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Notes -
Are we all going to work fake jobs
From a Yarvin blog a few weeks ago:
Yarvin is influential, but many others including people in the Silicon Valley VC, AI, LLM research X.com e/acc space have made similar comments over the last few months. This is because, in part, it appears that AI researchers, senior lab figures etc increasingly believe that as multimodal performance and robotics both benefit from extreme uplift in terms of p investment and intelligence, which makes mobility inherently easier even if the mechanical components don’t change, the mass automation of all employment will happen as one Happening, over a brief period of a few years. This rather than over a prolonged 20+ year period, as had been predicted by early 2010s mass automation projectors, like CGPGrey in 2014.
I argue there are three core schools of post-AGI economics:
It Doesn’t Matter Because We’re [Almost] All Going To Die. This category encompasses the three primary groups of AGI doomers: (a) malicious and/or paper clip maximizer AGIs will destroy the human race, (b) AGI will help human terrorists or factions to destroy the human race by eg. assisting in genetically engineering a deadly pandemic that kills most or all humans, and (c) AGI, in eliminating most/all jobs and therefore making all of us economically superfluous will lead to rich and/or powerful people exterminating or starving the majority of the population, and then perhaps eventually each other.
UBI or some other form of by-default, low obligation distribution. To maintain consumption as productivity increases and employment decreases, governments transition their populations over to welfare, which eventually everybody is on. Ignoring significant implementation issues (like the classic Soviet ‘who gets the most beautiful apartments with the high ceilings’) this runs the risk, Moldbug argues, of a loss of meaning so extreme that it leads to a form of civilizational suicide. Proponents argues that this kind of true freedom will allow people to find their own meaning, in leisure, in raising families, in falling in love, in learning about and understanding the world and themselves. But what did humans do with their hugely increased leisure time starting from the mid-20th century? Spent much of it watching TV, porn, consooming products and scrolling online. Wall-E is about this, although the obesity will seemingly be avoidable by then.
The Gamification of Life Something interesting that happened as the ‘live service’ video game developed over the last thirty or so years is that players increasingly demanded ‘progression’ in their competitive multiplayer games. It is not enough that the game you play for 20 hours a week is fun, it must involve your character’s statistical advancement, the slow grind for rare armor or skins or minute stat increases. Players demand ‘progression’. Man yearns to labor. Huge categories of modern day employment are already fake jobs that exist to reduce the number of welfare recipients in overall terms, the result of regulation and government spending in everything from compliance to college administration and the DMV to HR. This economy involves fake work in fake jobs, perhaps with stratification in terms of resource allocation, progression, a kind of gamified simulation of pre-AGI labor that most people engage with to a greater or lesser extent and which confers status and resources.
If (1) occurs, it was probably almost always inevitable (perhaps as a solution to the Fermi paradox). There is little anyone here can likely do to stop it. The choice between (2) and (3) is much more interesting. If you were the absolute ruler of a country that transitioned from widespread employment to mass automation of all labor, would you really give up on any incentives to encourage prosocial behavior beyond ‘obey the law’? Would you really trust people to live dignified, meaningful lives? Would you care?
Goethe said it best:
Living is the act of becoming. Post-AGI economics should be geared towards great works; building the Tower of Babel, space colonization, Galactic Imperium. Something grows or it dies. Humans will need to participate in and identify with some grand project like this even if their individual contribution isn't meaningful.
But if AGI designs and builds this for us, aren’t we just spectators?
99.99% of the Roman imperium were spectators, they got to bask in the Glory of Rome the same.
The most benevolent AI imaginable would do everything required to achieve these great works short of the marginal productivity of human struggle such that humans meaningfully participate in the project, even if that contribution itself could be automated.
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