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Comment by augment_me | Hacker News Reader

I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment and mass extermination of those that refuse.

Otherwise you might end up with disruptive things like protests, blockage of value creating infrastructure, etc.

Another less dramatic option would be containment in prisons or similar where minimal costs can be incurred.

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The irony of comments like this is that the vast majority of people who make them would not be in the group they think they belong to.

Won't anyone think of the leopards? They can't subsist on faces alone and yet people keep feeding themselves to the leopards?

I find some irony in that this hyperbolically late-stage neoliberal take is being taken as something I want in all but 2 replies

I read it as satire :-/

It might very well be. Poe's Law. But there is actually a not-insignificant group of people who believe this sort of thing. Or would go along with it if they thought it was in some way logical and they wouldn't be among the re-educated or exterminated.

You're still undershooting just how grim the optimal outcome of our system is. It's not going to be about 'refusal', like taking a bargain and making choices. If total automation is achieved, huge swaths of people will be placed into that bracket immediately, based largely on their luck, the country they live in and their wealth. An automated world doesn't need this many people to run itself, so only a chosen few will make it through. The rest will eventually be slowly destroyed in the most cruel ways possible. People will keep chanting "Adapt or die" until it turns into simply "Die".

Don’t be daft. All that man power would be excellent for bolstering the army and invading neighboring countries.

I imagine a human body will still be cheaper and more agile than robots for a long while.

Russian typing detected.

This is nonsense humans would be irrelevant and useless in war with machines.

A machine has superior eyes and reflexes, a single robot with a gun would kill a infinite number of humans with the same gun.

Yeah, that for many people is a "AI must be prevented from happening at all because it will bring about this outcome" argument.

> I think the economically rational choice is re-education of the group into value-providing employment

I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.

> mass extermination of those that refuse

I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.

I distinctly did not get the impression that GP is happy about or approving of what he’s suggesting may be “economically rational.” It reads more as foreboding to me.

This is how I meant it, but the replies above might have attributed this to moral values somehow

So in Hitler's Germany, you would have been one of the Germans who felt a bit uneasy about the trains, death camps, etc., and then put on your uniform to carry out your orders?

Like the previous commenter said, people have dependents, mortgages, children, partners, etc. Percentually many more are tied up economically with the capital/state than in 1940s Germany.

Given the current economic trajectory there will be a line to put on uniforms, I don't think I am more eligible for this task than many others who have more dependents.

we have a word for people like yourself, and that word is “a nazi”. kindly consider denazification stat.

In Hitler's Germany, most people did. Why would this time be different?

I'm not suggesting it would be, but it sure is interesting to see people who are far better educated and have way more historical perspective than the average 1930s German did be so eager (or complacent) to follow in their footsteps down the same very dead end.

Either way, he’s a dickhead. He’s clearly throwing around words he doesn’t really understand.

It wouldn’t be economically rational to do this. Nations have a monopoly on violence (policing, military & enforcement of through force) within their own borders, and nations are in competition with one another, even during times of peace.

It does not make sense for anyone nation to start culling people who do not get onboard with some radical social engineering programme. Through the stroke of a pen these companies are under the control of the government.

Say you want to make an even more pessimistic argument, say the oligarchy in one country get control of this monopoly on its violence. That country is still in competition with other countries.

Russia still has nukes, and thanks to their little war, they lack the technological expertise to go to toe to toe with China and the US on AI. Countries wanna mobilise what resources they can to survive this strategic competition and that includes humans.

Say the oligarchs are smart enough to maintain the status quo in foreign policy, and they seek to enslave their entire country. There is no amount of resources in the world that would prevent the amount of disenfranchised people from revolting and over-throwing any such government that didn’t give them a fair social contract, especially one that’s already gone through higher levels of economic development.

It is economically rational, the game masters/ruling class/aristocracy/epstein class keeps the peasants around because they need their labor.

Once AI can replace them, keeping the peasants around means they gobble up your energy, food, land, resources while returning nothing.

He is not advocating for exterminating people, he is just being a realist, like it or not this is the most likely outcome. Having humans is not a advantage since their usefulness is low and their resource consumption is high. The first country to get rid of them and replace them with machines will have a unassailable economic advantage. China and Russia will ultimately lose since they are nationalists dedicated to preserving the chinese and russian ethnicities. They will keep their humans around and be outcompeted.

You can insist something is economically rational all you like but that doesn’t demonstrate it is

Think through the logistics of maintaining power after a sudden transfer of institutional power to an oligarchs where humans come obsolete and are being lined up to be exterminated? Do you think those people just disappear? Do you think jobless, aimless people, or the new poor have historically accepted such reversal of economic standing?

History almost suggests this leads to a complete breakdown of society

Do you think this is gonna be enforced by robots?

Do you know how much power comes from the fact that energy come companies reliant consumption?

Think, do you think of that power they built on goods sold to consumers stays around after the consumers disappear?

Calling this economically rational probably goes hard if you have a rudimentary understanding of second-order effects, and an understanding of economics built on YouTube videos & hot takes online.

Something you learn in most introductory economic classes, is slave labour is less efficient than free salaried workers, an observation that goes as far back Adam smith & Richardo.

> mass extermination of those that refuse

It already looks like this is underway if you look at the state of health care and how little is being done about it.

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