Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Now, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing.

It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.

This doesn't add up with the number of billionaires and the growth over the last decades - it just seems that there's a bottleneck and the value captured from technology isn't trickling down.

Of course, you can claim that such "billionaires" and that part of that "value" is the result of speculation, but since billionaires can use that speculation to buy money and acquire more assets, then for sure there's some value there that isn't getting to the vast majority of the people.

1. Raise wages to match global increased productivity

2. Democratize ownership

That's it.

ChatGPT is the first time in a while that a new technology is easy enough to use and integrate that the productivity gains could be captured by the lowest-skilled workers.

Uber/Lyft are the antithesis of this: their apps do very simple things but at scale and with an eye towards confusing their drivers. It's not unthinkable that a co-op version of these apps could exist, but the folks with the skills to build them get snapped up by big tech pretty quick.

IMO if we want to share the wealth, the ONLY way to do it is by upskilling workers and simplifying technology.

Imagine an early human group of 40 people. If one person hoarded the food of 37 others and employed the remaining two just to guard it, it wasn't long before the ruse was up and there was a revolt and the food reclaimed.

Now, only because of scale and abstraction, basically the same setup is possible (0.1% owns as much as 50% of the population).

Our time is perverted ownership-wise, and it's time to go back to a truly cooperative society.

Cooperation, not hoarding, was the foundation of the beginning of civilisation.

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My ideal future resembles Star Trek: a world where money is obsolete (at least on Earth), and people pursue exploration, science, and the arts purely out of passion and curiosity.

A society driven by innovation, not profit.

It is the same just with extra steps which put politicians and such in control of it all. Which is why something like these really are the only viable tactics to the overarching strategy. Politicians won't allow change that excludes them from power

3: The top of the economic ladder reacts to worsening conditions by switching from promoting riskier growth based economic policies from which they might glean opportunities from new wealth, to allowing only status-quo reaffirming policies in an attempt to protect their already aggregated wealth and positions of economic power.

This leads to worsening economic and social conditions for all non-elite parts of the population, as their economic and social issues are left unaddressed and thereby worsen under the status-quo.

This leads to more pressure for the body politic to act to solve those problems, but as the top of the economic ladder now only endorses policies that support the status quo, a new political movement will need to grow that focuses only on stagnating and blocking any attempt for the government to act. All proposed reforms that allow the government to act for the benefit of the masses are blocked, all existing abilities of the government to help the masses are hollowed.

This worsens economic and social conditions, which then means this becomes a catch-22.

The political entities that are responsible for this dynamic, out of quiet guilt, instead begin lauding themselves that their actions are not the cause of worsening conditions for the masses, but are instead the realization of the representation of the ideological soul of their nation. This leaves these individuals intentionally deaf to the possibility that they might be wrong, and further reinforces their inability to compromise or present solutions that would challenge the current status-quo. This also becomes a catch-22, and can reach the point of fetishization. It also increases the tendency of this political class to promote policies that are ideologically driven political projects that hurt the country economically, because they fundamentally arise from a position that large parts of the population are not true citizens and deserve punishment.

If this trend continues unchecked, as things continue to worsen, merely rendering government unresponsive becomes insufficient. So it results in the election of strong-men type characters that sell themselves to the populace as being the only ones capable of breaking the political deadlock that prevents solutions to issues within the country, while simultaneously promising to their richest funders that they will actually use their power to further entrench the positions and wealth of the existing economic elite.

This creates a new group of politicians that seek power for themselves by exploiting this new dynamic, where they compete by their willingness to break cultural norms in order to service these two groups, and much later, a reactionary progressive cadre that functions similarly on the opposing side.

This new dynamic worsens the economic and social issues at play, as the crumbling competency of hollowed out social norms and institutions lose their ability to function as effectively for the mass populace until the standard of living has fallen sufficiently to match the capabilities of the country to support it, and an increasingly deaf and authoritarian political class is far less effective at managing the needs of the people than in the previous more-decentralized state. Quality of life continues to drop, either slowly over time, or violently.

At this point, the new political class will consider usurping power and wealth from the rich elite, as there are no longer legal norms to constrain them.

Regardless, with decreased capacity in an ill functioning state, where the new political elite has acquired power by servicing an elite class focused on maintaining wealth instead of driving growth in the nation, the country loses its ability to compete economically with rival nations, and begins falling further and further behind, thereby worsening the above cycle.

But what you have to remember, is its all worth it, because the alternative includes potential taxes, promoting policies to raise wages, or reinvesting in your fellow countrymen, and those things are all worse than what I just described /s

What's worse (for the society), is that in this world nobody has an incentive to create wealth, because they know it'll just be taken away. When rich people aren't in power, people with political capital and big guns are. I don't think that's better.

If AGI takes over, that changes things, somewhat. If it creates unlimited abundance, then it shouldn't matter who has the most (if everyone has plenty). Yes, it would create power disparity, but the thing is, there'll always be SOMEBODY at the top of the social hierarchy, with most of the money and power - in the AGI scenario, that is someone who is in charge of AGI's actions.

Either it's AGI itself (in which case all bets are off, since it's an alien god we cannot control), or the people who have developed AGI, or the politicians who have nationalized it.

Personally, I'm uncomfortable with anyone having that much power, but if I had to pick the lesser evil - I'd prefer it to be a CEO of an AI company (who, at least, had the competence and skill to create it), instead of the AGI itself (who has no reason to care about us unless we solve alignment), or one of the political world leaders (all of whom seem actively insane and/or evil).

The hard part of course is investing the money in marketing and support to match the user recognition and experience that Uber and Lyft, subsidized by VC wallets, can provide to their customers.

I love this, thank you for specifying the condition under which you might be convinced otherwise. I respect your position more for this. (And unfortunately as a Star Trek fanatic myself, agree with it so far as well).

Where are you getting the 'earn' part from, and why isn't it in scare quotes like 'hoard'? It seems like you're just changing the parameters of the argument to support the conclusion you prefer.

Unfortunately, due to the way politics and money work in the US, we have zero real choices...

>1. Raise wages to match global increased productivity

This is blocked by our two-party political system. Openly by Republicans (at the moment) and practically by Democrats. Both of our political parties seem to serve the people that actually pay them (ie. rich business owner donors) vs. people that vote for them. At least if it comes down to a problem between the two. This is shown in sharp relief in the famous chart by Martin Gilens showing which laws get passed in the US based on interest group.

>2. Democratize ownership

This is blocked by actual owners. Money equals ownership in the US. So, perhaps we can use our dollars and spend a certain way, one might think. Just BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street combined have more assets under management than the entire United States GDP, and they are just 4 companies. Good luck!

>That's it.

That is probably not it, but if it is we are fucked!

Sorry to be a pessimist, but progress is not guaranteed. I see the mid twentieth century as largely an anomaly in human history. Going forward, I see wealth concentration continuing to accelerate, with a widening gulf between classes that control the means of production and everyone else, which due to technological advancement will make a lot of people's labor much less profitable. Basically, a reversion to a more feudal system, where there is essentially an aristocratic class that hoards and lives off its previous wealth, and pretty much everyone else living at a subsistence level. Think Ireland in the early 1800s (not necessarily that level of absolute deprivation, but same level of relative deprivation compared to the land owners).

The reason I see this as the most probable outcome is when I hear people talk about "raise wages to march global productivity" or "democratize ownership", I don't see any rationale as to how or why that would happen. Do you think the people in control will just give that away from the goodness of their hearts? There is literally no economic or social reason to expect this to happen. It's clear that democracies can be successfully manipulated into "blaming the boogeyman", so I don't think the democratic process will bring about these changes.

Happy to hear a rational argument to the contrary, but my primary point is that I rarely hear any argument about how we get to there from here.

I know this has been discussed at length in many places, but I just want to point out that it isn't binary. There is some kind of distribution where "sovereign ownership" (full protection, no taxes, no redistribution) would entice the most people to create wealth (and even then, I doubt it would be 100% of the population), all the way to "mob rule" where a minimal number of people would be enticed to create wealth (and I don't think it would be 0%). People do things for multidimensional reasons.

That said, our societies have tried many variations along the spectrum between these two extremes, and I think we have uncovered the importance of protecting wealth and the incentive to create it.

So if a factory used to employ 100 people, who were paid a salary, that salary was taxed generating income for societal benefit like roads and hospitals. But if automation comes in and produces the same with just 10 people, the money from income taxes for societal benefit is reduced by 90%. The net effect is that society may have less money for the collective benefit even as production gets more efficient. An automation tax would make up the difference.

It’s not altogether different than the “mileage” tax for electric vehicles to displace the gasoline taxes that fund roads. It’s a different tax scheme because the fundamental premise has changed (road use is proportional to gasoline consumption/tax needs are proportional to human salary). Taxes are systems of convention so we don’t need to pretend they must adhere to some immutable physical law.

To your question about how it could be implemented, I’m sure there’s lots of nuance. But to illustrate it off the top of my head, industries may have baseline rates of per-capita production and if they implement automation to exceed that substantially, that excess production would be taxed. So a craftsman woodworker who makes five items a week wouldn’t be affected, but a cabinet factory making 300 per capita items per week would.

The problem with the Star Trek fantasy is that it's a lie even within the show. There are still people with obligations. There are still treaties and trade. There is still a hierarchy where some people have more important jobs and report to others. The only thing that seems different is that no money changes hands.

If we actually automated everything so no one had to work, there would still be a gradual progression and a time when some people have to work while most don't. I'm not sure how you get through that phase, not to mention what it looks like on the other side.

One thing I think should be considered is not so much how to pay everyone "enough" but how to reduce cost of living so more people can work less, or eventually not at all (somehow without owning everything and amassing control).

Capitalism favors success and dominance over virtue, but some social subsets (eg clergy) get status through virtue.

The less need there is for human labor, the less disincentive humans have for killing each other over raw materials.

1. The boomer political class that is perfectly fine with spending more and more money but unwilling to pay for it, mortgaging everything the previous generations built. Basically sucking all the value out of it for themselves so that their children and grandchildren will have nothing.

2. A big symptom is that tax rates on the richest have been going down for the last 50 years, and are now ridiculously low.

3. The thing that makes that work: unnaturally low interest rates, for the last several decades.

4. A complete unwillingness to use antitrust to break up the largest companies.

I don't see how this is going to turn around, because the propaganda is now so good they have convinced the poor that all of this is somehow good for them.

I think there is another word for this.

read To The Finland Station by Edmund Wilson.

There are only a very few cases where Democratize ownership worked and it was under a benevolent dictator. After the dictator died, everything fell apart.

I'd start with changing what and how we measure. A move away from single-dimension variables like GDP and simplistic closed-form calculations like the Black-Scholes formula and all it led us to believe.

If we agree simple-but-wrong metrics are bad, then we can (I believe) move towards simulations--not "my simulation" nor "your simulation", but ways to talk about beliefs and outcomes. I think the future will involve AI-assisted computable discussions, where multiple variables and the ability to dynamically incorporate or exclude assumptions from opposing perspectives will lead us to some shared agreement and mutually beneficial outcomes (while allowing for many areas where people will continue to disagree).

I'd propose next that we continue to raise the prominence of evidence showing how cooperation is often better than competition. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom spent her life identifying systems and methods of cooperation. She proposes, "We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies [e.g. of the commons] nor free of moral responsibility."

Robert Axelrod ran simulations on the iterated prisoner's dilemma and concluded, "forgiveness, cooperation, and reputation" are a stable strategy in most real-world conditions.

Strong ideologies that promote extreme individualism, marketed as scientifically sound, deserve great skepticism IMO, and should be treated with the same wariness as two missionaries knocking on your door.

It's an incredibly murky train of logic though. Most wealthy people have done nothing directly to cause the poor to suffer. But if you examine it closely, you can find links from greed <---> suffering everywhere.

Uber, Airbnb are good examples of this. When regulation caught up with them, the damage was done for better or worse. To this day, some regulators still struggle to keep up due to the lack of resources, and the tech does achieve this... and now you have tech oligarchs dismantling the government bodies responsible for regulation.

So I don't think it's just a matter of people upskilling to generate more value, because people pay taxes for the work they do - they can't afford the lawyers and structures to avoid this. The people who have the luck and the opportunities to generate this kind of value are already doing it, or will do it, or don't want to do it.

So while I agree with you, and people should have access to the opportunities to upskill and to generate value, I also think there's a massive gap in income and taxes in a lot of democratic countries. These things can go, and should go, together.

Money exists fundamentally to motivate people to perform some action. In the end, it comes down to paying labor. No one pays the earth, the forest, the sun.

Automation stands to make human labor too expensive to compete, since our needs far exceed the energy it takes to operate and manufacture us.

Without human labor, you don’t need money. You just need more anthropoid robots to make more anthropoids and to execute on whatever it is you want to do, own, or construct. You don’t buy a yacht, you build a one-yacht factory to make a yacht.

Capital will become human-sparse, needing only resources and energy and will exist to serve a small group of beneficiaries, if anyone.

I'm not sold. Actually, I think there's more to it. There's been an historical association between people's job and their sense of identity and self worth. The value of work is not just about earning money, or the portion of that money that is transferred to social uses through taxation or otherwise. If you just implement UBI there'll be bored directionless people, drug use, criminality and social problems. What we need is recognition that (a) we don't need the people anymore (b) that's OK (c) different people may freely choose between social engagement and hibernating in a room with VR or going full artist hermit mode or becoming a triple PhD or being a psychonaut or whatever.

The oddball reality is we're sort of there already, it's just not evenly distributed. Ask an anthropologist or an economist or a technologist: what policies should governments put in place to support people and society in a transition to "nobody works or needs to work or engage with one another at all?" Turn them all in to GPS tracked phone zombies? Build sovereign wealth funds? Redefine collective identities in virtual spaces? Slowly introduce methods to reduce fertility? Reject technology and return to nature?

It seems to me that our ape minds are not well suited to the new reality. Most will seemingly choose to live a reactionary life of experiential consumption in a bubble of consensual hallucination crafted by technology that is controlled by others... and soon, controlled by endless generative AI. As a species we are enslaving ourselves to the perpetual feed through laziness.

In an era where similar popular experience increasingly lies at every corner of the globe: ask yourself - what kind of life do you want to lead? As technologists, we now arguably have greater ability to alter humanity's course than the politicians. We should think about how to use it.

Since 1960 American GDP has more than tripled in real terms (constant dollars): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDUSA

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Step 2) some drunk invents FTL

Step 3) the Vulcans show up

I'd be happy to live in a version of society where there's enough abundance and good will that people just give to charity, and that is enough to support everyone, and nobody is being forced to do anything they don't want.

I only dislike it when people advocate for involuntary redistribution of wealth, because it has a lot of negative side effects people aren't thinking through. Also, because I think that it's evil and results in the sort of society and culture where it would be a nightmare to live in.

I live in Germany where we have taxes & don't consider it a nightmare.

Places with governments that weak also tend to prominently feature involuntary redistribution of wealth. It tends to be more self-service at the hands of the end-recipients and without the kind of ethical theory behind it that is at least the notional framework fo redistribution by functional governments, but it still very much occurs.

Most western countries mostly respect individual freedom and property, taxes being an exception to that, somewhat limited and controlled. I see that as a necessary evil - something we can't fully avoid (at least, I can't figure out how we'd do that), but should try to minimize, to avoid sliding down the spectrum towards more and more evil versions of that.

I think most western countries are nice to live in because they do comparatively good job at respecting people's freedom, property, and the right to keep the stuff they earn.

Advocating for more redistribution is taking steps away from that, in the direction people don't realize they don't want to go in.

If we had a hyptothetical coloured currency where one kind could only be spent buying property, other necessities, some luxuries like travels. As long as the currencies could be enforced to not be interchangable the "dominance" becomes realative with respect to influence points one has collected.

1) The past gives context and so we shouldn't dismiss it. In this case, it provides insight into why the current tax structure is the way it is. If the underlying premise change (ie the nature of work changes) we should look to also changing the tax system. To me, that is looking forward, but using the context of the past to inform our judgement. Imagine if the past tax was based only on agrarian income because that formed the basis of the economy when the country was founded; I don’t think we’d want that same tax structure in a modern economy when the proportion of farmers is in single digits.

2) I think this ignores the overall system. The economic system isn't one dimensional. Society benefits from the factory, but the factory also benefits from society. They don't work in isolation, so a single end goal ("just skip the factory and give people money") is an over simplification of the system and its goals.

3) But you would all pay an income tax, so (in an ideal implementation) it balances out. No automation tax collection, but higher income tax collection. The inverse is true when it spills over the automation tax threshold: lower income tax on per capita production, but higher automation tax collection.

>I'm not sold. Actually, I think there's more to it.

Of course there is, and I've admitted there would be a lot of nuance. We should be careful that the nuance isn't gamed, but that doesn't mean the best alternative is the current system, or worse, an overly simple system like a flat tax that disregards nuance completely.

>There's been an historical association between people's job and their sense of identity

Yes. There's some benefit to this, but it can easily spill over into a toxic mindset. I don't want to live in a society where people's identity (and potentially moral self-worth) is at the whim of an employer. I think the job/identity coupling is a very Western mindset (probably rooted in a Puritan work ethic), but not a particularly healthy one. That's why we have issues with diseases/deaths of desperation like you allude to. I think the better solution is to decouple people's self-worth from their work, rather than ensure people keep working.

>The oddball reality is we're sort of there already I hear this a lot, but it reminds me of when I was in college (decades ago) and I had a professor (who was nearing retirement at the time) and he spoke about when he was in college he had to write an essay about how people would manage their lives when they no longer had any work to do because of all the efficiency gains that were just on the horizons.

>As a species we are enslaving ourselves to the perpetual feed through laziness.

I think this is the Aldous Huxley A Brave New World viewpoint (written in 1931) so I don't think it's anything new. FWIW I tend to agree.

There are a bunch of white-label ride share apps. When Austin banned Uber and Lyft in 2016 it took about a day before new services popped up to replace them.

I hate to break it to you, considering how much effort you put into your comment, but this is already the case. Global economics is something we CANNOT control already, so the world you live in, is ALREADY governed by alien God. The self-described "optimists" here are naive at best, and delusional at worst.

  > Advocating for more redistribution is taking steps away from that, in the direction people don't realize they don't want to go in.