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Notes -
Surely 'even faker jobs' can only be a transitional step to either eudaimonia or annihilation?
Why would govts buy voters off if voters can no longer riot and overthrow the govt, if the power of millions of people in the capital city is insignificant compared to Slaughterbot Swarm #873? Why would leading corporations care what regulations there are if they can send their slaughterbots in and turn the regulators into meat paste? Or less dramatic scenes of 'super-charismatic AI explains the best course of action to take and calmly, politely shows why your particular idea, senator, would be expensive, risky, embarrassing and actually produce the reverse of what you wanted + some huge kickbacks to sweeten the deal.'
The key factor here is power transitioning from human armies to machine armies, leadership roles being taken by AIs. The rich/AIs can always renegotiate the deal later when they're more powerful. Who would trust Sam Altman to uphold a deal a moment longer than self-interest dictates?
I think we should focus on dull but important outcomes over more interesting but less significant transitional stages.
I think there are a lot of inconvenient logistics and highly conflicting motivations to consider around this among elected representatives, government bureaucrats, private sector businesses (which are not just their owners but everyone else making decisions), random rich people (many of whom are reliant on consumption by the ‘99%’ for the entire value of their holdings). Mass unemployment due to AI might be only a year or two away, at what point does Elon pull the trigger? But wait - he makes cars and satellites - who controls the kill bot fleet? Armin Papperger? The DoD? There are a lot of coordination mechanics that I think make a “kill the poor” scenario unlikely, not least because the merely moderately rich would know they were next.
In general, I think the oft-made argument that welfare was implemented so that the there wasn’t a communist revolution is at best largely inaccurate.
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