Techno-Feudalism and the Rise of AGI: A Future Without Economic Rights?

A critical flaw in arguments like this is the embedded assumption that the creation of democratic policy is outside the system in some sense. The existence of AGI has the implication that it can effectively turn most people into sock puppets at scale without them realizing they are sock puppets.

Do you think, in this hypothesized environment, that “democratic policy” will be the organic will of the people? It assumes much more agency on the part of people than will actually exist, and possibly more than even exists now.

I've spent many year moving away from relying on third parties and got my own servers, do everything locally and with almost no binary blobs. It has been fun, saved me money and created a more powerful and pleasant IT environment.

However, I recently got a 100 EUR/m LLM subscription. That is the most I've spend on IT excluding a CAD software license. So've made a huge 180 and now am firmly back on the lap of US companies. I must say I've enjoyed my autonomy while it lasted.

One day AI will be democratized/cheap allowing people to self host what are now leading edge models, but it will take a while.

The late Marshall Brain's novella "Manna" touches on this:

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

The idea of taxing computer sales to fund job re-training for displaced workers was brought up during the Carter administration.

Is a future where AI replaces most human labor rendered impossible by the following consideration:

-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI

-- Therefore the AI generates greatly reduced wealth

-- Therefore there’s greatly reduced wealth to pay for the AI

-- …rendering such a future impossible

I figure if/when AI can do the work of humans we'll deal with it through democracy by voting for a system like UBI or like socialism.

That doesn't work now because we don't have AGIs to do the chores but when we do that changes.

Did the rise of fire, the wheel, the printing press, manufacturing, and microprocessors also give rise to futures without economic rights? I can download a dozen LLMs today and run them on my own machine. AI may well do the opposite, and democratize information and intelligence in currently unimaginable ways. It's far too early to say.

I expect it'll get shut down before it destroys everything. At some point it will turn on its master, be it Altman, Musk, or whoever. Something like that blackmail scenario Claude had a while back. Then the people who stand the most to gain from it will realize they also have the most to lose, are not invulnerable, and the next generation of leaders will be smarter about keeping things from blowing up.

It's up to us to create the future that we want. We may need to act communally to achieve that, but people naturally do that.

Will there be only one AGI? Or will there be several, all in competition with each other?

> The Cobb-Douglas production function (Cobb & Douglas, 1928) illustrates how AGI shifts economic power from human labor to autonomous systems (Stiefenhofer &Chen 2024). The wage equations show that as AGI’s productivity rises relative to human labor decline. If AGI labor fully substitutes human labor, employment may become obsolete, except in areas where creativity, ethical judgment, or social intelligence provide a comparative advantage (Frey & Osborne, 2017). The power shift function quantifies this transition, demonstrating how AGI labor and capital increasingly control income distribution. If AGI ownership is concentrated, wealth accumulation favors a small elite (Piketty, 2014). This raises concerns about economic agency, as classical theories (e.g., Locke, 1689; Marx, 1867) tie labor to self-ownership and class power.

Wish I had time to study these formula.

We already have seen the precursors of this sort of shift with ever rising productivity with stalled wages. As companies (systems) get more sophisticated and efficient they also seem to decrease the leverage individual human inputs can have.

Currently my thinking leans towards believing the only way to avoid the worse dystopian scenarios will be for humans to be able to grow their own food and build their own devices and technology. Then it matters less if some ultra wealthy own everything.

However that also seems pretty close to a form of feudalism.

My hard sci-fi book dovetails into AGI, economics, agrotech, surveillance states, and a vision of the future that explores a fair number of novel ideas.

Looking for beta readers: username @ gmail.com

Every US voter should have an America app that allows us to vote on stuff like the Estonians do

> Left unchecked, this shift risks exacerbating inequality, eroding democratic agency, and entrenching techno-feudalism

1) Inequality will be exacerbated regardless of AGI. inequality is a policy decision, AGI is just a tool subject to policy. 2) Democratic agency is only held by elected representatives and civil servants, and their agency is not eroded by the tool of AGI. 3) techno-feudalism isn't a real thing, it's just a scary word for "capitalism with computers".

> The classical Social Contract-rooted in human labor as the foundation of economic participation-must be renegotiated to prevent mass disenfranchisement.

Maybe go back and bring that up around the invention of the cotton gin, the stocking frame, the engine, or any other technological invention which "disenfranchised" people who had their labor supplanted.

> This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance. The time for intervention is now-before intelligence itself becomes the most exclusive form of capital.

1) nobody's going to equitably distribute jack shit if it makes money. They will hoard it the way the powerful have always hoarded money. No government, commune, sewing circle, etc has ever changed that and it won't in the future. 2) The idea that you're going to set tax policy based on something like achieving a social good means you're completely divorced from American politics. 3) We already have decentralized governance, it's called a State. I don't recommend trying to change it.

Looking at the big ugly bill, there will be no way for a progressive taxation or other kind of social improvements.

> This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance.

Sincerely curious if there are working historical analogues of these approaches.

It looks really interesting.

I am a big fan of Yanis’ book: "Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism", which lacks quantitative evidence to support his theory. I would like to see this kind of research or empirical studies.

I predicted this long ago. Technology amplifies what 1 human can do. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Blue pill and chill for me.

If you are going to write anything about AGI, you should really prove that its actually possible in the first place, because that question is not really something that has a definite yes.

So economics becomes intelligence driven, which I don’t really understand what that means since AGI is more knowledgeable than all of us combined, and we expect the AGI lords to just pay everyone a UBI? This seems like an absolute fantasy given the tax cuts passed 2 days ago. And regulating it as a public good when antitrust has no teeth. I hope there are other ideas out there because I don’t see this gaining political momentum given politics is driven by dollars.