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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

Anything that removes the need to pay salaries would have massive impacts on productivity numbers. (I am not arguing that would necessarily be good[1], but it would show up in the economic stats, in line with bglazer's point).

[1] The big brain take behind "necessarily" is that: "no salaries, everything is free" seems cool, "no salaries, a few people hoard all the wealth" seems bad.

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> Anything that removes the need to pay salaries would have massive impacts on productivity numbers. (I am not arguing that would necessarily be good[1], but it would show up in the economic stats, in line with bglazer's point).

I agree with that. My point was that not all "doom scenarios" require the kind of "quasi-magical abilities" that he tried to use to dismiss them all.

IMHO, the sci-fi "superintelligent AI sends terminators to kill all the people" doom scenarios are distractions (possibly intentional distractions) from far more plausible doom scenarios.

> [1] The big brain take behind "necessarily" is that: "no salaries, everything is free" seems cool, "no salaries, a few people hoard all the wealth" seems bad.

If the former were plausable, we'd almost be there even without AI, so it's either a fantasy or the work we need to get there is not technological. The latter is basically 2024 but moreso.

Or to put another way, AI can be dangerous even when It's being totally helpful... When it is enabling some of humanity to screw things up for everyone else out of greed or anger.

While I agree with you, have you found anything related to how you would essentially ration goods in a system where AI could provide and everything was free?

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