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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28156 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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I think people are still stuck on the idea of "costs down, but sales prices stay the same" because they haven't really incorporated it into their world view that consumer demand may remain the same, but ability of consumers to pay those prices will drastically decline because much fewer people are in the jobs generating high enough income levels because AGI has replaced those jobs.

You can accuse AI industry people of many things, but not having thought about this kind of thing really isn't one of them. There are lots of interviews of them musing about how this could all work out. There's a wide variety of takes but few of them are "the economy is going to just be normal after the singularity except we'll be very rich".

And I really don't think this is the reasoning @FiveHourMarathon is using to call the AI bulls religious, precisely the opposite really.

So if UBI is the way forward, then the owners of the AGI industries are going to pay for that via taxation, which means they are going to (1) have to sell their $500 house for as close to $500 as they can get, not the current house prices and (2) they're just transferring the money from one hand to the other, since the money to buy the house comes from the UBI they are being taxed to pay.

If you're taking a very small piece of every financial transaction in an economy run by AIs you'll be fabulously wealthy, but thinking about this as the steady state missing a lot of the value proposition. Even ignoring that in the transitionary period where you can offer the house for $5000 in a market that lags behind the new reality, when houses can be had for a fraction of the cost then society is able to just have a lot more houses. If you take a step back and just look at what a fully automated economy actually is then if you own the backbone AIs then you can just print a giga yachts for anyone with the raw materials and the government can decide it has a monopoly on the raw materials and redistribute the proceed from selling them. Raw materials here being land, natural resources, electricity ect. When you grow the pie this much the details of how you distribute pie slices, while important, is definitely able to be overcome. The amount of abundance in such an economy would be staggering.

you can just print a giga yachts for anyone with the raw materials

That is where the sticking point is. How do I get the raw materials? Joe the guy with no job (AGI and robots automated it away) and no stocks (because he didn't get in to buying stock in the AI firms/never had the upbringing where you buy stocks) and no backup fortune is dependent on UBI (if all goes well) to live. Where does Joe, out of his UBI, get the gold, steel, energy and so forth to print a gigayacht?

When I read the handwaving about post-scarcity and AGI can just pull all this out of thin air, it does sound more akin to the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes than reality as we currently have it set up. Maybe AGI will change the world so that the guy living on a rubbish tip in a Third World slum can now access the same private beaches, luxury mansions, and gigayachts as Jeff Bezos - or maybe not.

You can accuse AI industry people of many things, but not having thought about this kind of thing really isn't one of them.

I do think there's an unconscious bias there where the thinking is predicated on "people like us, guys I know who work with me, my social bubble" and not "the guy who drives the bin lorry" because they don't understand what it's like to live in that socio-economic class.

Joe might be broke, but he still has antibiotics, vaccines, a smartphone, out of season fruits, climate control, and budget airline tickets; none of these could be had for any price 100 years ago.

Now, I don't actually think this level of AGI goes well at all, but at the limit it's everyone (or 99.99% of people) die or there's some level of redistribution that allows people to survive. In such a redistributive world it's not really implausible that even a pittance of UBI buys enormous amounts of material goods, much like a relative pittance today buys goods that a billionaire couldn't have had 100 years ago.

But would you rather be a poor person now or a billionaire 100 years ago?

Calvin Coolidge, one of the most powerful men on the planet at the time, watched his son die at 16 of an infection that you could cure for a few dollars now, and fell into a depression that lasted the rest of his life.

Stalin, one of the other most powerful men on the planet, watched his wife die at 22 from what was likely typhus, which would also be curable for a pittance nowadays, and by all accounts was never the same after her death.

A bottom 10-20% percentile American in 2026 gets to live a life of pigging out on delivery, video games and porn with a 75+ year life expectancy.

Honestly not even close tbh.

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