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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3308 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How are you changing your investment/savings strategy as AI timelines get shorter? I’m still in my boring ol’ index funds but have decreased my savings rate down by 5-10%.

I know very little economics, but the popular sentiment seems to be that interest rates will get very high and raw capital will be incredibly important in a post-AGI world. Does this matter for the average person like me who just wants to be financially independent in his 40s?

If AI destroys labor prices totally then we’ll live in a very different society. Why would the majority of the population accept people who happened to be rich in 2025 staying rich forever while everyone else has to live off welfare forever? There’s no way most people will accept that deal. Manna / Elysium scenarios are unlikely, elites aren’t fast enough to cement power so absolutely, while corporations without people with disposable income to consoom product coupled with extreme AI-related deflation will lead to an asset price collapse in every class that will affect the wealthy more than the poor.

My prediction: the government will continue to create more jobs (by regulatory means in the private sector, by making firing people more expensive, and directly in the public sector) and most people will still have to work at some point.

I don't get this take at all. If we're in a world where we're basically fully labor-post scarce, that applies to defense too. If nobody needs people to operate factories, nobody needs people to fight wars either. The relevant question will be where exactly did all the power accrue? A government? A single corporation? Many corporations?

Technology has tended to consolidate power.

A stone age man might lead a band of 20. A Celtic chieftain might lead 20,000. King Louis XIV ruled 20 million. Today, Emperor Xi rules over 1 billion.

The default assumption is that the technology of the future will place ever more people under the rule of ever fewer.

That was part of the reason OpenAI started – to democratize the future. Not looking good today. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/763283865238577153

That’s the thing, the ‘evil elites’ scenario requires, in a crisis, extreme coordination between a fractured elite class in which they somehow very quickly agree to genocide the plebs and then just do it, and that just doesn’t seem likely.

Yeah, there would be no need to kill the plebs. In a future bifurcation between Eloi and Morlocks, the Eloi would simply take any resources they need and allow the Morlocks to mostly live unmolested with whatever is left.

We don't kill criminals, the homeless, the chronically unemployed etc now so I never understood why AI would change anything.

And if they are revolted against, use drone armies to suppress, etc.

This future is scarily plausible. It would require a coup in the western world, because voting.

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