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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Has problems with economics' most important question ("who live big house?") because it creates a permanent two-caste society in which one class of people who make up the vast majority of the population are eternally poor and live off the state, with no real chance of improving their situation (other than with a generally rising tide), while the other caste live off their capital and own all or most of the resources. Seems likely to fuel class conflict, perhaps successfully given traditional bulwark against socialist revolution (lower-middle class/burghers) no longer exists, nor do stratifications within working class (eg. between working class and underclass/lumpenproles). Might be social problems or dysfunction due to malaise or lack of labor in some communities.

It might be solvable with modest wealth taxes. The goal would be to gradually bring down wealth inequality. Possibly high taxes on inheritance.

It doesn't collapse to #4 IMO; market still functions as it did earlier, theoretically...

It's also hard to see what the structure of the 'elite' would be like. Would people try desperately to hold onto wealth, knowing that they'd die if they lost it? Wouldn't the huge collapse in aggregate demand caused by the withdrawal of billions of people from the market sink a lot of those rich people?

A fic mentions this problem. I already referenced it here days ago, so I'll keep the quote short this time...

The paradox of plenty had truly arrived. Factories were more productive than ever, but even at the lowest prices, the only clients with money were the increasingly opulent capital owners, the hyperclasses the newly emergent economic class that would come to define the following century. Economic production stagnated, even as potential production skyrocketed.

Government responses were mixed. Almost universally, the world’s government’s, nominally democratic or not, had degenerated into instruments of their oligarchical hyperclasses. Nations where the hyperclasses sympathized with the masses handed out basic incomes to keep them solvent. Those that didn’t handed out pittances or, often, nothing, content to rely on increasingly brutal oppression.

(...) it was only in a certain proportion of nations that it was able to mutate into true Detachment, with the hyperclass extending their beliefs to include the proposition that it was morally correct for the lower classes to be kept down, that it was morally incorrect to hand out relief food or money, and so forth. These kinds of beliefs mutated into endless variety, to a degree wearingly and horrifyingly familiar to any historian of the age.

Eventually, the world’s nations, defined by their hyperclasses, began to sort into two groups. The nations where the hyperclasses detached in this manner began to back each other in international disputes. Similarly, the nations where the hyperclasses held onto their moral compasses, implementing relief and welfare programs–though never giving up their hold on power (...) War followed shortly thereafter

Eventually, agonizingly, and cataclysmically, the FA collapsed under weight of its economic inferiority, its own ideologies rendering it incapable of effectively mobilizing its populations, or even preventing its populations from being co-opted by the other side.

like retvrning to feudalism or whatever, unlikely or unpredictable enough that they're not worth discussing in this context.

Heh, in The Full Stack Of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier, UBI is categorized as a feudalist solution.

Working “Below the API” is the terrifying dystopian endgame vision driving the support in Silicon Valley for redistributive programs like Universal Basic Income, and Sam Altman wrote a prescient essay way back in 2013 about the political tensions of a low-growth Zero-Sum environment. The optimistic take is that “API-based” software businesses provide flexible employment, cash-on-demand-in-exchange-for-elbow-grease, and a way to provide for yourself and your family that didn't exist 10 years ago.

The pessimistic take is that working Below the API closes the path to Wealth for an entire Class of people as labor trends towards Perfect Competition, towards Zero Economic Surplus, towards a world where the serf~ peasant worker can't afford to purchase the tools she uses to work and must instead rent them from her employer at an ever-increasing-margin, i.e. pay a feu/fee, to be able to feed herself.

(...) Speaking of the Wealth-generating ability of labor, people on the internet had many different responses to my Bermuda Triangle of Wealth essay on personal Wealth-building: i) government needs to regulate healthcare costs ii) government distortions are actually what caused the cost disease and iii) government needs to limit immigration. All in response to the same essay on building Wealth for yourself.

…but there was one other kind of response that I hesitated to include

This plays as edgy irony to most people Above the API [5 favorites]

And yes, stow the pitchforks, #killingisstillbad, and yes, violence is super bad, Non-Aggression-Principle is good, and no, I definitely don’t condone any of that. But in a Feudal world, history has been pretty clear that things are Zero-Sum and there’s still only one good way to build Wealth — Take it and Tax it. Veni vidi vici etc.. If people look out the window and see nothing but Feudalism and a personal lifetime of serfdom, you can at least understand their instinctive linguistic reaching for violence (while condemning it).

Is there a non-violent solution that people living Below the API can self-effectuate, instead of having to rely on the Noblesse Oblige of Skynet those Above the API?

Perhaps. Another preachy author provides a less bloodthirsty solution that still satisfies history’s fundamental rule of Feudalism:

“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”

Voting is violence (by proxy), and Democracy marks a difference between the Feudalism of old and Silicon Valley’s envisioned Feudal dystopia. Each vote you cast is an implicit claim on the full force of Uncle Sam. It’s buried beneath layers of civilization, thankfully, but US voters elect Representatives who determine Tax Rates which determine IRS policies which, if you try to fuck around on, will get you violently arrested and sent to jail.

Nowadays you can Take it and Tax it at the ballot box, with the use of force suitably restrained by process and bureaucracy. Which is precisely why so many in Silicon Valley who can see the writing on the wall (eventually all those jobs “Below the API” get replaced by a robot…) are instinctively turning to Political solutions instead of Technological ones to the Wealth-building abilities of their fellow Americans.

“It’s a shame, really, but you can’t fight (technological) progress.”

My point: As long as people who feel abandoned or impoverished or crushed Beneath the API or like they have no obvious path upwards, as long as those people feel that VOTING is a valid way to “Take it and Tax it”, they can peacefully express and effectuate what otherwise must become violence or generational poverty & stagnation.

There’s no other way to build Wealth in a Feudal world — you’re either a Lord or a Serf.

I think one factor you're underappreciating is the ability for people to find work or competition even if it would be hopeless for them to be material productive. You can't do the soul draining and boring work you used to in order to get paid but you can definitely participate is communities without goals related to production. Classically sports teams but all sorts of video games. And as long as people's lives and the lives of people's children continue to have even more luxories I don't see them being that resentful of the people who own the machines to produce the food or power. "who live big house?" isn't much of a problem when everyone can live in a ridiculously large house, the real question would be actually scarce resource like who gets to live in the house surrounded by interesting celebrities rather than the generic house #134920394 in subzone #234524234 zone #14, which could even be tied to these aspirational albeit not-production related pursuits.

As material excess saturates us we probably just start caring much less about it, I'd imagine people start very generously trading material wealth for social status. Maybe the kind of boring guy who owns 0.0000000001% of google builds a big esports stadium to put his name on it an increase his popularity. Much like Peterson's point with scandanavian nations minimizing environment differences maximizing genetic differences when the marginal usefulness of material goods approaches zero the value of social connections maximizes.

Alternative to UBI:

Each person receives a resource allocation block (representing some bundle of ownership of society's stuff and thus resulting rents). When they have a kid, their personal block is split with their kid after a period of time.

When someone dies, their block is distributed evenly to all other living citizens.

This technique was designed to deal with monopolization problems with pseudo-immortality, but it also has the effect of punishing natalism when the overall birthrate exceeds the growth of society's resources. The practical effect is that the impact of natalism hits early, hits hard, and hits those most involved in pushing the world towards Malthusian suffering. On the other hand, if no one else is having children, your kids will get a larger total share of the resources as the others die in boating accidents, landslides, etc. (Children of extreme natalists have to work for a living, but that's the future the natalists would choose for everyone else, so it's just arriving early for them.)

In this scenario, nothing prevents someone from renting their allocation to someone else. That's the capitalist angle - you can live at a higher standard of living by renting additional stuff by providing value to others, but you can't accumulate ownership of whatever the resource allocation block is composed of.

What is the point of renting your resource allocation (let's just call it wealth) to someone else? If you aren't allowed to accumulate wealth, you have to immediately spend it. Whatever you earn, you have to immediately spend, so you might as well have just spent what you rented out. No one can actually borrow anything if no one else can save.

That depends specifically on the resource type being allocated.

Basically you can store value in whatever resource class is not being allocated in this way. For instance, if every citizen receives an allocation of land or energy rights, you can store value as ownership of factory equipment even if you don't own all the land the factory is on.

That proposal reminds me a bit of John Roemer's A Future for Socialism. From Cosma's review:

There is no central planning board, like the Soviet Gosplan, commanding factories to produce so many million tons of steel and size 12 leather boots. Instead, all goods, including labor (land, oddly, is not mentioned) are allocated by markets; there are many banks, making loans at interest to competing firms, who pay dividends to those who own stock in them, and are, quite cold-heartedly, allowed to go bankrupt when bad luck or stupidity force them to it. There is international trade, free in goods, somewhat restricted in capital. Market forces impel firms to efficiency and innovation, at least as much as they do today.

Clearly, a rather old-fashioned marriage, with markets as the bread-winner. Where, then, do we find the socialist better half of the union? Not in the welfare-state provisions (though there is a full set of them, like china), but in the stock market. Stock prices are quoted not in currency but in coupons, issued to citizens on attaining their majority, not convertible to cash, and reverting to the treasury at death. The price of a firm's stock in coupons will, presumably, reflect both the current value of its dividends and expectations about its future performance. Citizens can buy and sell shares in firms directly, or, more plausibly, invest in mutual funds.

In a steady state society (no productivity growth; pseudo-immortality; the marginal birth results in decreased average productivity since existing labor is already deployed to the most productive uses), your proposal seems like a decent approach. I'd prefer something like purchasing a birth license: to have a child, a parent must purchase the right to one with a portion of their allocation, roughly equal to the amount that every person is entitled to at birth. That would require substantial reproductive coercion, but this avoids punishing children for their parents' social irresponsibility. Particularly, the entire point of having a roughly equitable distribution of resources is to avoid immiseration; over time, though, those who have children will become more and more impoverished, and it will pass down through generations. Ultimately you'd end up with a two class society, between the Methuselahs (those who received a significant initial resource allocation block and have grown by countless death dividends) and the Children (those who start out with a zero or minimal block and have received fewer death dividends than the Meths). I'm not convinced the disincentive of causing suffering to their children would prevent those who want them from having children.

Yeah that's the whole bit there - it's specifically designed to avoid direct reproductive coercion like that. Instead it just feeds people the environment limits early.

The other trick is that because whatever you didn't split with your kids/heirs while you were alive (+ x years for early deaths) gets redistributed, you're basically encouraged to have a kid/heir at some point.

Stock prices are quoted not in currency but in coupons, issued to citizens on attaining their majority, not convertible to cash, and reverting to the treasury at death. The price of a firm's stock in coupons will, presumably, reflect both the current value of its dividends and expectations about its future performance. Citizens can buy and sell shares in firms directly, or, more plausibly, invest in mutual funds.

I don't understand what this means. In what sense are the shares not convertible to cash? They can be bought and sold and pay dividends. Is this just a ban on stock buybucks? What does that accomplish?

Why pay them in shares in at all? Why not just give them cash with which they can buy the shares?

Finally, why not allow them to pass them on to their children? They'll find other ways to do this anyway and, to the extent that it works, it would discourage investment.

I think the proposal would prevent private individuals from purchasing or selling coupons (simply by making contracts involving those unenforceable) and heavily regulate conversions, mostly focusing on banks. Dividends would be issued from cash flows. Existing companies would fund new investments via cash loans from banks. New companies can either rely on cash loans from banks or on giving up a stake in the business to the banks; once the business reaches a certain size, it would be required to IPO, and owners would get get coupons in exchange for their labor- or cash-derived ownership stake. Banks would then be required to sell any accumulated coupons for cash (this market doesn't really exist; I suppose the government sets the conversion rate between cash and coupon, in line with how much it deems the socially optimal consumption vs investment rate to be).

The benefit of having separate capital and consumption currencies is that one can be treated as basically an inalienable; the only way you lose coupons is bad investments, and you can't be forced by circumstance to give up your claim to public ownership.

I'm not convinced this offers much over regular cash grants every person is entitled to, and it puts a whole lot of faith in banks performing oversight competently, giving investments judiciously, and making their decisions without political considerations.

Ultimately you'd end up with a two class society, between the Methuselahs (those who received a significant initial resource allocation block and have grown by countless death dividends) and the Children (those who start out with a zero or minimal block and have received fewer death dividends than the Meths).

I'm not sure if the math works out that way. I'm envisioning it as follows:

  • Every year, everyone gets +1 allocation point from other people dying

  • Families split their allocation evenly at each birth.

Let's look at several family structures that are stable over generations.

Large young family:

  • Inherit 16 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have children at 20, 22, 24, 26 years old

  • The family has 2 * 16 (inheritance) + 2 * 26 (parent's age) + 6 + 4 + 2 + 0 (children) = 96 points, split six ways = 16 points each

  • Live another 80 years, dying at 96 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 49.4 points during your life

Small young family:

  • Inherit 40 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have a child at 20 years old

  • The family has 2 * 40 (inheritance) + 2 * 20 (parent's age) + 0 (child) = 120 points, split three ways = 40 points each

  • Live another 80 years, dying at 120 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 90 points during your life

Small old family:

  • Inherit 80 points

  • Marry someone identical, and have a child at 40 years old

  • The family has 2 * 80 (inheritance) + 2 * 40 (parent's age) + 0 (child) = 240 points, split three ways = 80 points each

  • Live another 60 years, dying at 140 points of allocation.

  • Average approx 106 points during your life

I don't think that a mere doubling of resources is enough to entrench an aristocracy or cast someone into poverty. More permissive inheritance laws could make for stronger effects, but that isn't how I read the proposal.

I was thinking of much longer lifespans, since mitigatedchaos referred to it being developed to deal with pseudo immortality (i.e. only dying by accidents, murder, etc.) Iirc the expected lifespan with those mortality tables is on the order of 1000 years, with a thicker right tail than our current distribution.

Though I'd suspect that even at 1000 years the disparities wouldn't be that worth worrying about. Thinking about it a bit more, only if there were significant feedback processes (larger allocations leading to longer lifespans leading to larger allocations) would my scenario be a risk.

Replace "years" with "decades" and everything else will be the same. The mechanism simply doesn't allow for concentrating allotment the way that we can currently concentrate wealth.

All the other options probably end up at option 3, most likely via some kind of 'soft cull' featuring a combo of AI generated hypertargeted wireheading media and social engineering cratering the fertility rate to new lows. The reaction of western elites to fertility rates crossing the 2.1 threshold was a collective shrug, once the median person is a valueless UBI serf I don't think they'll mind the rates collapsing to 0.4 or less.

Is a .4 tfr achievable? A small number of East Asian societies have a tfr slightly below 1, but .4 indicates that a large majority of women have no children at all, and not simply that there are some childless women in an environment where few have more than one.

And IIRC birthrates in the US are currently rising, so it’s not like this is some inevitable end state.

I think once you combine mass data harvesting, advances in applied psychology and a suitably advanced AI capable of generating any sort of entertainment on the fly you'll see things trend in that direction. VR AI generated infinite entertainment + AIsim significant others purposefully designed to hit every emotional soft spot and cater to every need with scientific precision, monitoring heart rate, eye movement, years of browsing history, just about any bit of digestible data to better target its content. And while there's been something of a minor bump to birth rates in the past year, the explanation I heard is that's more due to deferred planned pregnancies from the whole corona thing, I'd bet it's a local maximum on a continuing downward trend long term.

brave new world/elysium

plebs kept comfortable. all citizens possess a single half-right of procreation. two adults may have a child and combine their half-rights to gain government financial support for that child. half-rights can be bought and sold (the government will always buy them.) clinics that reversibly sterilize will pay-out on completion. hard control of reproduction if financial incentives fail. they won't.

almost categorical automation of labor will happen in our lifetimes. if you do not see the behemoth's lesser shadow named AI art you are myopic, or desperately so. 2050 at the latest. too many jobs will be lost too quickly. it's coming right now, shame how yang turned out, he sees the trees but not the forest. we will be able to feed every mouth. clothe and shelter and cure-all every man. outfit all who wish with perfect VR or direct-brain-interface-experience-simulacra to live their lives in dreams. but why structure that to continue without end? all other incentives may be unnecessary beyond making sure people who want to stay plugged in, can.

policy that ensures each generation reduces by half is inevitable, even if we solve the rocket equation and superluminal travel and stellar shipwrighting allows us to annually dispatch a hundred thousand hands offworld.

from their fortress manors, or new zealand, elites will do what they will.

hard control of reproduction if financial incentives fail. they won't.

They will. We already have rapidly growing sub-cultures who shun certain aspects of modern civilization and average six children per woman

amish et al. will not factor.

such subcultures who otherwise normally engage in society and civics will bend as government subsidy ceases.

policy that ensures each generation reduces by half is inevitable

This has the advantage of being simple within the system(s) you described but also seems really aggressive. Is this really required with people being bored because they're unemployed?

automation will permanently replace >90% of labor by 2100. what few human-necessary roles created by automation will lay within the remaining <10%.

humans have a biosocial capacity for community size. we are biologically fit for communities only insignificantly larger than the number of faces and names recalled by modal memory. large towns and cities are psychically radioactive, chernobyls of the mind, inducing madness. historically "too many people being bored"--bored, restless, purposeless--heralds chaos. in cities where madness already whispers, exploding populations of permanently unemployable young men could see that effect magnified most terribly. technology will solve most issues of the day. it may solve the problem of purposeless young men by giving them lives in artificial reality. if it cannot, disaster will follow.

Mass automation won't happen in our lifetimes. Robots will push out humans in some areas and raise the overall standard of living through productivity increases, but the Industrial Revolution proved that even an unprecedentedly massive increase in output will be matched by a corresponding increase in desires. Keynes thought we'd all be working 5-15 hour weeks at most by the 70s yet that was obviously wrong. Something like 98% of people were employed in agriculture in the 1700s which has dropped down to <2% today, yet the median work week is still at 40 hours.

Outside of a potential tech singularity born from a artificial superintelligence, things will proceed how they have throughout history: minor iterative progress most of the time, sudden rapid development in a few particular industries for a few years, then back to minor iterative progress.

Keynes thought we'd all be working 5-15 hour weeks at most by the 70s yet that was obviously wrong.

It's entirely possible that many of us (especially in white-collar jobs) are indeed working 5-15 hour weeks spread out over 40 hours. Competition is tight, and nobody wants to look like they're not trying hard, so we go easy on ourselves rather than visibly negotiating for reduced hours. Various companies have experimented with four-day weeks and they don't seem to have resulted in big productivity drops*, suggesting that the same amount of work could potentially be done in fewer hours if the will was there and pressure was applied.

*Obviously difficult to measure and prone to biased reporting. Notably companies don't tend to keep four-day weeks once the experiment ends, although this may result from inertia or a desire to look competitive in the market.

https://gizmodo.com/four-day-work-week-work-from-home-return-to-office-1849562791

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/four-day-working-week-microsoft-japan_n_5d77c236e4b0fde50c2dec9a

I think option 1 is the best of the four, but in the West, I think we will get option 2. The reason for this is that people crave status, which option 1 and 4 would not give them. People don't want to be equal, at least not those who are above average. But option 3 is not politically viable or defensible. Option 2 has plausible deniability. It allows successful people to maintain greater status and wealth over others while being able to convince themselves of the fairness of their social system.

I think we may live in a corporatist dystopia where every field is turned into an over-professionalized rent-seeking guild. Doctors and lawyers especially will come up with lots of good sounding reasons to maintain a high degree of human involvement and restricted membership in their fields, allowing them to capture most of the surplus value. There will be a pathetic safety net for anyone who can't get a Doctorate of Janitorial Science or who is expelled from the professional guilds that make up the entire job market because his mandatory AI assisstant overheard him spreading misinformation (which is already loophole for the regulation of speech).

This may also be combined with high levels of wealth taxation such that the main form of durable wealth will be the status one can achieve by politicking up the corporate ladder in this professional guilds which will be so regulated as to effectively be government institutions.

Options 1 and 4 also go against the belief system of the common man. People don't like either free markets or hyper-regimentation. They see a balance between laissez-faire capitalism and communism as desirable.

Some countries like the Gulf states or North Korea may choose a version of option 3. I think the Gulf states will at least deport their foreign workforce.

A big question is what will happen to the third world. Some countries will be too dysfunctional to profit from AI, while rich countries will have a strong motivation to shut their borders. If it is obvious that immigrants are not net contributors in a fully automated world, the only reason to let in immigrants will be for humanitarian reasons.

But option 2 will make it look plausible that immigrants could be net contributors even though they won't be.

Some countries might find some excuse to not let them in, while others will make themselves poorer by letting them in. Finally, will rich countries allow people to move between them? Option 1 and 2 would require a rational government to require immigrants to arrive with some capital, maybe provided by their home governments.

I predict that it will come down to politics. Special interest groups will lobby the government to let in those who are expected to support them while restricting groups that might join their professional bodies and dilute their rents. They might relegate the immigrants to some low paid new arrival class that doesn't get much from the government but lives better than they would in their dysfunctional country of origin. For this reason, there would be very little immigration from functional countries, unless they could convince their governments to pay them a sort of immigration dowry.

Some countries will be too dysfunctional to profit from AI

Can't very well have a functioning AI when the power to run it goes out for several hours every day.

Some countries might find some excuse to not let them in, while others will make themselves poorer by letting them in.

Considering that this is already the case in many countries without AI, it seems like this process is likely to continue no matter what happens with automation of the economy.

if mass automation renders the majority of people unemployed?

Why should we believe that that’s a plausible outcome to begin with?

I think if there are no near technical limits and AI makes 95% of humans useless (or 99.99%) it is basically useless to even consider what that looks like.

It isn’t quite the same thing, but it is kind of like a 2D being trying to understand a 3D being. There is no reference point (and no, technological improvements have historically caused displacement but generally have expanded labor opportunities). The idea that humans create effectively a new apex predator fundamentally changes everything. Trying to retcon it to our current situation seems silly to me. Probably as silly as people living in the Middle Ages thinking about what earth would be like in the year 2000…

Technically this is possible through a combination of options 1/2 and a ban on non-rich people having children, but I'm thinking of darker futures (for the victims) here.

Oh geez. Who radicalized you?

You could be interested in reading up on FHI's Windfall Clause, «a policy proposal for an ex ante commitment by AI firms to donate a significant amount of any eventual extremely large profits garnered from the development of transformative AI».

As you know, I expect some sort of 3 (which makes me unremarkable here). For the purpose of novelty, let's discuss a variant closer to 1, where the size of the plebeian population, or more likely its resource expenditure, is capped at some absolute value or a modest share of total economic output, while their political power to negotiate a bigger cut is tacitly of explicitly eliminated. This will necessarily mean hard caps on access to transformative tech, from radical life extension to transhuman self-modification, to AI or mind upload creation/access, to raw energy/matter utilization, to types of structures allowed to control and the very software primitives allowed to conceive of, and in my book will be not much better than Eating The Poor (or, bluntly, Not-Powerful – all those «financially independent» smartasses go to the chopping block just the same), though of course I'd rather be rate-limited to the normal 2020's life expectancy and subjective abundance than culled, more or less obviously, in like 3-15 years.

In fact I do not expect life to get any better than it is now and would be pleasantly surprised if it never got way worse.

The argument for it is long-term trajectory of more egalitarian scenarios. The class of people who'll benefit from ownership of transformative AI will be fairly small, unusually intelligent, conscientious, good at optimization of business processes, and long-term oriented. In two words, high-agency. We already see the outline of this elite group. If a half-ape like me can think about eventual cool and useful things to do on an astronomical scale, to scale my agency up, they ought to be able to feel it already. It might be akin to Anders Sandberg's plan. As you can see, in 10k years Sandberg plans to not only contain multitudes but let them out, which is to say, there'll be some big N of Sandberg copies doing various fancy things that'll require substantial compute and matter (seeing as all low-hanging fruit will be picked before then). Altman observes, correctly, that there's lotta energy in the universe – but not so "lotta" as to make the question of apportionment moot. N Sandbergs are N-1 plebs who don't get equal agency to a sandberg copyclan.

Crucially, Sandberg expects his copies to broadly share the same value function, thus he is more than happy to share with them his allotted fraction of the Cosmic Endowment. Barring copies, I'd bet he'd be equally happy with people sharing his philosophical outlook, aesthetic and interests; and probably personal friends, relatives and such (though I'd trust him to not be obscenely clannish). Obviously, that selects against 99% or more of the Earth's population.

Sandberg is just a public speaker – but we can expect actual AGI profiteers to reason along the same lines, and be more clannish at that. And are they wrong?

Suppose we naively equalize this power, or just adapt current political institutions to it, such that in a few generations a plebeian can secure resources to start his own copyclan and bite off some share of the light cone. What would they make of it? Would they not devolve into puddles of high-maintenance hedonium? Or, worse, would they not spill into ugly rat races over artificially scarce artifacts to secure positional goods, invent increasingly absurd sports, flaunt their cognitive limitations, vote for some even more buffoonish Trumps, and generally mode-collapse into God-monkeys replaying behavioral loops from Savannah? Worst of all, would they not succumb to Moloch in His basest form, the Blight from Sandberg's own worldbuilding exercise, like Scott warned in his meditation?

I'm less of an elitist than you, and you're far from the worst offender, but frankly it's very hard for me to imagine that, if I were to make the decision that people upstream of of Altman or Hassabis will soon be positioned to make, I'd have the heart to play Prometheus. I would, however, try to spread the prerequisites of high agency. I'd be enticing baseline humans to partake of Ambrosia, the Fruit of Knowledge and the water of Mnemosyne before giving them Fire.

But that's only in hopes of increasing the share of actors who'd be motivated and capable to do interesting things with what they can take – in other words, who'd be capable of being reasoned with and similar to me, similar enough to not have great regrets about ceding effectively the whole light cone to them. In terms of outcomes, it's not that different from inflating my own clan or copyclan, only more humane (and local traditionalists would say it's actually more evil than just letting them die). And the chance of success is lower – as you say, «unlikely due to lack of public buy-in».

Power dynamics do not send people who'd take such risks out of idealism or aesthetic preferences to the top.

Conveniently, utilitarians tell us that human lives, happiness points and QALYs are fungible, so it makes little difference on the cosmic scale if you uplift the current 8 billion half-apes, or let them expire (but ethically, e.g. doubling down on addictive entertainment production, SusTainaBility propaganda, birth control and child substitutes and industrializing this novel Canadian practice of recommending euthanasia to unhappy poor people), and generate a more aligned population from the small chosen seed.

The big difference lies in odds of success, so the choice is straightforward – even without the brute consideration of kin preference.

Suppose we naively equalize this power, or just adapt current political institutions to it, such that in a few generations a plebeian can secure resources to start his own copyclan and bite off some share of the light cone. What would they make of it? Would they not devolve into puddles of high-maintenance hedonium? Or, worse, would they not spill into ugly rat races over artificially scarce artifacts to secure positional goods, invent increasingly absurd sports, flaunt their cognitive limitations, vote for some even more buffoonish Trumps, and generally mode-collapse into God-monkeys replaying behavioral loops from Savannah? Worst of all, would they not succumb to Moloch in His basest form, the Blight from Sandberg's own worldbuilding exercise, like Scott warned in his meditation?

Yeah, but that doesn't preclude giving them, say, equivalent of Earth's worth of resources. It doesn't necessitate murdering them by restricting anti-aging or mind uploading tech.

If a half-ape like me can think about eventual cool and useful things to do on an astronomical scale, to scale my agency up, they ought to be able to feel it already.

I don't expect there to be that much interesting stuff to do in Reality. Space ~undifferentiated at scale. Agency = compute.

I'm less of an elitist than you, and you're far from the worst offender, but frankly it's very hard for me to imagine that, if I were to make the decision that people upstream of of Altman or Hassabis will soon be positioned to make, I'd have the heart to play Prometheus. I would, however, try to spread the prerequisites of high agency. I'd be enticing baseline humans to partake of Ambrosia, the Fruit of Knowledge and the water of Mnemosyne before giving them Fire.

What would that involve?

Conveniently, utilitarians tell us that human lives, happiness points and QALYs are fungible, so it makes little difference on the cosmic scale if you uplift the current 8 billion half-apes, or let them expire (but ethically, e.g. doubling down on addictive entertainment production, SusTainaBility propaganda, birth control and child substitutes and industrializing this novel Canadian practice of recommending euthanasia to unhappy poor people), and generate a more aligned population from the small chosen seed.

I think most would agree that killing someone, to swap them for someone new, is not good.

Maybe it's copium, but I really don't believe that it's likely. It's a coherent view, and it does make sense from purely selfish perspective, sorta - but moral intuitions would scream. I mean, really? (not literal) post-scarcity achieved, now let's go kill everyone except close family and such? Kill actual living 10B humans, replace with new instances, personally designed?

All of that motivated by just wanting to grab, say, 10% more resources (otherwise allocated equally between existing humans)?

Anyway. From Perfect Imperfection:

- Yes. - She took a breath. - Take advantage of it. These are the privileges of your position. The ease of escaping into bliss, into places of absolute peace. Reverse the way you think: it's not you who moves in the world, it's the world that moves in front of you, like a perforated tape, and you choose on which part to latch the reader of your soul.

- Stahs [standard homo sapiens]. - He patted the horse on the neck. - I am a stahs. An aristocrat. Is that how I should think?

- Exactly. What, you don't like the word? Aristocracy is necessary.

- You are attempting to freeze culture in an artificial state.

- To freeze man. Humanity.

- It all amounts to the same thing.

- Does this outrage you? Why does it?

- I don't know. It seems to me some kind of... calculating, ruthless. Social engineering. It has a bad connotation.

- Didn't they tell you, every Progress inevitably gravitates towards UI.

- They said. Actually... you told me.

- Ah. - She raised her eyes to the starless sky. - Me. Well, yes. So you know - if it wasn't for Civilization, you would have found here after the resurrection only phoebes [posthumans] and inclusions; there would be no more stahs. Well, maybe a few zoological specimens.

- But did you have to go straight into all these pseudo-feudal rituals?

- There wasn't much choice. In an inf economy, in an economy of arbitrary distribution of infinitesimals, feudalism remains a stable system. Democracy - not. Is it democracy that you feel sorry for?

(...)

It appeared that she had gone all the way: the sun setting over the ocean, the golden beach, the white stones of the boardwalk, the warm wind above shaking the plumes of palm trees.

The beach was not yet empty, dozens of tanned nude people were walking along the wave boundary or playing volleyball. A girl with a dog stopped at the steps leading to the boardwalk and gawked at Adam and Angelica - she probably noticed their condensation. Zamoyski winked at her. She whistled at the dog and they ran on, child and animal. (...)

They ordered milkshakes. From the waitress's demeanor, her naked nervousness, her quick, stealthy glances, her artificial precision of speech, Adam inferred that she recognized the stahs in them.

When she left, he looked around the boardwalk and the beach. He looked for signs of tension and agitation in the behavior of the beachgoers - the recent war with the Deformants, the current one - with the Suzeren, these massacres of people from the ripped apart Ports... But nothing. A postcard resort.

How much of the information about these meta-physical clashes ever leaks into the cultural soil of HS Civilization, to the very bottom? Gnosis doesn't censor it, after all; it's all floating around in Plateau. But apparently the enstahs don't care much.

But you have to admit: they live luxuriously - in the luxuries of the 21st century.

- How many of them do you think have citizenship of Civilization?

- Probably none. - Angelika shrugged her shoulders.

- Do you remember what you told me then, in the clearing, under the moon? About the rules of Civilization and feudalism?

- Aha.

- "Because to me it looks", he waved his hand, "like the twenty-first century, right down to the marrow of its democratic bones."

- Well. Ninety-nine percent most of the time live as you lived in the twenty-first, after all, this is what our Civilization is based on, we must have a strong cultural foundation, a certainty of normality. But above these ninety-nine percent are the stahs, there is the whole hierarchy of Civilization, the Lodges and the Emperor and the Gnosis and the prohibition laws. Well, then, this political structure that makes the twenty-first century possible - now it was Angelika who embraced the landscape with a broad gesture - this structure is feudal in its essence.

- You can't live in democracy and feudalism at the same time. It is an absurdity of sorts. They quarrel with each other in every detail, in language even.

- Really? After all, in your time feudalism has already begun to overtake democracy. Don't make such a face. You knew. The greater the power of the intellect - and therefore of money - the lesser the power of the majority.

- You were well indoctrinated by the Jesuits. And the facts - what are they? He looked at the beachgoers.

- Stupid sheep herded by enlightened shepherds from the heights of the Curve. How nicely they play! How happy they are! How wonderfully tanned! How nicely fattened! We'll step in before bedtime, stroke their heads, they'll lick our legs, make us feel better - and let them continue to play carelessly.

- Isn't this what the paradise of democracy looked like in your day?

- Democracy. Repeat the word. And those here? They don't have the right to vote, they're not citizens, they don't -.

- But they don't want to be citizens! As stahs they would be restricted by Tradition. And yes - they are absolutely free. Civilization does not constrain them. They can be whatever they wish. Do whatever they desire. Do nothing if they desire it. Inf fulfills their dreams, inf gives them security.

- And what do they do? They lie on the beaches.

- And what did they do in your day? They drank through their allowances in neighborhood parks. - She laughed. - Fren is the same, only the laziness is more luxurious.

- But why is citizenship something that is bought? Even if they wanted to, they couldn't afford it.

- And how do you distinguish such a decision from hundreds of other temporary whims, fulfilled on a word? How do you make them feel that citizenship and politics are more than just another inf game?

- In such a culture they grew up, what do you expect from them?

- But nothing! This is just a man's natural state!

- After all, you can see it, she resumed more quietly. - Just look at them. Progress itself is undemocratic. Take a look at the Curve: up over here, down there. The universe is undemocratic. There is no such livable universe at all that doesn't enforce a Perfect Form, doesn't impose a hierarchy. Democracy goes against the laws of physics. And subconsciously they know it, they all know it.

I think the nature of jobs and work will shift, but the marginal value of humans to other humans will on average be higher than the costs of survival. As long as some non-misanthropic humans retain economic value then it will spread outward from them. If AI is the only one controlling economic value, then all bets are off.

A short story to illustrate:

God-Emperor Franz has all the economic value. He wants an advisor and a semi-subserviant friend to talk with about god emperor related issues. Everyone else could be robots and Franz would not care, but it is important that his advisor and friend is a real person. Since Franz has all the economic value he has to pay some amount to share some with his friend so that his friend isn't miserable. Franz shares a minuscule fraction of his economic value, enough to pay for all his friend's food and housing.

His friend has this minuscule salary, but one day Franz discovers that his friend is still not happy. Franz finds out that his friend wants to have a wife and family, but he can't afford them with his minuscule salary. Franz decides that he doesn't want to have to deal with constant requests for increasing his friend's salary. Franz grants his friend .001% of all the economic value. His friend is blown away by the generosity. This is trillions of times greater than the salary he was receiving before.

Many centuries (or millenia) go by, and Franz is very happy being the god emperor, and his friend is happy for many years as well. One day Franz notices that his friend is angry. "What anger's you, friend?" His friend responds "It is just the constant complaining of my second son's 5th kingdom. They ask why they can't receive more of an allotment of economic value. They spit on your generosity, and ask why you can't grant more. Even after I kill all the people of that generation and resettle it with new poors they seem to get the same idea in their heads again and again."

Franz spends some time thinking on this issue. The problem will keep occurring as long as he only gives away a fraction of his economic value. His friend will continue to be upset by people asking for more. However if he gives away all of his economic value he won't be the god-emperor. In the end he decided to give 50%-1 units of his economic value away. He will always be the god emperor with the most economic value. But no one could possibly expect him to give away more.

Franz and his friend live happilly every after. However, on the fringes of the human galaxy, planetary wars are constantly fought and waged over the scraps of economic value flowing outwards from the center. Billions of lives are extinguished every day in the unending wars. But their complains never reach the ears of the emperor or his advisor. The complaints don't even get close, there are at least 6 degrees of separation from anyone that even knows about these complaints and the emperor's advisor. A secret cabal of police and enforcers maintains these 6 degrees of separation at all times. The leaders of this cabal know that if such complaints were ever to reach the emperor ... then the emperor might go looking for a new friend who doesn't want a family.

This is how I see it. After "the moment", your future will be a binary of whether you're inside or outside the circle — whether you know or are related to Emperor Franz. The outsiders go extinct. But for the insiders, it's just a population bottleneck. They gradually dissipate their wealth among relatives, friends, and descendants, spiralling into an unthinkably vast inheritance and patronage network.

So the future is not 5000 tech bazillionaires cackling and drinking space wine served by butler androids. There will still be a society. Its population will have been replaced. A similar thing happened to English lower classes in early modern England, I've read; they were gradually replaced by descendants of the upper classes, excepting some fetching X chromosomes.

This is assuming human civilization doesn't shed humans like the outgrown husk of a germinating seed, of course.

I'd read a short story from the secret police POV. Cool hypothetical world.

Imagine a text-based 160 IQ AGI, akin to GPT-3, was introduced today. How much impact would it really have?

  • Private sector in areas with low regulation would see incredible productivity gains.

  • Public sector would continue to trundle along as is, completely oblivious to technological advances.

  • Regulated industries would still be bottle-necked by the law and stuck waiting for the government to move, if they move at all.

It already is the case that you can get unlimited video entertainment for $10/month, while healthcare, education and housing costs continue to rise. AGI can't change the law or force itself to be used (unless you're talking about a different kind of AGI than I am).

I can imagine a world where most people's work can be automated, but for various reasons, it isn't. So I guess this is a vote for option 2, considering we're sort of there already.

"160 IQ AGI" and "akin to GPT-3" are contradictory descriptions.

I read that as “website with I/O similar to GPT-3, but with actual 160 IQ.”

All lead to option 3.

Options 1 and 2 just apply huge burdens and store up resentments between the de facto 2 classes, while at the same time removing all selection mechanisms for the underclass, biologically, culturally, in family customs, even personal habits. Ever aspect of these people is left, prey to entropic build-up and degradation. This is de facto extermination, just slowly. Unless there is some way to reverse that entropic build up, which requires not only a society and culture that is foolproof and builds beneficial habits for those who are useless and know it while also requiring germline gene correction/editing deployed enmass. This is the minimum threshold for options 1 and 2 to succeed. Note that this is - perfect gene editing and utopian society that has fixed all problems endemic in the present day and historical underclasses.

Option 3 has the same problems as options 1 and 2, except now the very mechanism of the operation of state is itself now unable to undergo any selection, and will, unless we have divine intervention and achieve a perfect immortal utopia, collapse. Eventually.

The only sane way to respond to anyone suggesting UBI or any other such measures is as if they harbour genocidal impulses towards those who would be in the UBI dependant class. They either do, or they don't care. UBI implemented across the world is obscene and horrifying to such an extent that it makes even the holocaust look like a practice run in human destruction..

Please see my response here:

https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42541?context=8#context

I am not convinced thst this isn't UBI by the backdoor, and embeds all the dysgenic and totalitarian criticims I have of UBI via your resource block mechanism.

Yes I agree, the people in charge may very well not be Smart and Good. I must clarify that I don't argue for 3 out of fear of dysgenics, rather that dysgenics will make 3 the de facto outcome , even if it starts with 1 or 2 or even 3.

Destroying the poor can happen via drome tech, but it can also happen but removing selection pressure on their subpopulation leading to a proliferation of unhealthy alleles, bad habits, and self destructive culture. All can be propped up and sustaine by the pumping in of energy, food, resources, healthcare, and management, etc from the glorious and benevolent UBI providing Smart and Good. Meanwhile the poor degrade and are harmed, untill such time that the UBI either cannot sustain them anymore or is removed and then they mostly all die I guess.

As a thought experiment attempt to illustrate this point consider if we could medicate all the negative effects of say, sickle cell anaemia but didn't do anything about malaria. If we isolate the population and prevent breeidng with external populations and then leave them to it, pumping in sickle cell meds, for a long time, many many many generations, and then suddenly go "surprise" and stop the meds what happens to their population?

What happens if none of them know how to farm or hunt or even cook too, as prepared food was given to them for the last several generations? then you also stop providing the food at the same time.

Ditto that for everything else that's benficial.

Add in maybe they've also been encouraged to take lots of highly addictive drugs too, don't worry they won't ever run out and if you want to wuit here are these withdrawal meds? How many are addicts?then suddenly one day, no more drugs no more withdrawl meds?

So they suddently have no meds for their crippling and ultimately lethal inherited genetic diseases, don't have energy, food, and are going through withdrawal. Fixing any of these problems is not in living memory of being in living memory to their entire class, so how many make it out alive the other end?

Then the Smart and Good don't need drones, they can just metaphorically club the survivors to death with 2x4s and theres the "great cleansing" of the non Smart and Good achieved via UBI.

I think the realistic option is some flavor of (3). We already see this in the real world.

Consider an oil well in Iraq or Sudan, protected by the US military or PMCs, primarily constructed from parts designed and built in Texas or Germany and exporting oil to global markets. The local people have essentially no economic value to the people operating this well. Mostly they don't interact, unless someone on the oil well wants to try Sudanese food.

This is economically pretty equivalent to the scenario where 1% of people generate 99% of production that you've described.

Wouldn't the huge collapse in aggregate demand caused by the withdrawal of billions of people from the market sink a lot of those rich people?

No. I think you don't understand the role of aggregate demand. Here's the classical Keynesian story:

  1. Exogenous shock brings real productivity below real wages.

  2. Workers refuse to take a pay cut due to nominal wage stickiness. Net result is workers who could be productive stop working and total output drops.

  3. Raise AD to produce inflation, thereby tricking these workers into taking a (real) pay cut.

You've already assumed these workers cannot be productive which invalidates step 2 of Keynesian economics. There is no output drop. Their real productivity is zero, therefore there is no possible amount of inflation which can reduce their real wages low enough to put them back to work.

(There are other flavors of Keynesian economics which use other forms of nominal rigidity, but I can't see how any of them are applicable. E.g. here's a very plausible one: bank lends you money to buy some CRE but insists on you maintaining a certain LTV. If you lease it out at a lower rent, LTV necessarily goes up. If it goes unoccupied, you can plausibly delay the assessment that would result in triggering your LTV covenant and having to pony up cash to the bank. Hence many commercial landlords will let buildings go unoccupied.)

I think one of the major differences between Sudan and the USA in this scenario is that very few Americans are subsistence farmers who can take care of themselves, assuming they’re left alone enough. They have to be provided for by someone either in exchange for money or due to moral obligation.

Why can't the non-wealthy Americans just maintain an economy similar to the current one, while the tiny number of wealthy people live on their estates with armies of flying robot butlers and engage in no trade?

Two reasons:

  1. Usage of finite resources. Farmland, minerals, etc. Sheer space - being able to look out of the window and see nothing you don't own appeals to people. I'm reminded of Isaac Asimov's Solaria, a planet where people have lived on vast estates for so long that physically perceiving or interacting with another person repulses them.

  2. I think people like controlling other people. They want to make sure everyone thinks and does Good things, and refrains from Bad things, regardless of whether this actually affects their own interests.

At this point we're talking about a breakaway civilization and the wealthy don't need most of those resources.

Jeff Bezos current plan for getting resources is the following:

  1. Deliver goods and services to hundreds of millions of people.

  2. Those people provide him some of their productive output.

  3. The amount in (2) exceeds (1) by a marginal amount, which Bezos keeps.

The flip side of (3) is that of the resources Bezos controls today, the vast majority are devoted to creating value for the world rather than himself.

However, in this hypothetical the productive output of (2) is negligible. Bezos doesn't need to trade with the world anymore, he can just make whatever he wants with his own robots factorio style. He has no need for the vast resources he previously controlled in order to serve the world - just whatever he and his buddies need.

Sure, but my point is that ‘need’ and ‘want’ are two very different beasts and ‘want’ is capable of expanding pretty much indefinitely.

Or to put it another way, in your scenario it’s Bezos and his buddies who decide what they need, not the breakaway group, and I bet they’re going to disagree.

I don't think we're disagreeing strongly. In my comment, Bezos is the breakaway civilization.

But I think real world examples of groups with massively disparate technology levels are illustrative. For the most part, Exxon does not steal subsistence farmland unless there's oil literally underneath it. Modern industrialized humans generally don't seek out resources useful to monkeys just for the heck of stealing them.

In fact, the general trend as tech levels increase is for humans to use land more intensely - modern cities as a real example, arcologies surrounded by forest as the futuristic example. The primary countervailing factor in the west (but not the east!) has been antisocial behavior on the part of mainstream political actors - specifically NIMBYism and a refusal to provide effective policing that induces people to spread out and avoid destructive people. Neither of those would be much of a problem for overlord bezos.

But I think real world examples of groups with massively disparate technology levels are illustrative. For the most part, Exxon does not steal subsistence farmland unless there's oil literally underneath it. Modern industrialized humans generally don't seek out resources useful to monkeys just for the heck of stealing them.

That’s fair, I hadn’t thought about it like that. Big aristocratic estates have historically been a thing - maybe our conception of what’s valuable changed, or the social acceptability of chasing it to the last drop. I’ll have to think about it.

Growing potatoes really isn't that difficult, however, they won't be allowed to do so.

Tractors and synthetic fertilizers makes it pretty easy now, but without those growing potatoes is pretty difficult. You don't average 8 kids per woman and zero population growth at the same time if agriculture is easy. Just take away the oil and Malthus can finally stop spinning in his grave.

We'd still have brown coal. You can run cars on coke, no problem if you want.

We've already seen the mass obsolescence of humans. The result was to push people towards the service economy while also increasing social dysfunction among the former blue-collar working class. Political outcomes actually led to the reduction of social programs under the auspices of neoliberalism and Reaganism, as the blue-collar class had lost the organizational potential that their former labor involvement had granted them. Probably we will see more people employed in the service economy as well as a 'shadow economy' while the real economy falls under the sway of capitalists and their robotic labor forces.

All roads lead to no.3 IMO.

As you mentioned, UBI would likely cause class conflict. The capital-owning class already has an advantage since they can buy support from whatever remains of the state apparatus and fund traditional human professional soldiers. They could probably also print out powerful autonomous weapons as well. I think they'd win a war quite quickly.

Implicit UBI is already sort of what they have in many of the Gulf countries. The public sector is very large and there are fairly generous welfare policies, a great deal of work is 'automated' by guest laborers from poorer countries. But why does the govt go to such an effort to make an implicit UBI? They are afraid of being overthrown by the people for being grotesquely corrupt/autocratic/not Islamic enough. Saudi Arabia spent hundreds of billions in extra welfare when the Arab Spring happened, they were scared. If they had an option to crush their citizenry, that would totally change the game. The mere knowledge they could do that would change how they operated. They'd act more heavy-handedly, provide fewer and fewer benefits, substitute bribes with fear.

If the bulk of your population isn't contributing anything to your economy/military but draining resources and demanding protection, it makes sense from the perspective of the state to kill them off or expel them. Then you get whatever chunk of farmland, civilian industry and housing stock back, to be reprocessed into something more useful. That might be military industry, giant supercomputer complexes or giant nuke-proof underground factories/redoubts. If it's more efficient to be without a large population, then over time civilization will move in that direction.

It's also hard to see what the structure of the 'elite' would be like.

I'd imagine it would be an oligarchy where each actor has their own industrial base in a certain part of the country, working together for now so they don't have to be sovereign and totally self-sufficient. The wealth they'd hold would be that they have command codes over many of the robots that do everything. Of course, this would be an unstable equilibrium since each actor has an incentive to remove all threats. Presumably this is all happening in an era of quick technological development, so the first to develop a powerful new weapon/AI would have a major advantage.

Eventually we'd end up with the last man standing, sovereign over the whole world and all the stars he could get his hands on. Maybe he'd have a family, friends or people frozen cryonically. But everyone else is totally dependent on him.

I don’t think automation will, in the short run, render the majority of people unemployed. All these fancy robots are probably going to require constant maintenance for a very long time, and finding the people to do that maintenance will be a bigger challenge than structural unemployment.

I do expect a long term trend of people who had previously worked in, eg, foodservice, moving over to work in nursing homes, but I expect even that to be overstated.

Now as for lower level white collar work, these people can mostly be retrained to do other jobs. Now a lot of them won’t, they’ll mooch off their parents or partner and smoke weed, but society’s response to that will be limited to op Ed’s. And even the reduction in white collar jobs is likely overstated because white collar workers will use regulatory barriers to keep a real human doing a lot of this stuff, or at least supervising an ai that does it.

I don' think automation will have a net-destructive effect on jobs--that is, new jobs will replace old ones. But to go along with the hypothetical, probably a continuation of what we have now: more welfare spending, but also occasional on-time universal remittances like in 2020-2021, but it will not be a UBI.

Eat The Poor. Catch-all for socialist visions of capitalist dystopia (eg. Manna, Elysium) in which the poor are either slowly or quickly genocided, or waste away in awful conditions on earth while a small number of wealthy capital owners continue humanity.

Likely not because in a consumerist capitalist society elites derive their wealth from the lower classes. Who is clicking those Facebook, Google, or Instagram ads? There will be more business to business activity, bypassing the consumer altogether, such as Facebook selling ad space to NGOs and multinationals, Amazon selling cloud storage to big companies, Microsoft servers, etc.

There will always be some scarcity, such as social status or between the merely rich and ultra-wealthy.

The critical point is when the expected economic value of a typical human goes negative. That's when things start to go screwy, and I worry we're crossing that line soon.

Presently deriving wealth from large numbers of the lower classes is the most common route, but what if you could derive your wealth from large numbers of robots instead? Unless the aggregate poor can sell something to the aggregate not-poor, cash will flow away from the system until the population dies out.

This obviously concludes with Mongolian supremacy, since they have land to build with and fewer mouths to feed. Steppe Nomads at it again

The critical point is when the expected economic value of a typical human goes negative.

I'm a little confused. Would you agree that the expected economic value of a typical human is positive today? That is, the average human produces more output over the course of their lives than they consume. It seems like requiring this go negative is predicting a large decrease in the average human's economic productivity. Why do you think humans are going to be much less economically in a future with more automation than they are today?

I agree that present-day EV is positive.

Humans take maintenance: food, water, medicine, education, entertainment. Even if you'll accept being a subsistence farmer in the wilderness, that costs land. I'm predicting that, post-automation, most humans will be unable to do enough useful work to pay for this upkeep. That is: anyone able to provide you with food or water or farmland, could get what they want more cheaply by paying for a robot. At that point it's economically efficient to do away with the human. That's what I'm worried about.

That is: anyone able to provide you with food or water or farmland, could get what they want more cheaply by paying for a robot.

This confuses absolute advantage and comparative advantage. Suppose that there are two jobs, which I shall imaginatively call Job 1 and Job 2, plus two people, whom I shall imaginatively call Person A and Person B.

Suppose that Person A can be better at both Job 1 and Job 2, yet production is optimised by Person A doing the job with the lowest opportunity cost for them, and Person B doing the other job.

This is why e.g. there are cognitively loaded jobs that aren't done by the highest IQ people. Employing Terence Tao as my accountant would have advantages over employing some mere 130 IQ moron, but that doesn't make it economically viable. The same is true for an AI, even if that's a 2000 IQ AI.

Both you and @Gillitrut have cited comparative advantage. I don't think that saves us here. Comparative advantage means you need to be willing to do some job for less than the cost of operating a robot to do that job. In a high-automation world, that cost will be very cheap -- the robots are building robots. What I mean by "expected economic value of a typical human goes negative" is that the price someone would be willing to pay for a human to do that job is less than the price of the resources it takes to maintain a human life.

Imagine I'm Cyberpunk Genghis Khan. I have robots that produce everything of economic value to me, including art, food, and military might. I'm keeping Mongolia as a nature preserve, and some subsistence farmers are trying to live out in some forest. Why should I let them? They produce some valuable widget, but they need to be allowed to keep at least enough farmland to keep them alive. I could have my robots build that same widget while occupying half the space.

If they press their comparative advantage, they could produce widgets with one third the space they need to live, and then die because humans require upkeep and industrial automation can drive the value of labor below that upkeep cost.

Both you and @Gillitrut have cited comparative advantage. I don't think that saves us here. Comparative advantage means you need to be willing to do some job for less than the cost of operating a robot to do that job.

This is a (common!) misunderstanding of comparative advantage. If humans could produce some good or do some job for a lower marginal cost than a robot then the humans don't just have a comparative advantage, they have an absolute advantage. A group (say humans) can have comparative advantage relative to some other group (say robots), even if the second group can produce everything more cheaply than the first group, as long as the second group cannot produce literally everything it needs.

In a high-automation world, that cost will be very cheap -- the robots are building robots. What I mean by "expected economic value of a typical human goes negative" is that the price someone would be willing to pay for a human to do that job is less than the price of the resources it takes to maintain a human life.

Imagine I'm Cyberpunk Genghis Khan. I have robots that produce everything of economic value to me, including art, food, and military might. I'm keeping Mongolia as a nature preserve, and some subsistence farmers are trying to live out in some forest. Why should I let them? They produce some valuable widget, but they need to be allowed to keep at least enough farmland to keep them alive. I could have my robots build that same widget while occupying half the space.

I detect a tension between these two sections. On the one hand, robots are so cheap we can mass manufacture them to do any new labor as the need arises. On the other hand, robots are so rare and expensive that only the rich own and have access to them. If robots are so cheap, why can't the workers making widgets (or farming, or whatever) buy robots to do their own jobs instead and profit thereby? If robots are so expensive, how is it there are enough to fill literally every labor demand?

The subsistence farmers can farm and trade and build things among themselves as if the society with the robots around them didn't exist and they were living in 2022 (or 1900).

If the subsistence farmers have robots, they can use the robots to farm, and they're fine. The scenario only becomes a problem if the subsistence farmers don't have robots. But if they don't have robots, then, among themselves, humans farming and trading does have a comparative advantage over robots, and trading among themselves is as economical as it was in 2022.

Imagine I'm Cyberpunk Genghis Khan.... Why should I let them?

If you're cyberpunk Genghis Khan, that's the same sort of problem as regular Genghis Khan. If the only thing keeping the peasants from being killed by you is whether trading with them is more economical than killing them, that's a scenario that can and has happened in the modern day.

There's a difference between "peasants die because they can't trade with rich people and the rich people kill them", and "peasants die because they can't trade with rich people, so they can't make enough money to eat". The latter scenario is the one that's in question; the former is as old as humanity.

Comparative advantage means you need to be willing to do some job for less than the cost of operating a robot to do that job.

No, it means that the opportunity cost of operating the robot for that job is higher than using it for some other job (maybe something that humans can't do) and the expected (economic) profit of paying you for the job is positive.

Let's go back to the simple example. Suppose that Person A is a robot. Hiring Person B over Person A for Job 2 means that the opportunity cost of using the robot for Job 2 is higher than the opportunity cost of hiring Person B over Person A for Job 1. Reducing the accounting cost of operating Person A to do Job 2 can change the rationality of using Person A for Job 2 over Job 1, but it doesn't change the comparative advantage of Person A for Job 1.

This is the same reason why high productivity countries like the US and Western Europe/Japan/etc. don't just produce everything. If I am the sole CEO of Nike and I can have my design team in Germany and my manufacturing team in Vietnam, even if my German team could do both better, it makes sense for me to invest in both countries. Insofar as I am using my German team to manufacture the clothing, I am not using them to design new apparel, production techniques etc., which is wasteful.

Or again, go back to the Terence Tao example. Suppose that he has an IQ of 300 rather than just 180 or whatever he has. Do you start hiring him to do your accounts now?

"Ah, but I'm talking about being able to produce lots of Terence Taos at a cheap cost." Ok then, but this increases society's capacity to pay more people to do work. And again, you could use those Tao clones to do your accounts... Or things that Tao can do and your accountant can't. Which is more rational?

What you need for automation to make humans redundant is a fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0 or lower. That could happen! For example, jobs could become so cognitively complex than you'd need an IQ of 150 just to keep up. That's why, even today in the developed world, it's extremely hard to get a job if you have an IQ below 80.

On the other hand, automation often increases the marginal productivity of labour. People who can cannot write coherent sentences and cannot do long multiplication can do what were once cognitively loaded jobs, due to tech like Grammarly, calculators, word processors etc.

The sensible conclusion is that we don't know. The sensible practical inference is that we should prepare for both outcomes. However, to do the latter, we need to actually understand the problem: it would be something like excess complexity in the workplace, not cheap robots.

If you can spin up a new Terrence Tao clone for $0.05 per hour, then no human who is not more capable than Terrence Tao in some dimension can earn more than $0.05 per hour. I would create enough Terrence Taos do do all the mathematics I want, and then create some more to do my accounting. The opportunity cost is the cost of the hardware it would take to run such a model, and hardware costs are already falling exponentially even without AI electrical engineers.

Automation increases society's capacity to pay people for work, but not the economic need to do so. The robots are being built and maintained by robots. The "critical point" I describe comes when anything that a sub-120-IQ can do, can also be done by a robot for $0.05 per hour.

"A fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0" is exactly what I'm talking about. Experientially, this looks like slowly raising the minimum IQ it takes to earn enough to survive until almost all people are excluded, and population massively shrinking as a direct result.

Increased labor productivity: advanced chess obituary. There comes a point where Human + AI is worse than AI alone. Rather, it's an anomaly when a human is able to meaningfully assist an AI to accomplish some task.

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I think two different positions are being equated here.

First is the question of whether humans will be productive enough to sustain their own existence, that is, whether humans will create value in excess of what they consume. This has been the case for probably all of human history and it's hard for me to comprehend what could happen to the human species that would cause a massive decrease in productivity such that we would be unable to sustain ourselves by subsistence farming.

Second is the question of whether it will be more efficient to automate various kinds of labor as compared to having humans doing them. That is, whether it will be cheaper in price per unit output to have a robot farm some patch of land (or whatever) as compared to having a human laborer do it.

The key point is that both these things can be true. It can be the case, simultaneously, that (1) humans who engage in subsistence farming are net-EV positive and (2) robots doing subsistence farming instead would have a higher EV.

As long as humans have a comparative advantage (equivalently, as long as automation is not costless) there will be things we can find for humans to do. And if automation is costless, then why wouldn't everyone use it to fully satisfy their desires?

Unless the aggregate poor can sell something to the aggregate not-poor

Status goods. "hand made" is already used this way.

One obvious thing (though far from an utopian answer): prostitution. (and if people missed this, then then they missed also other things)

Odds are, if you can replace people doing physical labor, your tech level allows replacing prostitutes with cyborg prostitutes that are much prettier, cause no drama. never talk back and feel just as real.

But most people just don’t want to get into the Experience Machine.

Cyberwhores wouldn't be an experience machine, just better prostitutes.

Are you sure about that?

Well, maybe Zoomers are built different. She did say it had never happened before.

Well, the expected worth of having a child is negative right? Back in the good old days you would breed free labor for the farm, but now in the burbs kids are an enjoyable economic drain. Like a really, really expensive 18-year long movie ticket.

Or are you saying that the average person at least "makes up" for their cost in the growth and value they provide? And that maybe we're crossing that threshold?

If you're valuing things purely from the perspective of hedonistic pleasure, sure. Worth noting that you might be concerned with a future beyond your own lifespan...

Yep, that's what I mean. From the perspective of a country, humans are the economically most efficient way to get most things done. E.g. China can do interesting things with 1.4b, "GDP per capita" is still a meaningful metric.

Now, say we go through an automation foom. You can grow lots of crops and feed lots of people very cheaply -- but what do you get in return? Starving the masses is a bad idea because you want to preserve your labor force -- but your labor force is all robots now, so what does it matter? All else equal, a country with a small population will outcompete a country with a large population.

I don't like this, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

One thing that a world where robots build everything cheaply would also achieve is that the cost of robots would go down as well.

It might be just possible that in such a world one can afford to buy their own manufacturing 'bots and put them to productive use themselves and maintain their own livelihood that way.

Especially if mass automation drives the costs of most basic goods down to pennies.

A long time ago I did read a story about a dystopian world where robotic production was so prolific that they actually designed robots whose sole purpose was to consume goods to keep employment high.

Not likely to happen, but interesting to think about.

A long time ago I did read a story about a dystopian world where robotic production was so prolific that they actually designed robots whose sole purpose was to consume goods to keep employment high.

Sounds like Brave New World with an extra step - humans made redundant, not pacified.

The story was actually about a particular robot consumer who ends up organizing a revolution because he was unhappy with his programming.

But yeah, it's weird to think that someone would build a robot for the purpose of, e.g. sitting in a theater to watch a movie so as to make sure someone is paying for a ticket.

But then, it is a little weird that humans do that.

There is actually an option (5) that might be the most realistic. Price of goods go to zero in an automated world. Status goods would still exists and likely be quite expensive. But if you have robots that make robots who do the work why wouldn’t actually costs of goods approach zero? Fb/twitter for example are zero. I know their ad supported. Other goods have fallen in price like computers. I think a broader freemium model might end up working for a lot of goods.

I think this is the most reasonable model: marginal costs trend to zero on most essentials, but never truly zero to ensure a some level of allocation efficiency. Eventually we decide that we can either give things to those without, or that payment infrastructure is just too much effort for things like internet searches and email. A century ago food scarcity was a real concern, but practically nobody in the West suffers from a lack of access to calories in 2022 (although the nutrition of those calories is certainly often lacking).

A few centuries ago, wars were fought over the trade of black pepper, among other spices. The word salary has a Latin origin relating to salt as practically a method of payment. I find it ironic that both of these now sit ignored on restaurant tables and come in packets with disposable utensils that largely end up in landfills.

That said, the hedonic treadmill is a powerful thing and I can absolutely imagine future generations convincing themselves that it has actually gotten worse somehow.

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