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Any thoughts on what stock one ought to buy right now, as someone whose gradual getting spooked by AI advances has finally passed a critical threshold, in order to be in a good position in the specific subspace of possible futures where most humans have become economically worthless but the current system of contracts and titles remains intact?
Specifically, the "the vast majority of the economy is one or a handful of AI conglomerates, plus whatever industry is required to keep them running; whoever has a share may be less screwed" scenario. I can just about think of Google (for DeepMind) and Microsoft (who seem to be OpenAI's closest openly traded partner), and maybe Nvidia if one expects their GPUs to continue being unrivaled as hardware platforms.
I don't know, is it inconceivable that UBI+light wireheading through superstimuli could keep the vast majority of people sufficiently placid to prevent widespread upheaval until the problem solves itself through birthrate collapse? This would have the same effect as a genocide of the poor, but not involve a lot of violence or even generally offense to revealed ethical preference.
I'm not so convinced of this, insofar as my impression is that over the past 1000 years, most societies were sufficiently "capitalist" in the sense that private property and ownership stakes were mostly honoured most of the time, but in the majority of them most people did not have a meaningful opportunity to significantly better their situation.
A classic joke:
– Vodka has gone up in price, son.
– So Daddy, now you'll drink less?
– No son, but you'll have less to eat.
What I mean to say is that there are other solutions to the problem of unproductive masses, and they don't involve either outright genocide nor communism. Such as...
I guess we shall see how China deals with more unrest. The surveillance aspect already happens in most western countries anyway, tho I assume China acts on it more (see the aftermath of the recent protests in china - police searching people’s phones for western apps and pictures/videos etc, or Chinese cops using relatives still in china to force ppl in australia to delete tweets etc). AI will be insane in china in the near future. I mean they can already ID you based on your walking gait…
Ironically @2rafa is a big fan of this particular technology, gait recognition, as a tool for suppressing violent crime. It's not like those programs and models are secret – any developed nation can do it.
But of course only rather intangible things such as «social contract» can stop the state from redefining most any dissent to crime.
Marshall Brain is, from what I understand, a socialist, and thus given to conspiratorial reasoning where the class of actual, as-recognized-by-Marx capitalists are organically hostile to the rest of the society, more powerful and more connected. I think you raise valid objections against this viewpoint and its implications.
But it's a matter of degree, not kind. For those of us who are neither PMC nor large property owners, it mostly changes the schedule of going into terrafoam. The incentive of efficiency is the same.
Besides. In Manna, he says that this largely dehumanized welfare population is <230.600.000 people (<1500*cube capacity). The main character could work for 10 years after the major breakthrough in automation, and even had a stint as an administrator. So in our timeline that's 2032 at the earliest. Population Pyramid says there'll be 352 million Americans by that point. Census Bureau is more bullish and expects more like 360 million. So very naively, 360-230=130.
36-37% of the population is quite a lot more than Peter Thiel and Brussels class. We don't have that many NYT journalists either.
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