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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

>But what do people do to produce things when intellectual labour is automated?

They do what AI can't do, entrepreneurialism, because AI doesn't have property rights. Like back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed, not working for large corporations, because corporate cog-in-the-machine work can be done better by AI. With AI it's far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.

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Are you really arguing the singular benefit of being human that AI can't take away is a specific concept of law? And then say that running your business with AI is easier than ever? So if we are reduced to running our own business, and AI can do that pretty good, what do we do?

If he is that does seem like a reasonable claim. There is precedent in concepts like citizenship, for example. Property rights. Inheritance. A lot of things give people advantages purely because that is how the legal superstructure works without reference to any inherent imbalance in economic or social power.

Not really, no. The question is not what distinguishes us at some point in time in some scenario, but what AI cannot take away, and changing a few laws seems not too far fetched. Especially because the people in charge of AI do seem pretty unscrupulous and powerful to me, and there is no sign of that influence being reigned in.

> back to the 1800s when most Americans were self-employed

They were mainly wage employees and factory workers by the end of that century due to industrialization. And "AI" is the industrialization of intellectual work.

> far easier to run your own business than at any time in history.

But let me play the devil's advocate and argue the point: who will the business sell to, if most people are not in a position with wealth to spare to buy from your business?

Its businesses all the way around

... What do you believe 1800 America was like? Because it was govt backed credit sales, land grants and pre emption rights that gave the land to people. The "self employment" was subsistence agriculture on the granted land in the frontier. The land was granted by a mechanism very similar to the volkisch lebensraum.

Clearly a relevant and replicable analogy to AI making entrepreneurship easier /s

Your version of 1800s North America is a myth.

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