Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?

> This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance.

Sincerely curious if there are working historical analogues of these approaches.

Communism with "cybernetics" (computer driven economic planning) is the appropriate model if you take this to the logical conclusion. Fortunately, much of our economy is already planned this way (consider banks, amazon, walmart, shipping, etc.), it's just controlled for the benefit a small elite.

You have to ask, if we have AGI that's smarter than humans helping us plan the economy, why do we need an upper class? Aren't they completely superfluous?

Well, aren't the working class also superfluous, at least once the AGI gets enough automation in place?

So it would depend on which class the AGI decided to side with. And if you think you can pre-program that, I think you underestimate what it means to be a general intelligence...

Sure, maybe the Grand Algorithm could do what the market currently does and decide how to distribute surplus wealth. It could decide how much money you deserve each month, how big of a house, how desirable of a partner. But it still needs values to guide it. Is the idea for everyone to be equal? Are certain kinds of people supposed to have less than others? Should people have one spouse or several?

Historically the elites aren't just those who have lots of money or property. They're also those who get to decide and enforce the rules for society.

Not a clean comparison, but resource driven state could be tackling the same kind of issues: a small minority is ripping the benefit of a huge resource (e.g. petrol) that they didn't create by themselves, and is extracted through mostly automated processes.

From what we're seeing the whole society has to be rebalanced accordingly, it can entail a kind of UBI, second and third classes of citizen depending on where you stand in the chain, etc.

Or as Norway does, fully go the other direction and limit the impact by artificially limiting the fallout.

The AGI, given it has some agency, becomes the upper class. The question is, why would the AGI care about humans at all, especially given the assumption that it's largely smarter than humans? Humans can become superfluous.

The computers serve us, we wouldn't completely give up control, that's not freedom either, that's slavery to a machine instead of a man. We would have more democratic control of society by the masses instead of the managed bourgeois democracy we have now.

It's not necessary for everyone to be exactly equal, it is necessary for inequalities to be seen as legitimate (meaning the person getting more is performing what is obviously a service to society). Legislators should be limited to the average working man's wage. Democratic consultations should happen in workplaces, in schools, all the way up the chain not just in elections. We have the forms of this right now, but basically the people get ignored at each step because legislators serve the interests of the propertied.

I suspect even with a powerful intelligence directing things, it will still be cheaper and lower cost to have humans doing various tasks. Robots need rare earth metals, humans run on renewable resources and are intelligent and self-contained without needing a network to make lots of decisions...

Can you explain a little more about Norway?

This was always one of the downfalls of market economics.

We already have conscious feelings about these things, but it's virtually impossible to enforce it into the market at scale in a meaningful way.

We could take a broadly agreed on sentiment like "I really want the caregivers taking care of my grandparents in the rest home to be qualified and adequately paid so they'll do their best", and mysteriously the market will breed a solution that's "the agency is charging $50 per hour and delivering a $12 per hour warm body that will do the bare legal minimum to avoid neglect charges."

We try regulation, but again, the market evolves the countermeasures of least-cost checkbox compliance. All because we aren't willing to take direct command over economic actors.

We have the guns.