Capitalism Can't Handle AI | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism Can't Handle AI

Capitalism as a system of profit-seeking agents can't handle AI right. There is a very simple feedback loop:

1. Agents seek to increase their profit by automating people.

2. Each agent acts to its own good but at the same moment, the ultimate goal is to get rid of all consumers of what agents produce, because jobless people are very bad at consuming goods and services.

3. Agents don't have any motivation to provide goods and services to consumers if they don't get anything valuable in return.

Conclusion is simple. Either:

a. AI development will be completely regulated and jobs will be preserved (thus negating the promised AI effectiveness), or

b. Capitalism will be destroyed and a completely new economical formation will take place.

It is AI or capitalism.

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Agents don’t have motivations or care about anything. They just do what they’re told… or try do. If they generate money or not is of no concern to the agent itself.

Consumers need two things to consume, money and free time. Jobless people have all the free time they could want. Find a way to get them some money to spend and they’ll consume all day long.

Quick point on capitalism – the profit seeking motive is what makes the economy efficient and ultimately is what results in higher wages and living standards for everyone. We should be careful not to over-index on the direct effects of the "profit motive" such as profits to asset holders, while overlooking the far more important downstream benefits to society and workers. It's not win-lose.

But yes, it seems fairly obvious to me that if AI will effectively displaces all human economic value then the economy will not work for humans.

The only point I'll make on that is that I suspect you're worrying about the wrong thing. In a world where humans are economically worthless they're also politically powerless and entirely dependant on the decision making of the more intelligent artificial beings they've created. In this world your employment income will quickly become the least of your concerns.

+ No proper definition (loaded language, rhetoric). + False Dichotomy (fallacy). + Forgone Conclusion (fallacy). + Flamebait

The contradiction between capitalism needing consumers and automating labor out of work has arisen before in the industrial revolution. The solution back then was imperialism and using the profits from the colonies to subsidize a middle class to consume things. Maybe capitalism has still got a few tricks up its sleeve, but the world is finite so you might be right.

You seem to be conflating capitalism with consumer goods.

Consumer goods may indeed disappear completely from the economy, though even this does not follow from your argument.

First: Capitalism doesn't require that corporate income is distributed through wages. The "capital" in "capitalism" implies owners, who can be paid dividends from that ownership.

Second: Before transistors, "computer" meant a human. Before AI, "agent" meant human. Specifically from the perspective of a firm, paying fees to maintain an AI agent isn't that different from paying wages to a human agent, and there are already plenty of firms whose business is selling to other businesses, "B2B" is the keyword.

>Capitalism doesn't require that corporate income is distributed through wages

It does indeed require that. Otherwise, there's nobody left to profit on. Without consumers there's no business - and no capitalism.

For the reasons given after that quote, both halves of that are false.

Agents/AI do not respect intellectual property. We see the collapse of the open web/blogging, next will be other digital industries. So of course jobs will decline. More for the pirates and less for everybody else

Capialism also provides you free email and free ability to read and post here. Or do you think the Church or RedCross or Bernie is running HN? How did HN emerge out of capitalistic system? There are thousands of simple feedback loops interacting with each other to generate reality that itself changes from 1 day to the next. AI is like a weather system. Dynamical. Ever changing. Unpredictable. What human brains have always done when dealing with unpredictablity is to generate simple stories. In the past we used to call it religion.

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