Post Labor Economics: How will the economy work after AGI? Recent thoughts and conversations

WRITING STUFF

[technobabble]

Never underestimate the power of greed or what a person will do to hold onto power.

[ianglenn]

A guy wearing a Star Trek captain's uniform, giving a serious and insightful talk on economic issues, never explaining the uniform. I like it.

[philipmuller]

MIT published a list of jobs most likely to be replaced by AI recently. It included many adjunct professor, lecturer, and similar roles that one might do earlier in their career. As long as we need experts to do some complex jobs that AI can't do, those people may likely need to go through phases in their early careers in which they're competing alongside AI. One of the arguments for AI is that it can make jobs easier/ faster/ more productive, but learning has been shown to happen through struggle. If we allow AI to take over every easier cognitive task for economic reasons, couldn't it undermine the building of expertise everywhere?

[Cogitovision]

It really comes down to who owns the means of production. Figure that out, and you have answered the question. If we own our own robots who do our work, we reap the benefits. If giant corporations own the robots who do all the work, the economy, as such, no longer exists.

[Jontheinternet]

We already treat workers like crap. Imagine now that they aren't needed how they will be treated

[kyneticist]

I'd take a moment to point out on a related note that Microsoft's new Copilot suite will likely pretty enthusiastically, be trained by hundreds-of-millions of people on how to do their jobs. I'm sure that other people can make a better guess as to how long it might take for the Copilot to become the Pilot.

[godmisfortunatechild]

Of all places discussing ai I'm glad people in the comments are really getting to the heart of the matter. What will the everyday people do to survive once they're superfluous in the economy? How can we rest assured that the benefits of AI will be for everyone and not the VC's, investors and elite. By all indications it seems we're headed to a creating of a permanent economic underclass

[cobaltblue]

To me the most interesting part about all of this is how many people are sleeping through this. It’s how I imagine the transition from horse and carriage to the automobile went down. You had people who just weren’t aware of the new tech. Then you had those who were aware of it but thought it was a novelty. And then there were all the people working in all the professions surrounding horse care and carriage building who could have never imagined that their career would become a niche profession in less than a decade. Fast forward to now and most people don’t realize the gravity of what is coming and how much it’s going to fundamentally change things.

[witwisniewski]

You're an optimist. Humans could make their lives utopia already, with what we already have accomplished, but we don't. We are not even close to solving the reason why there are wars, and AGI will become part of the war machine before it makes everyday life better. We also have an epidemic of mental illness, that (almost) by definition means that we harm ourselves and society. We have rampant narcissism, both the narcissists and their admirers. Most rich people do not seek wealth to be wealthy, but rather to be wealthier than others. They are motivated by schadenfreude. To look down on other people, many must be oppressed to live on the "wrong side of the tracks", and will use AGI to find diabolical ways to oppress people.

[jamesdavidson]

Something that always sticks out to me when tech leaders discuss "improvements in education" is: what will we need to learn? If AI supplants all cognitive work, why do we need to learn math and science? What job would it lead to? Hopefully education becomes more about spiritual / emotional fulfillment (if it's even possible to feel fulfilled without being useful)

[debaterforhim]

You are very optimistic. I think you trust the government and businesses far too much to think prices will fall...

[marktellez]

I love it when you cover these topics. As an engineer I deal with the tech all day, but the part I am most interested in are in all the ways we simply aren't prepared for what is about to hit us as a species. Industrial revolution squared instead of multiplied.

[tomaszzielinski]

I', m afraid people become useless and powerless before they see what hit them. Not only a majority of the industry will be controlled by a few companies that control the AI, but also media, entertainment and well as personalized AI assistants owned by these will keep the people unaware or not interested of ongoing shift. Point is, it doesn't matter what AI and the rest of industry could do in theory, it matters who owns it and benefits from it.

[chrismantonuk]

This is all very optimistic. I have a feeling the reality will be a lot more painful and take a lot longer to work itself out.

[tjakal]

Such a strange time to be alive, ever since I was a young teen and started to assemble enough information to piece together who we are and where we're heading I've had this increasingly sharp vision in my mind how this is exactly the sort of trajectory we're on. Still I didn't expect it unfolding at this rate til maybe the very tail end of my lifetime. Now that it becomes increasingly evident we'll live to see it come about it feels as tho I was just placed here as an observer to experience what it's like struggling towards an out-of-reach ceiling that isn't even the floor for the thing that makes us obsolete.

If 'Descartes Demon' has me I suspect it's trying to teach me humility.

[asatorftw]

The biggest problem I am having is to decide what to learn in a future that might make all of it obsolete. I love learning about AI and how it works, but am I good enough to make any impact on the field before AI can write itself? I highly doubt it and it weights heavily on my heart.

[virtualalias]

6:13 - The issue with more personalized is that we're already culturally fractured. Not sure what we do when our news, movies, music, books, etc are all tailored to our preferences such that we're supremely unchallenged in whatever viewpoints we have when we're thirteen.

[pieterlouw]

I honestly hope this future becomes reality there are so many terrible ai outcomes the David Shapiro verse seem like one of the good ones

[satish]

Couple of questions here:

1) If people are going to get replaced by the “machines”, who’s going to pay the taxes to the government? How is the country going to function, without money circulating?

2) Who would be the consumer of this service, without money to spend? For instance say Amazon spends lot of money to automate its facility, logistics etc, but who is buying the goods for it to have a ROI on the spending ?(Partially answered in the video, but still confused)

[Rhgeyer]

We are a 6 figure income couple and had very little saved and not much cash lying around the preverbal".
'...don't have $500 for an
emergency" that was us. The big thing was debt all kinds of it, cars mortgage (although our home isn't a high price one), student loans for our kids, and of course credit cards.
One day we just got sick of being broke and went total scorched earth and became frugal overnight. Paid it all off, it took almost 5 years but now we have no debt and this year our savings rate is 50% on basically the same income that had us perpetually broke. So for us it is mainly staying out of debt and watching our spending, at first it was a real effort to save in our HISA and 401Ks but now it's actually fun watching our money grow. No car or vacation or neighborhood is worth being broke or financially unstable.