-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
-- Therefore the AI generates greatly reduced wealth
-- Therefore there’s greatly reduced wealth to pay for the AI
-- …rendering such a future impossible
-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
-- Corporate profits drop (or growth slows) and there is demand from the powers that be to increase taxation in order to increase the UBI.
-- People can afford the products and services.
Unfortunately, with no jobs the products and services could become exclusively entertainment-related.
Also "rendering such a future impossible". This is a retrocausal way of thinking. As though an a bad event in the future makes that future impossible.
We may find that, if our baser needs are so easily come by that we have tremendous free time, much of the world is instead pursuing things like the sciences or arts instead of continuing to try to cosplay 20th century capitalism.
Why are we all doing this? By this, I mean, gestures at everything this? About 80% of us will say, so that we don't starve, and can then amuse ourselves however it pleases us in the meantime. 19% will say because they enjoy being impactful or some similar corporate bullshit that will elicit eyerolls. And 1% do it simply because they enjoy holding power over other people and management in the workplace provides a source of that in a semi-legal way.
So the 80% of people will adapt quite well to a post-scarcity world. 19% will require therapy. And 1% will fight tooth and nail to not have us get there.
wealth is not a thing in itself, it's a representation of value and purchasing power. It will create its own economy when it is able to mine material and automate energy generation.
UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.
And overall wealth levels were much lower. It was the expansion of consumption to the masses that drove the enormous increase in wealth that those of us in "developed" countries now live with and enjoy.
>In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
Productivity increases make products cheaper. To the extent that your hypothetical AI manufacturer can produce widgets with less human labor, it only makes sense to do so where it would reduce overall costs. By reducing cost, the manufacturer can provide more value at a lower cost to the consumer.
Increased productivity means greater leisure time. Alternatively, that time can be applied to solving new problems and producing novel products. New opportunities are unlocked by the availability of labor, which allows for greater specialization, which in-turn unlocks greater productivity and the flywheel of human ingenuity continues to accelerate.
The item of UBI is another thorny issue. This may inflate the overall supply of currency and distribute it via political means. If the inflation of the money supply outpaces the productivity gains, then prices will not fall.
Instead of having the gains of productivity allocated by the market to consumers, those with political connections will be first to benefit as per Cantilion effects. Under the worst case scenario this might include distribution of UBI via social credit scores or other dystopian ratings. However, even under what advocates might call the ideal scenario, capital flows would still be dictated by large government sector or public private partnership projects. We see this today with central bank flows directly influencing Wall St. valuations.
You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources. They will also control robots with guns.
Less than 100 years ago we had a guy who convinced a small group of Germans to seize power and try to exterminate or enslave vast majority of humans on Earth - just because he felt they were inferior. Imagine if he had superhuman AI at his disposal.
In the next 50 years we will have different factions within elites fighting for power, without any regard for wellbeing of lower class, who will probably be contained in fully automated ghettos. It could get really dark really fast.
I like your optimism, though.
A while later, the world is living in a dichotomy of people living off the land and some high tech spots of fully autonomous and self-maintaining robots that do useless work for bored people. Knowing people and especially the rich, I don't believe in Culture-like utopia, unfortunately, sad as it may be.
Productivity has been increasing steadily for decades. Do you see any evidence that leisure time has tracked it?
IMO what will actually happen is feudal stasis after a huge die-off. There will be no market for new products and no ruling class interest in solving new problems.
If this sounds far-fetched, consider that this we can see this happening already. This is exactly the ideal world of the Trump administration and its backers. They have literally slashed funding for public health, R&D, and education.
And what's the response? Thiel, Zuckererg, Bezos, and Altman haven't said a word against the most catastrophic reversal of public science policy since Galileo and the Inquisition. Musk is pissed because he's been sidelined, but he was personally involved, through DOGE, in cutting funding to NASA and NOAA.
So what will AI be used for? Clearly the goal is to replace most of the working population. And then what?
One clue is that Musk cares so much about free speech and public debate he's trying to retrain Grok to be less liberal.
None of them - not one - seem even remotely interested in funding new physics, cancer research, abundant clean energy, or any other genuinely novel boundary-breaking application of AI, or science in general. They have the money, they're not doing it. Why?
The focus is entirely on building a nostalgic 1950s world with rockets, robots, apartheid, corporate sovereignty, and ideological management of information and belief.
And that includes AI as a tool for enforcing business-as-usual, not as a tool for anything dangerous, original, or unruly which threatens their political and economic status.
Some kinds of growth are beneficial in a phase but not sustainable over time. Like the baby hamster.
> You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources.
Let me rephrase that from 'So then there's no need for AI workers.' to 'So then there's no money to pay for AI workers.'
The UBI approach creates a closed economic loop: Company A pays taxes → Government gives UBI to consumers → Consumers buy from Company A → Company A pays taxes... This is functionally identical to Company A directly paying people to buy Company A's products, which makes no economic sense.
It's like Ford paying his workers $50/day, but the only customers buying Ford cars are Ford workers spending their $50/day wages. Ford would go bankrupt - there's no external value creation, just money circulating in circles.
Where does the actual wealth come from in this system? Who are the net buyers that make the businesses profitable enough to sustain the UBI taxes?
UBI in an AI-dominated economy can't create a functioning economy - it's just an imaginary self-licking ice cream cone.
The end goal is to ensure the survival of a small group of technocrats that control all production on Earth due to the force multiplier effect of technological advancements. This necessitates the depopulation of Earth.
Most don’t seem to comprehend why the economy is being destroyed by the ultra rich
The GP was claiming that it is "20th century myopic" to not notice that in the past the products of most human toil went mostly to a small elite. My very point was that that old way of doing things didn't generate much wealth, not that the way things have changed is all good. I'm not advocating for any of the old ways, I'm saying that having an economic system that brings benefits to all is an important component of growing the overall wealth of a society (and of humanity overall).
On the other hand, on a much broader scale, the planet itself is a closed economic loop. There's a finite amount of resources and we're all just cycling most of them around back and forth.
Arguably, a significant amount of "growth" has come from taking resources that formerly were not "on the books" and putting them on. The silver in the New World wasn't in (Western) ledgers until the 1500s, the oil under the Middle East was just goo until the late 1800s. The uranium ore in your backyard suddenly got a lot more interesting after 1940.
New value can come from inventing new and useful applications for existing resources or by finding new external inputs (maybe capturing some of that radiation the giant fusion sphere overhead is blasting in our direction).
Ask how many of your neighbours can name three Supreme Court justices (or hell, their senators and representative) versus who can name three Khardashian sisters?
TBH, I'd hope for the end of "broad" social status. I'd love to see a retreat towards smaller circles where status is earned through displays of talent and respectable deeds, not just by dominating/manufacturing/buying a media presence.
Or the technological singularity happens before that, and either AI will kill us all, or humans will merge with AI.