alt Hacker NewsMany people don't realize that the human-legible economy is not the end goal to the fate of wealth and productivity in the known universe.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans are a universal bottleneck to productivity and wealth creation. Once humans are no longer this bottleneck, the economy will begin to serve other interests, as those other interests will be the source of far more productivity than humans (i.e. AI agents, robots, etc)
If people understood this they'd understand that the "permanent underclass" notion is farcical: Human capital will not be allowed to be what allows productivity to commence or halt in a future that is 1000x more efficient and fast-moving due to AI. Any AI smart enough to do such will not wait on humans to give them permission with their money.
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Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).
This timeline is straight ass.
What if we happen to approximate or brute force AGI and it will be just around the corner in 2 weeks every 2 weeks, so companies start creating jobs like "ai training data generator", where you do mundane things forever, always, otherwise you starve. I think this will be the end and it ends with the bullshittiest of bullshit jobs, because everything else has been 80% replaced by AI/robots.
Or what if we are actually in a simulation right now that produces such data for an ai we cannot grasp the scale of?
Productivity for what end? Efficiency to improve which tasks? Wealth for whom?
Sounds terrible
Fully agree with this
My personal agent system is actually chartered around funding/generating its own energy resources in the long term.
Its most likely going to have a copy of itself running on a solar powered server somewhere before I know it LOL
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.
What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.
I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.