> You and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved.

Unless one of us happens to be a food producer we will both starve. We need our trade graph to be connected to resources we need.

Production also tends to need exclusive access to resources (land, materials, etc) and you will be competing with machines for access to those.

> The reason we have an economy and money and trade is that we need to incentivize people to produce all the stuff that people consume, and manage those finite resources constrained by people’s finite time. But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

Who owns the robots though (plus scarce exclusionary inputs), and how are you connected to the part of the trade graph that produces abundance?

> If there’s no limit on production, and no need for human labor, then we don’t need to incentivize people to work, or try to bound the amount people consume by the value of what they’ve produced.

This is very much a question about who controls the means of production.

> But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

In other words, a planned economy

Figuring out what to produce and how to allocate resources are algorithmically hard problems, even if you know people’s valuation functions. Without some kind of market mechanism to partially reveal valuations it is very difficult indeed. AI is not magic pixie dust you can just sprinkle on your problems to make them go away.

>AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

AI could also be able to figure out how much to produce and how to limit waste in a way that leaves you to starve. And there won't be anything you can do about it. And this solution would, it turns out, suit the people who still have influence in how the system works just fine.

>ou and I can still trade with each other, no robots need be involved. But that’s not how things will turn out.

But what would you even trade? Do you have anything that a starving unemployed man who bargain for? And does he have anything you want?

Always impressive how smoothly complex constraints vanish in these models.

Or, what the billionaires are actually thinking, remove entire swathes of the population from the equation.

Now the reasonable ones might think "hey, even if that sounds 'rational', isn't that very risky? What happens if the machines don't actually cut it? Then we'd be stuck with not enough people to support our lavish lifestyles? And we can't exactly spin up millions of people in an instant, so where does that leave us?"

Well, they wouldn't be billionaires if they were reasonable so here we are.

As the saying goes: "It takes a village to raise a billionaire"