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Comment by Kon5ole | Hacker News Reader

>First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance.

My attempt to talk you out of it:

If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and AI companies rich.

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Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a certain point.

The star trek society is is a remote possibility here. One can hope.

I think we're going in that direction. The typical reader here I think can't see the forest for the trees. We're all in meat space. They call it real life. Most jobs aren't on the internet and ultimately deal with the physical. It doesn't matter what tech we have when there's boxes to move and shelves to stock. If AI empowers a small business owner to do things that were previously completely outside their budget I can only imagine that will increase opportunity.

What makes you think the people who control these post-scarcity machines are going to share their output with you?

The Star Trek society was a myth - even on Star Trek. This was called out by Quark on DS9. There was very much the idea of “credits” and rationing based on limited resources.

During the original Star Trek show, you never really saw what life was like for everyone who was not aboard the flagship starship. They started exposing more of the universe in subsequent decades

Gene Roddenberry imagined a society in which humans evolved beyond their base desires and where petty disagreements and conflict didn't exist - but that made for lousy drama so the writers ignored it.

But you don't even need to go that far. A Star Trek style 'post-scarcity' society is impossible because it depends on infinite free energy, FTL and perfect matter replication, none of which are allowed by modern physics. In the real world you can't just outwit the second law of thermodynamics. No matter what form AGI takes - if it ever exists at all - it won't be magical. There will always be scarcity, and where scarcity exists there will always be hierarchies of power and control because human nature doesn't change.

Don't take it to the limit, but consider a continuous relaxation : underemployed people doing whatever is not feasible or economically attractive to AI/robots, like prostitution, massage therapy, art, sales, social work, etc.

Being rich is ultimately about owning and being able to defend resources. IF something like 99% of humans become irrelevant to the machine run utopia for the elites, whatever currency the poors use to pay for services among each other will be worthless to the top 1% when they simply don't need them or their services.

Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?

Unless the poor cause global warming with their bonfires and that inconveniences the rich. In that case...they will kill the poor.

I think it would be too depressing to have all these ghost towns and stuff - how would you explain that to your kids? That they're robot towns? Unaliving 50-80% under tragic circumstances like plagues and wars on the other hand...

And as an aside, the naturally rebalancing effect after the black death which killed 1/3 of Europe was that workers were suddenly in higher demand and could negotiate much improved workers' rights, ending serfdom. Such an effect won't be possible when there's something replacing the workers...

Or the poor decide the rich have no more right to be rich than themselves and start burning and destroying rich people's stuff and anger turns to blood.

It is far easier and faster to destroy than to build and technology can only protect you so much. Unless someone manages a completely self contained enviroment and has a good enough place to hide with it they could be at risk.

That's where "being able to defend your resources" comes in, otherwise they're not rich. But yes, I'm implying that in the future the defense could be done by something like armed drones. And "defense" would mean enforcement of whatever draconian laws they cook up. When the executive branch is non-human, you can never have a mutiny. You simply don't need to do any convincing or any pretending that you're a good guy. All you need is to outproduce the humans, make more drones than they can put up resistance. And drones are cheap, even today, and would only be one piece of the equation anyway, among direct access to your bank account, real-time AI surveillance for minute missteps, crowd control weapons mounted to autonomous vehicles,... all in all pretty grim. The question is who gets to be the elite. It's not obvious that it should be the Silicon Valley guys. We'll surely have massive elite wars (fought by humans + AI), sold to us as civil/national wars and people's revolutions, before the above pans out. The partial release of the Epstein files is one cluster of the elite (around Trump) threatening another. I'd wager that a lot of dirt will see the light of day in the next ten years and underneath it will be the fight over who gets to command the new kingmaker tech.

So what? If you can generate all goods and services without anyone else's help, you'll just do that. You don't need other people buying what you produce. You don't need other people at all, except for a very small number of servants.

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