Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

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My ideal future resembles Star Trek: a world where money is obsolete (at least on Earth), and people pursue exploration, science, and the arts purely out of passion and curiosity.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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.