Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Unfrozen__Caveman t1_j87fcas wrote

Reply to comment by kinetsu_hayabusa in Are you prepping just in case? by AvgAIbot

How exactly is the machine going to generate income if capitalism or some sort of goods and services economy doesn't exist? Who is going to pay the machine? Other machines? Income doesn't just magically appear out of thin air...

Who owns the machines? Nobody? Other "CEO" machines?

4

BenjaminHamnett t1_j87xiz6 wrote

Money is just distributed voting for what we prioritize (prices) so resources can be distributed efficiently. Society can choose to endow people more or less money, there will always be things society wants and will give the people that provide it extra “votes” to spend

5

YobaiYamete t1_j87nxm6 wrote

> How exactly is the machine going to generate income if capitalism or some sort of goods and services economy doesn't exist? Who is going to pay the machine? Other machines? Income doesn't just magically appear out of thin air...

"Income" itself is a concept that won't exist in a post scarcity society.

If you have a replicator that can easily spit out anything you need including other replicators, then you very quickly reach a situation where you don't need much of anything besides just mass to feed the replicator.

We aren't at that stage yet obviously, but once AI start massively improving 3D printers we won't be far off, and then it will just turn into a situation where people re-use trash from landfills and materials from asteroids etc to refine into other products, and you only work for fun, rather than as a necessity.

People and AI will still keep advancing tech, but "income" won't be required for much of anything. UBI would turn into a government issued ration fund for your replicator and that's about all that would be mandatory

3

Unfrozen__Caveman t1_j89xqag wrote

The entire concept of a post scarcity society is flawed though. We see artificial scarcity all over the place today. Look at diamonds for a simple example. When something is plentiful and valuable humans almost always step in and throttle its availability.

Insulin is insanely cheap to make but drug companies stepped in and now it costs people hundreds of dollars.

You could have an AGI that creates whatever you want out of nothing but if the distribution of resources is handled by humans greed will always corrupt the process and average people will get exploited. It's been that way since the dawn of civilization.

If we're truly going to have a utopia (which I don't believe we will) human beings would need to be removed from decision-making roles. And even if that were to happen, who's to say that an AGI would even care about us? They might just look at us how we look at our single-cell organism ancestors.

1

Chonkthebonk t1_j87oja4 wrote

Post scarcity is a myth resources are finite

0

YobaiYamete t1_j87q47y wrote

No they aren't lol

We have the entire solar system worth of resources which is already more than we could reasonably use, and then there's the entire galaxy beyond that.

By the time we even started to run out of stuff from the asteroid belt alone, we would long since have reached a stage where we could just upload our brain to a computer instead and live in a digital paradise tailored to each person, without having to screw around with traveling to distant star systems for more

6

cwallen t1_j87umdv wrote

Still doesn't mean that there is an unlimited amount of beachfront property in southern California.

Any resources not on earths surface are really expensive to get, and better AI isn't going to change the laws of physics.

I do agree with your earlier idea that mining landfills will become a very good source of resources.

When talking post-scarcity it helps to define scarcity of what. We can eventually hit a point where all basic needs, and many luxury wants are inexpensive enough to be essentially free, but that doesn't mean unlimited everything.

3

BenjaminHamnett t1_j87xl4c wrote

Spoken like someone who doesn’t understand physics or human desire

1

kinetsu_hayabusa t1_j87hqs9 wrote

Income comes from production. Doesnt matter if made by a machine or a human. I believe in the beginning of transition the gov will need set high taxes to AI companies. In far future, there will be no money at all. All the goods and services made by AI robots for free. Maybe every human could have a score that reflexes his actions in society and can use this to buy a nice car or house. Crazy science fiction but not impossible

2