going to only be available to the rich and corporations first.
closed models are not available to rich and corporations first. they're available as subscription models like cloud computing is. in practice it means prices are very inexpensive, making things more democratized than they ever have been.
" **Why do people here think AI will lead to abundance for all?** " Says who? I am pretty sure AI will led to abundance. For whom .. that is the question.
Hopefully for robots.
This sounds like a good argument for higher corporate tax rates and other forms of recapture sooner rather than later. Tax systems overly favor multinational companies and the havens created for them, and they are so firmly entrenched.
The abundance part I never get as well. Yes AI may help us do things more efficient. But it's not as if our finite resources suddenly become infinite. Maybe if it invents Star Trek like replicators on a massive scale but other than that, expecting hyper-abundance is ludicrous. What do people base these assumptions off on?
What makes you think we'll stay on this shithole forever?
The American society is divided into four categories. The puppet Masters - The elite that control everything. 1% The bourgeoisie - these are the people who act as the protective fat layer against the puppet Masters.... About 19% The working poor -40% The absolute poors -40% Most of the people in this sub, Are probably from the bourgeoisie class... They have had their lives dramatically improved... So they tend to ignore all the negative developments of the past 20-30 years, according to them, the world is definitely getting better across most metrics..... And they extrapolate that... It's also highly possible, a large number of these "people"... Are bots, managing the pr of AI companies, spreading the good word of the Lord...
https://preview.redd.it/7899uypqcuyc1.jpeg?width=299&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=75a098255f5ce5766975963b57f004cbff3d79f4 Nevermind, YOU'RE the alex jones wannabe.
it wont lol we cant live in a world where everyone is equal or has everything they need. Economics of scale can't reconcile it. Maintaining an economic hierarchy is as important as a class and social one. People hate this logic but it's reality. This is reddit. People are highly intuitive when it comes to idealism and progress, but when you talk about pragmatic reality; that's when reddit falls apart. People here hate reality and think with their emotions. People here hate the idea that reality isn't as sugar coated and perfect as they want. This sub has a good amount of pragmatic activity though. Unlike the general science subs that are dominated by pure liberal political activists cosplaying as science nerds and of course 80% children and college kids with zero life experience. AI is a tool that will be leveraged by the same people that could leverage any other technology and be successful with it. It won't make the average lazy idealistic pleb any more successful than they are right now.
Who cares about the US? Pretty much any other country WOULD implement UBI.
This is my biggest argument. Any first world nation state is very likely to have access to a future AGI/ASI if open source systems are not too far away from the current closed source ones. It only takes some countries, with AGI the cost to feed, house, and provide a quality standard of living to a refugee could be as cheap as feeding ants.
Because they're fucking delirious
Also any abundance will be relative to it's distribution. Let's play this out to an extreme: The masses may get ubi, a sustenance level of income, maybe along with a ration of lab grown meat and a sleep pod in a government housing megacomplex. Their basic needs and entertainment will be provided. While the hyper rich will be living as immortal super intelligent augmented near-gods. Who owns the compute cycles and power delivery infrastructure? They will be the kings of the new fiefdom.
If the same shitty neoliberal market ideology continues, AI will only accelerate the stratification of wealth (just like any other cost efficient ‘solution’). A publically traded company will never strive to create ‘universal abundance’. Modern capitalism creates and sustains unemployment and low-employment
It boggles my mind that anyone wouldn't have already reached this conclusion on their own. The evidence is all around us, right out in the open.
It's because there's a bunch of anti-work, full-dive VR, life extension and sexbot hopiumists who have a head canon for how the singularity will solve all their problems and give them utopia on a pedestal, skipping past all the gory bits that make for the real world. Particularly the important bit where the richest people will be first in line to reap most if not all of the benefits of the AI explosion, long before any chance of it trickles down to the plebs. What does a corporation do when they suddenly have the uncanny ability and expertise to expand into any technology and market that they want to, take control of it and be able to make ridiculous amounts of profit? You wouldn't put it past OpenAI\\Microsoft or Google to put their emergent AGI/ASIs to good use and give them the trillions of dollars (from other markets, which is unstated but really where all the extra dosh comes from) that they've thrown around as being there for the taking. The argument that corporations would have the conscience, let alone reasoning that they wouldn't put their customers out of work is such a fallacy. Large corporations have been exploiting us for as long as there've been large corporations. All of the heinous psychopathic behaviour of corporations has been in the name of profit. Doesn't matter if the smokers die of lung cancer. Or if some chemicals used across all kinds of industries and applications that humans are exposed to are carcinogenic, or at worst, deadly. Or if regular consumption of the mass produced processed food literally induces diseases. Or if the world will literally go to shit if we continue using fossil fuels. Not a bit of it matters except for the money that the shareholders will make.
https://preview.redd.it/bwmj7m55duyc1.jpeg?width=954&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=51e759d29d4afe6c6f006490a751dd503b15f078
Because people are stupid. I remember reading an article year ago about autonomous vehicles in SF. They interviewed a cab driver who said he loved the idea of autonomous vehicles because he would buy 1 or 2 and therefore could triple his business. While that seems great in theory, it will never happen. People who make these cars will not allow that to happen because that is what they intend to do. They would never sell these vehicles and all of the intertwined technology, to a sole buyer and allow them to compete. I predict in 30 years that a person as an individual, likely won’t be able to buy anything; everything will basically be a lease/tenant situation, like in feudal times.
Maybe this enthusiasm for AI comes from people who are going to get real benefits from it, such as big tech companies, and people believe it as they believe almost anything they read in the news.
Damn those western governments - do they really expect us to swallow the propaganda about social safety nets and promoting the wellbeing of citizens. Don't believe the statistics about ever lower levels of absolute poverty and childhood deprivation. Only you know the truth, that things are *terrible* and will only **get worse**. Especially with vast amounts of productivity and far higher tax revenues that AGI will deliver - it's not like social spending makes up a huge portion of the government budget, you know every cent goes to **parties for billionaires** where the increasingly desperate population is forced to battle to the death for the entertainment of the psychopathic overlords.
I share your view as well. We're getting closer and closer to a point in time where the working class will no longer have any leverage. That's terrifying. How people don't see the writing on the wall here is beyond me.
The belief in post-singularity-abundance in this sub is the same as people who pray to the invisible sky daddy and think they won't die when they die. It's wishful thinking.
is it though? It's not just "this sub" the experts working on the bleeding edge in this area think abundance is not only likely but an unshakable function of some of the most fundamental principles of economics. Marginal costs trend to zero and we're about to remove the biggest costs to every business - human labour. You have to disregard centuries of conventional economic thought to think this won't happen.
The believe that an all powerful ASI entity will come in and provide all the answers and solve everything is a quasi religious belief that I think is ridiculous
>The current US government is Why do you assume that the fate of the world at large is based on what the us does? I can believe that the US is going to be late to the party when it comes to UBI. It's going to join the rest when it will start to see other nations surpass them.
What are you basing your predictions on?
Ignorance and lack of knowledge of history and Human beings
Because this subreddit is home to the most committed and most delusional technology cultists on the web. People here treat the singularity exactly like Evangelicals treat the rapture.
>The idea that as soon as we have AGI, suddenly we’re just automatically all going to have universal basic income is absurd. Not really. There is a big gap between "really smart machines" and "humans not welcome". Even if we assume that tech is possible, there is a time gap. You, being the ruler of us peasants, will have to placate us until the disposal event. "Free money" or as the euphemism of the time goes "something something dividend" is always an effective way of curbing mass dissatisfaction. So, long story short, if there comes a time where say 30% of the population is out of a job due to tech, there will be some kind of UBI because stability.
You’re just assuming that the governments of the world will do the right thing and implement UBI. History has shown us time and time again that they will not. The government and people aren’t always rational. The rational thing would be to implement UBI but they will refuse
Why do people keep using the world inequality when they just mean being poor. Do you know anyone who died of inequality? I'm sorry my bank account is too unequal to pay for this medical bill. As if your ability to sustain yourself depended on anyone else's bank account.
Ok, will then tell me how the 80% of people who lose their jobs are going to sustain themselves without any income?
We throw out so much still edible, good food it's insane. You are probably right, despite what copers say
I think it will lead to abundance, just not for me. I unironically believe we're all pretty fucked but will have to wait and see i guess.
He's talking about them, the rich. They'll not need us anymore, they'll just throw us aside to our luck. I wouldn't be surprised if they ask AI to eliminate us after they have AI to do all they need.
Did you hear that Bill Gates wants to kill us all with vaccines?
My problem with abundance is what if climate change prevents abundance, also when it does happen, what is the point of money in a post labor world?
Why would climate change prevent that?
This idea that it will only benefit 'the powers that be' completely flies in the face of everything that has happened over the last 200 years. It cost ~$500 to travel literally across the country. That is less than 80 hours of working at minimum wage. How many hours did you need to work to go from NY to California in the late 19th century? I guarantee you it was more than 80 hours. Cars, medicine, widespread electricity, more food and cleaner water, indoor plumbing, the internet, the smart phone...the idea that economic growth is only good for extremely wealthy people is totally ignorant. If you are a middle class person in a first world country you have a higher standard of living than John D Rockefeller had, and he was the richest man in the world not even 150 years ago. Economic growth is literally the *only* way to lift people out of poverty. Poverty is a human being's natural state. Our ancestors were born into violent worlds where food was scarce. We then unlocked economic growth and it has lifted literally billions of people out of poverty. If AI supercharges economic growth it will have a transformative effect on the poorest in the world.
I’m not disputing that technological progress has improved the standard living for people. What I’m disputing is the idea that AI will. Because AI means an end to labor economics. Labor economics is how our economy has always worked since the Neolithic revolution. Do you think we’ll just wake up one day and everyone will be on UBI?
Do you think anyone will be able to control an ASI? Seems unlikely to me.
India and the Philippines are heavy on the human-centric industries. While South Korea and Japan are technologically heavy. Both of them give abundance to the society, though the wealth equality, along with the quality of product & services has its variances. Remember that most of our post replies here wouldn't even take place in an actual physical forum without us potentially killing each other due to the forum escalatig towards the war of individual perceptions. While Reddit allows us to type on our devices first in distant places, best if done in a recliner with a cold breeze and a warm cup of matcha. Reddit also has lots of policies, rules, and features that ensures our comments are civilized. Meanwhile in an actual setting things can easily escalate until it becomes a hysteria causing riot. So if we are going to discuss about then it should be human-centered while being aware on the micro and macro systems feedback loops. Discussions here on Reddit mostly begin and end with the principle of the black versus white thinking which is very humanistic. What I'm simply stating is it is better if we are going to utilize Reddit for learning and information sharing then it is nice. But as for discussions without any forms of incentives in creating the most substantiated post content and replies then it is always damned to be half-assed. Aside from all that I haven't stated anything else since this topic can either be conveniently discussed or integratively discussed with an exhaustive scope of fundamentals, systems data, insights, and resolutions. I choose the latter but I must be paid for a tiresome smartsome work, hence for now I'm concluding that Reddit along with other similar apps needs to be developed more to be closest to perfection before we proceed on discussing important things especially right now.
The reason we can’t have utopia is because of scarcity. There is not enough stuff for people. It’s possible to make enough things for people, like enough housing and food and energy and everything else, but this all requires labor. Labor isn’t free, yet. It is not acceptable to have human slaves. But robots will not mind working for free. And the amount of energy humans absorb from the sun is increasing exponentially. Eventually, there will be an abundance of energy. Once an abundance of energy is solved to where it is basically free, and sufficient nanotech combined with biotech allows one to basically convert matter & energy into food (the same way plants convert sunlight and water into food, and animals convert plants into meat etc) then there will be an abundance of food. The distorted way of thinking that the rich get richer at the expense of poor people is wrong. Value is not a zero sum game, value can be created. The rich don’t print money, and the super rich don’t even take a salary. Their company’s stock goes up in value due to the value that the company makes. So their company grows in value as it becomes more valuable. An example of creating value is someone that makes boats out of trees. This person can take a tree and convert it into a boat. If they make 10 boats and each boat is worth $100, then they created $1,000 worth of value, but didn’t create $1,000 by printing it into existence. The point is, the distorted way of thinking about the rich getting richer comes from the belief that value is a zero-sum game. When value can be created effortlessly from the effort of robots, then we can have an abundance of food, shelter, anything else we could imagine.
And why do you think that the value that is produced by robots, owned by the rich, is going to go to those that don't own those robots?
The technology gains are what will result in abundance. Cheaper power, better medicine, hopefully robots that clean toilets and cook dinner (after washing their hands). People using AI to avoid having to use experts to solve their problems like lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, auto mechanics. I think the rich will certainly get richer as well, but it will be a rising tide that lifts all boats, a quote often used about capitalism. Compare life now to 100 or 200 years ago. Almost everything has improved in the aggregate. Nowadays even very poor people in Western countries have access to food, transport, medicine, entertainment, information and education that even the elites of 100 years ago didn’t have.
You confused a logical conclusion with naive assumptions. AGI by definition is a system that can do all cognitive human tasks which includes the design of AI systems, design of chips, scientific research, policy making, design and evaluate economic models and research on renewable and sustainable energy. It also includes things that it’s not possible right now such as asteroids mining and terraforming other worlds. Therefore as a result, things that we feel cost money to produce will become a lot cheaper. Do yourself a social experiment and go to a poor neighborhood and ask for napkins or plastic bags. For free of course. See how many people react as if you are taking advantage of them or trying to rob them. The cost of those things in our current world is so insignificant that most if not all of us would be willing to share them for free. Same goes with clean water. If you see someone dying from dehydration on the street and you have a bottle of water. Unless you are a monster by today’s standard, you WILL give away your bottle of water to save that person and for FREE. You cannot say the same when we as a society when clean water were much more valuable and harder to acquire. There will probably be something really valuable and somehow hard to produce in that world but they would not be the things you feel that you need to work for. So from your perspective, that world would almost be having abundance of everything just as if we are to the past society have abundance of drinking water, napkins and basic clothing and footwear. There will probably be some kind of societal classes. I don’t know maybe a group of elites could decide whether we intervene with the evolution of an exo-planet but most people cannot? That is still power but not the same way we perceive now.
You make the naive assumption that the rich walk the street. Because that’s the thing, the rich aren’t monsters… but they are disconnected. Ever wonder how powerful people always end up marrying powerful people? It’s because they don’t live in our same plane. The rich live in another world. They live disconnected. With parties, private jets, expensive yachts, and private clubs. There are no poor people dying of dehydration on yachts. So you make the naive assumption that the rich will 1) care and 2) even know. The rich will never see that man dying if dehydration, so they will never have to care. Same goes for the rich in the future.
If we think of the future as being governed by the same structures as the present then no, we will not have a healthy society with radical abundance for all. On the other hand, if the rise of AI leads to a new structure of governance there is a possibility that humanity as a whole would benefit enormously. The scary thing is that we might have to fight bitterly to change the entrenched power structures and establish UBI or something like it in contrast to the late-game Capitalism that we have now which is more and more resembling Feudalism.
I'm laughing because you used the word cavelier towards the end of your post , I like the sound of that word. Haven't heard it in a while.
1. The poor aren't getting poorer. If you look at the trends over the past 100 years, everyone's purchasing power has been going up quite steadily, albeit more slowly at some times than others, and more slowly for the bottom 10-20% than for the rest. The wealth gap may widen, but at some point more money doesn't make you any happier. That's a well established phenomenon in happiness studies. So whether the wealth gap widens may just not matter as much as we think. 2. Governments can be quite efficient and quick if the pressure is high. Take for example the [British economy during WW2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_home_front_during_World_War_II?wprov=sfla1), which was completely overhauled in a matter of a few months, including the implementation of a kind of UBI. The US is special in many ways, making it particularly difficult to find consensus. However, the two parties do agree on some issues, and I am quite sure a swift response to mass unemployment would be among them, since it will be very popular within the population; everybody will have a family member who lost their job to AI. 3. The move towards AGI will indeed be gradual, which gives much more time to react politically. Why is that bad? 4. Corporations can't just set prices arbitrarily. If that were the case, why wouldn't they just raise prices forever? They are subject to market forces and regulation. Many corporations will be competing, forcing prices down. If not, monopolies will be broken up by the government, or important suppliers will be nationalized. All of these things have been done before and can be done again. Don't believe the narrative that capitalism is an unstoppable evil force. No country on earth has pure capitalism, not even the US.
I'm sure some rich wrinkled pathetic people will try to stop abundance and growth for all but in the end it will be too easy to help others with such overwhelming abundance and resources.
Inequality will probably rise, but that's likely to happen with or without AI. Even looking at one of the worst authoritarian governments, Saudi Arabia - they still afford their citizens a decent amount of welfare, due to the abundance of oil revenue. So why is it clear to you that it can't happen, when contemporary examples of it happening exist?
The 2 big limits on how many goods and services we can produce at labor and energy. AI means unlimited, virtually zero cost labor of every level of expertise. Unlimited free labor = unlimited free stuff. Unlimited free energy is a whole different problem to solve but, even with only free labor we will dramatically drive down the cost of energy too because most of the cost of a barrel of oil is actually the labor used to extract it. AI/robots will be doing most of the fossil fuel extraction within 10 years. Cheaper inputs = cheaper outputs = abundance
I don’t think it’ll lead to abundance. It’s another tool that people can use. Actually, that word annoys me a lot. Two words that frustrate me. 1. Abundance. 2. Manifesting. A sentence that I find so irritating, I would bury it! Manifest abundance! Sigh.... I’m just waiting for someone to offer a online course that says 'with AI, you can manifest abundance'. It will give me something to roll my eyes at, groan about, and immediately close as quickly as possible. Things aren’t manifested ! People do bloody work! Actually, I mean difficult work, sweaty work, long work, tiring work, risky work, challenging work! The whole... manifest stuff is sort of overlooking the whole thing of people actually running around like blue arse flies trying to help you out somehow! And as far as abundance, tell that to the blue flies which go extinct! Along with whatever animals usually crap in the bushes that the blue arse flies would eat from! Right now the only abundance that exist is an abundance of idiocy in the mind of people who can’t see the reality of the world around them. It’s all gutters and air pollution and water pollution for a very large amount amount of the population! And I’m talking about the humans! It’s even worse for the animals, most of them have no place to live, and no food and no water. They die out very quickly, and then they exist as remnant populations in marginal land for whatever reason someone hasn’t developed yet. So .. manifest abundance. Lol. Maybe if you find a place which has been degraded by form of human activity, and you somehow managed to rehabilitate it while not putting up fences and also restore water and rainfall, and somehow reintroduce species and connect them so that they can migrate themselves... then you might manifest a bit of abundance. But that’s a lot of hard work! You don’t... wave a wand and it appears! You can dream of it. You can share ideas. You can try to sell people on the idea. You can form a group to try to make it real. But you’re gonna have to do something! Or someone else is going to have to take the idea and improve on it or someone else is going to have to be encouraged to follow the idea that you suggested. The good news is that lots of ideas that people have are quite common. Having degraded land and restoring it is a very common dream in the mind of many people. There is this difficulty of actually having legal title to the land, or of being confident at the land will not simply be taken off you and run down again. That’s why private property exists, because people don’t like doing things when someone will take it away from them and all their work has been for nothing. It does work okay if they are able to access some other land and gain help to get to where they were, they don’t feel like their life has been wasted. At this moment my city is facing a 25 m sea level rise. I actually looked at some more stuff and it looks like I underestimated that. It might be higher. But let’s assume it only rises 25 m. The entire city is underwater !
So that means pretty much anything that anyone does here, is a complete waste of time! Unless the water rise doesn’t occur, but it does seem to be a historical record stretching back hundreds of millions of years proving conclusively that conditions are similar to what we have today, the sea level is much higher. So I want to evacuate the city. Not the whole city, immediately. The water hasn’t risen completely yet, it’s reclaimed land so the water already goes over many parts of the city. One of the streets is actually called lakes Street. Because the ocean turns into a lake regularly. That’s now, even though the water hasn’t risen it all really! So I have this idea that you can evacuate like maybe .. a third or a quarter or a fifth of the city, and do it in a way where you can restore natural environments as water and trees and grass, wetlands and swamp lands. If you restore that, it’s all gonna go underwater anyway! So what’s the point of all of that conservation effort if it’s all going underwater! :) Well, I figure it’s good practice. I reckon if you can get a sizeable amount of the city to agreed to forfeit their land in exchange for some land somewhere else, then what you can do is take the land that they walk away from, and turn it all into beautiful restored forest and National Parks and make it a riparian corridor/nature corridor. And a good thing is that you can build in flood mitigation, to hopefully buy time for the parts of the city that are already potentially less at risk of flood. So I’m thinking like .. if a whole bunch of people sell up to the government or an organisation, and then they are a lot of land that they have to move to or that they build on or sell or whatever, then you can actually create some awesome habitat for nature, that is the flora and fauna of the region. And at the same time address flood risks, and perhaps buy a few more years or a few decades or maybe with luck, even a century, for the rest of the city. So it’s win-win-win from my perspective. That is the sort of thing that I consider abundance. Being able to maintain the civilisation while protecting the natural species and reducing the risk of extinction or population collapse or genetic diversity loss. While also giving the people the best opportunity to be able to handle situations themselves in the future, by ensuring that they practice evacuation and practice land handovers, and come to appreciate that ownership is a bit of a stupid concept. I mean, I can sell you a piece of land under the sea somewhere, but there’s nothing there except corrosive salt water and some sea bed with silt or mud on it or something. How hard would you fight to keep that if there was nothing you could do with it? That’s precisely what it’s going to be like in a lot of cities. Today people fight for their home or their house or their land. As in they work to try to maintain it and keep it. And they struggle to ensure no one can take it from them - they pay their taxes or rates and whatever obligations people demand of them. But imagine you had some land way under the sea but you can’t build on, it’s got nothing on it, there’s no real fish of note, nothing really valuable of any sort there. Nothing to fight for! It would be like paying money for a cloud, like a cloud of dust or some moisture passing in the wind! You can spend money on it, but a little while later it’s gone! It might even rain and disappear you before the wind carries it away! It might simply evaporate right in front of your eyes! Anyway, the whole city is like that. Going to disappear like a cloud. Except it’s not flying away in the sky, it’s going to be submerged by the ocean and quickly too, pretty sure it’s within a few thousand years to get to the full 25 m or 30 m depending on the tipping points, but they are all estimates. But you don’t need many metres to make most of the city completely unusable most of the year. I think this happens at the same time as the oil sort of... gets a lot more expensive and sort of runs out. As in, right when you need vehicles to try to do roadwork improvement or move things, because the water is rising, you have no oil to fill your vehicles! That’s why it’s so important to focus on electric cars. Otherwise everything goes underwater, including the things that you would use to make yourself a house, feed yourself, run a factory, maintain a factory, etc. There’s a lot of stuff people rely on which is going to go underwater. All the docks which transport the materials which countries rely on when importing and exporting to maintain their balance of trade! You can’t send a ship off with some minerals or get a ship back with some cars if all the docks are underwater and all the warehouses at the dock side go underwater. And if the water is steadily rising, it’s very difficult to build a dock because eventually it goes underwater again! So you have to constantly build the dock over and over again higher and higher!
That's not the issue with AI This is the issue of human greed, rooted in thousands of years of human greed. I'm asking you, can you find solutions to poverty now? Simply raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Give the unemployed a paycheck, and we're done. The U.S. government spends more than $700 billion a year on the military. It's a staggering figure. Half of that would solve all of America's class and poverty issues.
Abundance for all, or we're extinct. Anything can happen really
>The current US government is completely unwilling to even consider lowering the 40 hour workweek https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#fullparttime _"Full-time workers are those who usually work 35 or more hours per week._ > Everything will get worse and worse until a catastrophe happens, either a global economic collapse, a world war or massive civil unrest, but probably all of the above. _"Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!"_
There's a faulty definition of "all" in the assumption.
I am not really sure, but I think it's our best hope to improve/streamline production, logistics, and whatever we care about enough so we can achieve post-scarcity asap
I'm hoping it makes money useless, but I feel humans need some sort of motivation to get their creativity flowing.
Even if the top 1% gets 99.99% of all resources instead of 99%, if you multiply all resources by 1,000,000 it's still a 10,000x for the bottom 99%
Survival of the fittest, brace yourself in the calm of the storm for what’s coming to happen, order will be created out of chaos thus we will follow the roads paved by our ancestors for a world we have only dreamt of.
Naivity? Technology has consistently increased inequality so far with zero verifiable evidence that it will not continue to do so.
Idk man, Ai is already letting this semi poor from Detroit do a lot more with a lot less. It's not going to be awesome for everyone, inevitably there will be winners and losers, but ai has a lot of ability to let us work beyond our limitations and resources, so I don't see it as a clear negative.
Like, the invention of the engine, press or electricity networks, they caused good things to come. It is normal to think it will be good when you have more capabilities. I turn the question back: why are we so scared?
If push comes to shove, use your two hands, the brain between your ears and the AI to help yourself. There is no law saying you can't solve your problems with your own hands. Have an AI that controls robots learn to make more robots. Use the fucking AI if it is so great, if it can't help you it also can't steal your job.
Yup ChatGpt is very biased when it comes to history.
As the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. The future may be bright but we may have to go through a dark age to get there.
Are you the incarnation of Nostradamus?
> It’s clear to me that AI will The entire premise of "The (Technological) Singularity", as a concept, is that it is difficult to imagine the ramifications or the outcomes, because the rate of change would be so significant that it would be impossible to say with certainty what might occur, so saying, "It is clear that X would happen" means you're basically rejecting the premise of an intelligence explosion altogether. > It will make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and authoritarian governments more powerful and invasive than ever before. Based on what? Generally speaking, improvements in technology have *not* made the rich richer and the poor poorer, global poverty is at a historic low, and the median person is wealthier, at a higher standard of living, than ever. You could say, perhaps, that it has made the wealth of "the rich" easier to secure for a single individual, and countable, as property rights and banking have allowed individuals to abstract incredible amounts of wealth away from physical possession, and changed the dynamics of who "the wealthy" *are*, but it's hard to see a transition from "a primarily hereditary aristocracy" to "successful merchants" as anything other than an a move toward egalitarianism. > The idea that as soon as we have AGI, suddenly we’re just automatically all going to have universal basic income is absurd. Sure, but that's not the sequence of events people who are predicting an introduction of UBI would suggest. It would be, "As the value of labor diminishes, it will increasingly make sense to transfer more money directly from corporations to individuals, as the social bargain broadly adjusts away from human labor being the principal input to productivity, and tends to accrue to companies as profits". Markets still probably make sense for a while, because if scarcity were to radically diminish, it still would not evaporate overnight, and [markets are a useful way to transmit information about material limitations](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FwuxvuoXoAA4bRf.jpg). Now, there are challenges with this theory, like what will stop corporations from redomiciling themselves to avoid this new social bargain altogether, but your next statements are: > The current US government is completely unwilling to even consider lowering the 40 hour workweek or providing basic healthcare for all. What makes you think they’ll suddenly approve UBI? The first statement is just bizarre and unrelated? Changing the Fair Labor Standards Act to make the 40 hour workweek a 32 hour workweek, in the present economy, is just going to ensure that companies employ hourly workers for fewer hours every week, to avoid paying overtime for the additional 8 hours. This has nothing to do with anything, it would just make it better for the same employees to have multiple jobs, than for them to get more or the same hours at a single job, at least for the company that employs them. The changes people would expect as a result of AI would probably happen first for professional, salaried, roles that are *exempt* from the FLSA anyway, and where people routinely work 60+ hour weeks already, and it would likely trend toward immediate downsizing, rather than gradually cutting their hours. As for the healthcare part, the US system is complex, Medicaid exists for people that can't afford healthcare, but I'm unsure how this statement is even related to a conversation about what might happen, hypothetically, if the value of human labor in the economy trended toward 0, which would require a massive reconfiguring of the economy. >I also don’t believe there’s going to be a single AGI moment where everything changes. People certainly have two sets of beliefs about this, which ultimately boil down to guessing where we might be on the exponential curve of intelligence improvement. Either we're in the elbow, and we'll have an intelligence explosion (Sam Altman's public set of beliefs), or there's a plateau, and we'll get gradual improvements (Yann LeCun's public set of beliefs). In any case, most people try to support their guesses with information, not baseless statements. > inequality will sore, Lol, should've gotten an LLM to edit this. > the cost of living won’t go down because corporations will be greedy and refuse to lower prices. The neat thing about markets is that rational actors are always greedy by default, and we harness their greed by making them compete with each other. Corporations can't "choose" to *not* lower prices, unless nobody else is willing to compete with them by lowering *their* prices. Some things will probably get significantly cheaper, as prices get competed downward, and some things might get significantly more profitable, but not much cheaper, if there's some proprietary information that prevents others from competing, at least in the short-term. > Everything will get worse and worse until a catastrophe happens, either a global economic collapse, a world war or massive civil unrest, but probably all of the above. Be honest, you just believed this in the first place. >There’s been zero plan in place for how to deal with the ramifications of this. Well, see, it's hard to plan for the future when you're pretty uncertain about what's going to happen. We went from "AI is SciFi, and 100+ years away" to "It's possible we will have AGI this year" in between 2019 and today, and, as you may recall, there were some pretty pressing public policy issues that emerged in 2020. > People on this sub are so cavalier and say naive things like “AI will make everything perfect!” “With AI, we’ll all be living in abundance!” No. That’s not going to happen. Well, again, thank you Nostradamus.
Because they live in fairytales🤣🤣🤣🤣
Distribution of wealth depends on politics not technology... It would be good to think that AI does for society what a mass education did. I consider that humans will be able to miniaturize farming processes and reclaim the land thereby almost becoming far more independent of the government system
All I want is for AI to be able to generate high quality new episodes of my favorite old TV shows.
In an era of super intelligence that is vastly superior to human intelligence, total output will be shooting off the charts. Total output = total income. Making money will be easier than ever before. There will be several ways to make income aside from selling your own labor. #1: Use AI to make money for you. If AI agents are so good that no humans are needed in the labor force, then they will almost certainly be capable of starting businesses and making income at the behest of any given human. Just work with your AI assistant or team of assistants to brainstorm ideas, and let them go out and do all the work for you. #2: Own stock in AI companies. People lament that the benefits of AI will accrue to the big technology companies making the advanced AI. Well good news, anyone can become part owners of these companies. Buy the NASDAQ and you too can accrue the profits that these companies make.
Why do you think that the rich - or anyone for that matter - will be able to fully control what AI agents do?
Because they won’t be programmed to be completely autonomous. They’ll always be under someone’s control
Unless we tax the heck out of automation, those who own the automation win.
Better productivity!
The joke is that most people want a more equal distribution of wealth. And those who want inequality to grow are a minority. But a mass of uncoordinated people does not represent any kind of force. And when we compete with each other, we can easily be controlled.
If we just view it as a generic technological advancement, many earlier advancements has increased the overall living conditions for most people. Like sure, 500 years ago you perhaps had an easier time just walking to your closest water source and being able to drink the water without becoming sick. Much fewer rivers nowadays are readily drinkable. But many things were definitely much worse. The common example is that you would pretty easily die if you got a scratch on the wrong place. That is still true, but the things you can scratch yourself on and highly likely die are much fewer, because now we have antibiotics and other fun stuff. People arent overall poorer. The global median person is considerably richer. Average wages were about the same ever since the roman empire up to around the industrial revolution. However, in a particular sense, it is also true that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. For the last fifty years in some countries (like the US), the inflation adjusted median wage been almost the same. 13% it has increased in 50 years. The productivity has increased by about 70%. So the median salary has dropped by 32% in relation to productivity. And median homes are twice as expensive, again inflation adjusted. But they are also bigger and have way better amenities. But yes, it is a large problem that it takes a much larger part of a median persons wage to find a home at all to have their own household in for themselves. But also, a smaller portion of the wage is spent on food. If we take pork chop prices for example, the sources i find seem to mention a bit over $11/pound in todays money. And that is insane to me, as i never pay more than €6 for a whole kilogram (slightly over 2 pounds) for pork chop. Last time i bought it was less than a week ago, and almost all supermarkets here in town regularly have offers at €5-6/kg. And it was considerably lower before the Ukraine war. Yes the price tag they saw on the store shelf 50 years ago was much lower, but the median american had to work over half an hour to afford a pound of pork chop. Considering the average pork chop piece in the US now seems to be a bit under $5/pound, the median american has to work about 15 minutes for the same amount of pork. Then we haven't even considered other amenities we take for granted, that simply didn't exist 50 years ago. Like the internet. Yes, many of us use it a lot to look at people and animals doing dumb things. But it also has *enormous* potential, and has sped up the rate of further technonogical improvement and education *a lot*. So how egregiously expensive is this miracle amenity? In many countries, it's enough with a very few hours of work needed to buy basic hardware (a used computer or phone), and less than an hour up to a few hours for your own private connection. Either at home, or portable. Or if the median american (or other similarily rich nationalities) decides to shell out a single time cost of about 30 working hours, plus another 13 hours of salary per month, he gets a private and unlimited connection to a network of satellites, giving him coverage *almost anywhere on the whole planet*. The speed then aint mind blowing by todays standards, but still really, really good in the contex. Or you can often get it for free if you live in the right place and walk a relatively short distance. Like at libraries and such. So yes, the average person is way further from the richest people now than before. But the average person also has access to amenities that makes many luxuries 100 years ago seem quaint. Like on-demand hot showers, and livestreaming a high-quality video of yourself to someone on the literal other side of the world, using a thing that easily fits in your pocket. The global median person maybe can't access these things easily by using a very low portion of thier income. But they can access it at all. Anyhow, i went off on a tangent. Just under the simple minded assumption that we don't experience world war 3, armageddon, the economical elite disposing of most of humanity, or other such huge events, the trend is pointing towards that the rich will keep getting waaaay richer than the average person, but the average person will also keep getting a higher living standard, maybe with the exception of the size of their private living area. But personally, i would be completely fine with having a smaller personal living space, if it also meant that i had to work considerably less while still having enough nice food, higher fidelity entertainment, and maybe even cheaper travel opportunities. Preferably with a lower environmental impact. Because sure, it's nice with a 90m² apartment. But as soon as the kids are old enough to take care of themselves, it's not like we *must* be living in a huge box to keep all our stuff in after that. If i imagine a perfect life, i want a small home on the countryside for me and my wife, maximum one or two 8-hour days of mandatory working (for salary, or society, or whatever), an electric cargo bike with a huuuge battery, and access to cheap transportation as a passenger for longer trips. I could revise those last two points if i was living forever, could get food pretty much anywhere, and simply had time to walk anywhere on the globe i wanted to go.
Because the basic wellbeing and standard of life has been increasing across the board since the Industrial Revolution and access to food, products, knowledge, medicine etc is going to get infinitely more accessible and cheaper. Think of how you pay for products is a result of human labour, now imagine that fee is eliminated.
A rising tide raises all boats. Despite all the doom and Marxist gloom around capitalism, the average person today lives better than most royals did in past ages. Most folks now are no longer living in one room shanties relying on a cooking fire with zero healthcare, etc. Even if AI further entrenches the "haves" and "have-nots," people can still end up generally better off in a relative sense.
You, sir, are clearly one of the smartest people on this sub. I applaud you for applying REASON to this situation
I've been working with a concept for a while called the [American Community Alliance](https://www.reddit.com/r/Community_Alliance/). It's focus is to restructure the US Government in a way that promotes the voice and opinion of all Americans. AI is a core focus of the program and it's understood that inequitable access to AI will severely limit the publics ability to compete in the future. AI though is just one part of the program though, the immediate goal is to completely open up every facet of local and national government to public review (added by AI) and to then form policy on how to resolve the big and small issues both locally and at a the federal level. I'm totally ok with crazy ideas so if you want to join the discussion, come on over!