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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

> It might be nice to hear from some of those 8bn voices.

They won't matter.

Where AI is likely to take us is a society where a few people at the top run things and most of the mid-level bureaucracy is automated, optimizing for the benefit of the people at the top. People at the bottom do what they are told, supervised by computers. Amazon and Uber gig workers are there now. That's what corporations do, post-Friedman. AI just makes them better at it.

AI mostly replaces the middle class. People in offices. People at desks. Like farmers, there will be far fewer of them.

Somebody will try a revolution, but the places that revolt will get worse, not better.

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Gig economy still requires a middle class for the demand side of the equation. So either the AI has employs humans in make-work projects, or we invent a meta economy that sits on top.

That is an excellent point. There have to be people with enough disposable income to take Ubers and order from Amazon.

Eh, for long term survival of the model yes, there has to be something left to ‘eat’.

While it’s devouring the group and getting stronger? Sustainability is not required.

For an exploration of that, see the novella "Manna":

https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Yes, I know. So do most people on here.

Manna doesn't really explore how the middle class disappears, though.

Do we really need all those people in offices? Probably not.

>Do we really need all those people in offices? Probably not.

In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber argued that we already didn't need most of those people in offices, pre-AI. They're there as status and power symbols for the higher ups - 'look at the size of my team! i am important! pay me more!' - not to do any actual value-generating work. Modern fiefdoms.

The financial services sector has gone from 6% of the workforce to 12% over the past few decades. Despite automation of everything routine. There's a lot of fat to cut there.

A hyper-rational AGI might be able to apply a bit of logic and realize that generating miserable people will create eventual problems for itself which are greater than the resources required to reduce that misery today.

Unlike those eight billionaires, who appear to have long-term reasoning skills about blowback which are closer to how Gollum thinks.

Sounds like a training criteria that said billionaires would be fools to include then?

After all, any one proactively being parsimonious will be outcompeted by those we aren’t - at least until the apocalypse happens. Then everyone loses.

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