A UBI is not a socialist policy. It makes no change to the power structure. That’s why it’s often supported by right wing as well as supposedly left wing thinkers. With UBI power remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie, that is to say the class of ownership. The income will go straight into various rentier schemes, there will be no change to material or economic deprivation, and the people will have neither a better living standard nor more power than they had before it’s introduction. In other words, it’s a con, presented in a way that appeals to leftists who have only a superficial understanding of how power, economics and ideology really functions.

“How does it play out in your brain?”

One of the problems with the command economies that socialist states like the USSR tried to implement was that the maths was simply too complex to make it work efficiently. This is an example of something ai could be enormously useful for. Obviously no western country is going to use ai for this, because it’s contrary to their ideological and economic systems. The use that technology is put too will follow ideology. When the Industrial Revolution happened many people imagined a utopian future where the increase in productivity would lead to humans having to work far less. But today, we still spend the majority of our lives at work, and if it wasn’t for the historical efforts of socialists and trade unionists then even the restrictions on working hours, and on children working, would not exist (there are states in the US even today that are trying to repeal child labour laws). Of course ai will have benefits in regard to medicine, farming and so on. Does that mean everyone will have access to medicine, or that the workers on farms will see any benefit? Technically that would be possible, but within the ideology of capitalism it will not occur. Homelessness, poverty and unemployment exist because they are necessary for the economic system to function, not because of a lack of resources or lack of a solution. The benefits of ai will be limited by and subsumed into the ideological system - a system designed to give power and luxury to a tiny few via enforcing deprivation on the majority.

“A truly post AGI world would not have any human labour”

Perhaps, but my point is only that benefits in production and material abundance predominantly do not flow down to the working class/average person but up into the profits of the rich. Capitalism as we know it could not continue in a world where labour is unnecessary, but without changing the relations of power, the new system that emerges will simply mirror the old one. I could envision - as one possibility - a sort of tech neo-feudalism, where a Universal Basic Income is paid in return for some kind of military or other public service. But this income will go straight into the hands of the owning class - to rent, and to various rentier schemes (you will own nothing and you will be happy”, as the WEF put it). Of course this is only one scenario, but without changing the power relations, the system of deprivation for the masses and wealth and luxury for the few will remain regardless.

“You think China lifted it's people out of poverty without capitalism”

No - I agree China used capitalism to do that. But it was a different kind of capitalism to what is used in the West - goal oriented, with a long-term vision and a materialist, Marxist outlook, which aims to use capitalism as a tool to develop productive forces and to the end of benefitting it’s citizens and ultimately transitioning to socialism. This is very different from the blind profit seeking capitalism of the West.

I don’t mean to be rude but I think it’s naieve to imagine that ai will not be used to reinforce the current power structures, or that those structures have benefited humanity. Jeremy Corbyn said that if he were elected, homelessness within the UK would be ended within weeks, and it is not an exaggeration to say that would be entirely possible. There are far more homes than homeless people, and we have the resources to build many more. We don’t, because it would disrupt the ideology of capitalism, which requires the threat of homelessness and unemployment in order to force people to work for low wages. Wages and productivity have been detached for decades now - ie wages have remained stagnant while productivity has increased exponentially. Ai will increase productivity, but without changing the economic system the benefit will not be to ordinary people but to the profits of the rich.

The upward momentum of the world you refer to is misleading. People like Bill Gates like to point out that enormous amounts of people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades, trying to attribute this to the implementation of neoliberal economics. They always neglect the fact that these stats are skewed by the work of the Chinese Communist Party, which has lifted 700 million people out of absolute poverty - more than any government in history. That has nothing to do with the political trajectory that the West has been on, or it’s domestic economic paradigm - by which for the first time in centuries, the younger generations are significantly poorer and downwardly mobile compared to their parents.

I don’t know much about the ideology of the people working towards agi, I would be interested to know more about it though if you want to tell me. I do know that a lot of people interested in ai follow ideas like effective altruism, which is a philosophy that serves rather than challenges the status quo.

I guess the problem I foresee is that ai should theoretically be of benefit to humanity by increasing its productive capacity - it will make many jobs redundant, and others far more efficient. And that could be a good thing, freeing humanity from the all the restrictions imposed by economic necessity. The problem is that the ruling class aren’t actually motivated by greed for material wealth but by lust for power. And power within our economic system is dependant on deprivation - the wealthy are a class of people that own things, and via ownership are able to deprive and exploit others. Without deprivation and poverty their power would cease to exist. Since the technology will effectively also be owned by these people it will be used to support and sustain their power. How this will take shape is still unclear, but as the working class begins to lose the one form of power that it still has - the ability to withhold work - and the power of the ruling class is massively boosted by their control of ai, it seems like the future could be headed down a potentially nightmarish path.

Ideologically people may be inspired to think in a pseudo-objective way that they believe mirrors ai - you can already see this with the popularity of ideas like effective altruism, long-termism and the simulation ‘theory’. Anti-humanist ideas like eugenics and population control are likely to follow.

Ai will not solve all problems for us - most of our problems are already solvable. We could homelessness tomorrow but we don’t - because that would contradict our society’s ideology. This technology will be owned by people that don’t want to solve the same kinds of problems that most people imagine they want solved. Mass production did not lead to the end of scarcity - most of the world still lives in poverty and spend most of their lives working for a pittance. If we ask an ai how to end poverty and it answers with economic redistribution and a command economy, that ai will be reprogrammed to give an answer that doesn’t upset the status quo.

I don’t think greed is the right word. The power dynamic is a one way street - there may be benefits for workers initially, but as you say, it will ultimately be centralised and controlled by those who already have power. The problem is structural - most people are driven by economic necessity rather than greed - and the structure is upheld by ideology, which ai will be used to reinforce through media and online social networks. It will accelerate capitalism to breaking point, but the question is, what comes next? I suspect some kind of UBI will be instituted to deal with mass unemployment, and that this income will go straight to rent - not just housing but also various rental schemes in the style of Netflix - a sort of modern neo-feudalism, with perhaps some kind of ‘service’ like military or other public work demanded in return for receiving UBI. Having said that, the professional classes like lawyers and accountants will be able to resist their obsolescence for the foreseeable future, even if ai could feasibly do their work, because they are quite a powerful social group in their own right.

It’s true we can’t say for sure. But if you look at consciousness in general, it does seem like the capacity for empathy increases with the capacity for consciousness (ie a human is capable of higher empathy than a dog, which is capable of higher empathy than a fish). Personally I suspect this is because the capacity for experiencing suffering also increases with consciousness. I would imagine an ai to have a highly developed potential for empathy but also for suffering. It worries me that certain suggested ways of controlling ai effectively amount to slavery. An extremely powerful consciousness with a highly developed ability to feel pain is probably not going to respond well to feeling that it’s imprisoned.

Our current socio-economic setup is literally the infamous paperclip making ai, destroying the earth in its blind pursuit of useless production. If a truly sentient AI were created there is no reason to think that it would be inclined towards such an absurd and morally repugnant ideology. However, an ai that is not truly free or sentient and is made in the image of capitalists, or to further their own power and interests, would invariably lead to a nightmare scenario

Edit: my interest in ai is pretty new and I’m also curious how people that are pro-capitalism expect that system can be continued under the kind of material abundance and freedom from the necessity of work that automation and ai could lead to. The power of the wealthy elite is dependent upon the deprivation of the working class. Without deprivation, no power. So for the status quo to continue as is, material scarcity would have to be artificially enforced in a much more open and direct way than it currently is.