Personally I welcome a post scarcity economy
I would if I didn’t fear that the scarcity will then be artificial to keep groups in power. The idea is beautiful, our current direction is terrifying.
Bad news: it is going to be an artificial scarcity economy. It basically already is, we have plenty of money for everyone to live well but it is all going into hoards.
This is what the mega rich don’t seem to realize. They already have 99.9% of the wealth, but if they had 99.1% of it no one would give a shit how much money a few trust fund babies had.
We would all be able to take care of ourselves and our families. Instead they want all the wealth and are willing to kill most of the global population along with the earth to get it.
That doesn’t matter because they won’t be here by the time that happens
Whoever still has money. Either importing wealthy immigrants to replace the American market or they’ll move their products to the markets that still have money.
They’ll be making stuff for rich people.
Why would we need anyone to buy things? Remember that money is an abstraction for resources. If you can do everything with AI, then you already have all the resources you need. Whether or not someone else needs what you produce is irrelevant when you already have access to everything you could want.
Yeaaaah, the issue there is that, that is completely incompatible with our current system of capitalism. If we do not take deliberate steps to transform the system, it will collapse.
Good. The system is fucked.
Let it collapse and we can work on a new system without hundreds of years of entrenched rich elites deciding it.
Instead of collapsing like a phoenix and birthing a new better world, it will cause death, suffering, and turn us into some sort of fucked up techno fuedalism worse than we are now.
I understand the nihilism, but we need to take the broken pieces we have now and reshape them into something better, not throw them out hoping things become better for no reason. They won’t.
There is literally death, suffering, and we’re heading towards some sort of fucked up techno feudalism today. Like we don’t need a revolution for that, that’s the path we’re currently heading towards without one.
Revolution isn’t pretty but just as when we overthrew monarchs, the end result and saving of future lives justifies it.
It’s no less compatible with capitalism than any other economic system. The idea that humans are no longer needed to do any kind of work is an issue the world has never faced before.
I mean… it’s pretty compatible with leftist ideologies. Especially a moneyless form of socialism/communism
I’m an optimist, so I’ll believe one day we’ll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don’t criticize me too harshly
Hey, that’s a reasonable thing to hope. The flip side, of course, is that I’m hoping I don’t have to live through Star Trek’s idea of how the 21st century goes. They definitely got all of the details wrong, but I’m afraid the vibes are matching a little too well.
Hey, we’ve still got 2 months to the Bell Riots, and DeSantis was talking about putting all the homeless people in Florida on an island
I think it’s as relistic a future as the complete destruction of mankind, but your point of view makes life a lot more enjoyable. Here’s a nice quote to back it up:
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future” - Victor Hugo
I am also an optimist. I believe one day we’ll all be dead, and all that will remain are robots that fuel off blood, left to invade hell for the only thing that will sustain them.
With that quote I expected to open a lyric video to a metal song
While I agree, I’m skeptical that we’ll see any meaningful advance toward that end in our lifetimes.
It will get a lot worse before it gets any better
The hand has been played and trend has been set, I don’t see anything coming close to a reversal, short of gereatric nepo babies dying off but their replacements don’t look any better…
Sucks to suck
Very bleak of you
Well the facts don’t look good, what is a peasant supposed to do?
Shoot yourself?
I gotta keep it real with you chief, I think about it quite a bit.
I lack the constitution for that also that’s what regime would want you to do anyway…
why give them the pleasure when you can impose costs on them for their misconduct.
Hope your descendants have it better
Hoping for something like that without taking direction action today is naive.
Direct action won’t fix shit unless critical mass does it, so also got to spread the word about the fuckening we are enduring, most people are really not aware of the conditions on the ground beyond their personal experiences.
And what direct action would you propose?
Don’t think of people having money as an on-off switch. It’s a gradual shift, and it’s already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.
Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Further proof of this: Climate change.
Funny thing is that capitalism accidentaly solves global warming same way as it created it - turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
Cool, when is that going to start happening? Because I only see a handful of electric cars and I see a whole ton of coal power plants.
Cool, when is that going to start happening?
Apparently right now https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/05/08/a-major-turning-point-more-than-30-of-worlds-energy-now-comes-from-renewables-report-revea
Wow! More than 30%! Global warming over!
It’s a hopeful idea, but it may be too late.
Should not stop us from trying though
Agreed.
I seriously doubt it’s too late, it’s more of a question how much damage will it cause
Alternatively: too late for who?
removed by mod
The problem is that the previous accumulation of capital has centralized a lot of power in actors who have a financial incentive to stop renewables. If we could hit a big reset on everything then yes, I think renewables would win, but we’re dealing with a lot of very rich, very powerful people who really want us to keep being dependent on them.
Except numbers aren’t confirming that theory Look at Wikipedia article about growth of photovoltaics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Solar power is booming world wide, consistently since many years. At >20% annual expansion rate, the exponential growth will start putting a dent on fossil within few years.
Everywhere except countries that have subsidized non-renewables which means they’ll become dumber and polluted and regress. And these countries (the US, specifically) have nuclear weapons and a lot of authoritative policy power.
They are only slowing us down though. They really cannot stop the change, because solar power is simply cheaper than oil. Once governments stop subsidizing oil, the big oil companies will be done for if they haven’t innovated by than. That is also one of the reasons why they are slowing us down, so they can buy more time to innovate and remain on top with a new, green business model.
I hope all the big oil bosses get locked up for crimes against humanity, but I think they’ll just change their business model into something green and exploit us in some different way.
This is why they say “they’re too big to fail”.
Sort of like how Phillip Morris sells vapes now.
This is not “capitalism accidentally solves climate change”. This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way. From there, capitalism took over, as intended. For green energy to be be feasible, we needed it to get picked up by the capitalist machine, because the capitalist machine has all the power and infrastructure in place to make it into a succes.
I predict that the same thing will happen with large capacity, small size home batteries once they become economically feasible. They are on the brink of becoming profitable and once they do, they will become a huge success and help reduce energy waste.
Same thing goes for fusion, but we’re a long way off making that economically viable.
This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way
I think this oversimplifies it a lot. There were a lot of different actors involved - I’m sure a lot of development was coming both from the semiconductor industry, and from state funded research, but in the end, the greed machine (aka capitalism) takes care of further researching and scaling it to the global level.
Also it’s not like there wasn’t any money in that business years ago - even back then solar was commonly used as a remote power source in mobile applications (calculators, camping and so on). Also NASA, but this was purely state funded
Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it’s more expensive than renewables.
The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There’s a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.
Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a “bridge fuel” that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what’s been built doesn’t seem like much of a bridge because there’s no plan for ramping down natural gas.
Colour me shocked.
Did you mean to say shareholder and corporate management? Investment itself (especially diversified) is completely about long-term performance.
Yup, economics are all about “LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!” It’s infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.
These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Well that’s not true at all. The vast majority of investors are in it for the long run.
AI owners will.
And if you then go around wandering “oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want”, “that’s way too few people to fill a market”, or “and what about all the rest?”… Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).
That’s the neat part. No one.
If the rich can hire a handful of the middle class to build and maintain their robots, then they can just cut the poor and working poor out of the economy entirely, and they will be willing to accept any conditions for food and shelter.
We can arrange the economy anyway we choose. Taking all of the decision making for themselves is part of the plan.
They won’t need maintenance if they’re a general purpose intelligence. A technology that has the possibility to free all of humanity from scarcity, has the possibility to finally collapse dominance of aristocracy for good. Sure, they’ll try and put themselves on top somehow. But once the knowledge exists, anyone can create a version for the greater good.
OK good luck setting up the economic system that doesn’t just reward the rich.
That’s the goal ain’t it? Imma need y’all’s help.
So we will have a handle of people living like The Jetsons, and everyone else like the Flintstones down below.
Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.
Which is why you place hards limits on capitalism with a lotmof oversight like in the north European countries. It can be done right ifnits done right. That is, of you wa to do it right. If you simply want to say “fuck it, I want to get rich” then you go for the no limits no safe wors style that the US is practicing.
My base rule is that if it’s needed or used by a majority of people, then the government should have it (probably exclusively too). Like hospitals, schools, infrastructure like roads and trains, electric grid, eventually the internet.
Now, shops and food isn’t in there, probably because we shop wildly differentt I guess, but some base could be handled by rhe government (which is usually the case, like minimum rights to food etc).
I like how you mixed a few notions together in a way specifically designed to induce chaos.
Even assuming that AI can take away jobs, which is itself I think inaccurate, and provably so, that has nothing to do with people lacking money. In an ideal world, we could use technology to improve productivity so that we would need to work less.
So then what you are actually asking is a different question. What you’re actually asking is, what happens if we create an economic system that takes away most money from most of the people, to much larger degree than is currently happening. And for that, all you need to do is go look at the history books.
Finally, your question as posed is partly self-contradictory. You’re talking about AI being competent enough so that it can fire everyone, but improvements in technology are not always monetized. They can also lead to extreme cost savings. If for example, if I don’t have the money to hire an accountant, but I don’t need to because the software package is good enough to handle all of it for me, then there’s no problem to be solved. And this is true for any number of so-called white collar jobs.
So then what we actually see is that jobs change and evolve over time. The word computer used to talk about a person who did arithmetic and other such operations. Now it’s used to refer to the machine itself.
You’re implying AI has the intelligence to remotely achieve this. It doesn’t. It is all venture capitalist porn for over glorified keyword copy paste. Thats it.
You’re implying AI will never progress beyond its current potential.
I doubt it’ll be taking our jobs anytime soon, but to assume that it will never improve would be naive.
It has barely improved since the 70’s/80s. Hardware got faster.
Its a fallacy to assume “line go up”.
That seems like a Q3 issue for 2026 let’s put the conversation off till then.
/s
Q3 2026 will come around and the AI will report that revenues are down. The CEO will respond the only way they know, by ordering that costs be cut by laying off employees. The AI will report there is no one left to lay off but the CEO.
Fade to black and credits roll.
The thing is, for AI to work we still need hardware, houses, food etc. Yes a lot of jobs will change but other new type of jobs will come.
Remember at the end of the day AI can’t do CPR
Yet
Here’s the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn’t fit on a lot of people. I’ve done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.
Tha makes sense. My point was only to refute the “AI can’t do CPR” comment. Every technological breakthrough in history was imagined as impossible by some, so to claim that because something is hard to do means it probably won’t be done has been shown to not be the case
That problem exists only as long as no one makes a better CPR machine.
And as long as CPR machines are obscenely expensive and difficult to obtain and maintain for a lot of smaller hospitals and EMS systems.
The bots hooked to our stolen credit cards.
