Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?
Do you think, in this hypothesized environment, that “democratic policy” will be the organic will of the people? It assumes much more agency on the part of people than will actually exist, and possibly more than even exists now.
The concept of voting, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people, is just dumb. Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates; everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media and they only hear about candidates which were covered by the media; basically only candidates chosen by the establishment. It's a joke. People get the privilege of voting for which party will oppress them.
Current democracy is akin to the media making up a story like 'The Wizard of OZ' and then they offer you to vote for either the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow. You have no idea who any of these candidates are, you can't even be sure if they actually exist. Everything you know about them could literally have been made up by whoever told the story; and yet, when asked to vote, people are sure they understand what they're doing. They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.
Even with just 50 states in the US currently, the complexity is very high. Operating in all 50 states or just a few is very difficult and costs a lot of money. Usually what happens is the "lowest common denominator" solution: whereby companies just follow the superset of laws that comply with the most stringent regions.
That's why California law is pretty much the most important state law. California has the biggest economy, and a lot of companies are headquartered there. In addition, their laws tends to be more restrictive for companies. So even if you're in Texas, there's a good chance you're just controlled by California law.
That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians.
So more people like Donald Trump or Joe Rogan, and less people like Gavin Newsom or Andrew Cuomo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it?
This is a problem of scale. The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. You didn't need to hatch devious schemes to come to power. You couldn't abuse your fellow men because they would be in charge tomorrow. That's the true power of random selection and it's completely inapplicable to today's society at large.
Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck.
Being chosen at random could be better than being chosen by elites who are actively trying to oppress you. You get the median thing instead of the below-median thing.
At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it?
Exactly. It would remove the false veneer of consent. That's a feature, not a cost.
The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime.
Re-apply the intended principles of federalism so that only decisions of insurmountable national relevance are made at the national level and the large majority of decision are made at the local level.
The solution to "candidates don't always deliver what the electorate wanted them to deliver and the electorate doesn't always hold them accountable" isn't "let's put people who never promised anything in the first place and aren't accountable for anything in charge, and somehow assume that they're going to be more benign"
I haven't got the first clue about governing a country, so I'd rely on people telling me what to do. If they can convince me (which will be easy, trillion dollar companies and powerful billionaire oligarchs convince people to act against their own self interest all the time) they end up running the country, but the blame can be taken by me.
I haven't got the first clue about governing a country
Is this really so different from quite a number of high profile politicians today? Many are mostly good at networking and how to use the media machine. The actual competence is with the invisible people behind them, and the bureaucrats. I see little or no difference, even disregarding current administrations (not just in the US).
With the current approach to voting; all the candidates you get to choose from have already been pre-screened for: 1. Thirst for power and 2. Alignment with the interests of big capital holders (who paid for their campaigns in order to get to this stage).
This is a horrible pre-screening process.
That's why it makes sense to outsource the decision making to a group of people that are being paid to study these issues full-time.
Given some balanced (yes, there's a problem) expert advice, I think rando's might make better choices than career politicians focussed on extending their power. The rando's would just return to their old careers afterwards.
The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection.
The greeks ( socrates/plato ) figured out that democracy was a terrible form of government. Then again, the greeks did vote for socrates to drink hemlock.
everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media
Is there anything sweeter than fox news, a "news" company owned by an australian, railing against foreign influence in american politics?
They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.
At this point, I'd prefer we ban campaigning and silly staged debates altogether. Just have each candidate post who their masters are and then let the people vote off that. It's far more value to the voter if they knew who the politicians owe their allegiance to than empty campaign promises.
But each mechanism has different tradeoffs. How much you get involved, how much expertise you need, and how well your interests are represented. A good political system uses all 3 to public's advantage, to reinforce each other.
Fox News already did this in the US, and it didn't take AGI.
adding trump to the search instead of CNN shows ABC and Steph. being ordered to pay Trump $15 million for defamation (which again, requires lying about a person or facts): https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/14/trump-abc-stephanop...
there are endless examples of this
that most people are viscerally reacting to feeling insulted by being called out about how most of what we think most of the time is simply chorus-like repetition of the general vibe we lead ourselves into believing is the vibe of "our" kind of people. our tribe of like minded individuals; the hacker crowd.
but at least I can admit this. it's only at certain sparse points in anybody's life that we are forced to really think critically; but this experience is terribly difficult and if/when real enough it comes with the existential dread of impossible choices weighted by real world consequences. I remind myself of this so to feel better about how I am indeed a mindless bot preaching to the choir, repeating what I was told to repeat, and pretending that I am fully present and fully free at all times (nobody is... that would be exhausting)
Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics
Not only that, but they actively stop applying critical thinking when the same problem is framed in a political way. And yes it's both sides, and yes the "more educated" the people are, the worse their results are (i.e. almost a complete reversal from framing the same problem as skin care products vs. gun control). Recent paper on this, also covered and somewhat replicated by popular youtubers.
Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics
Including you. This is a 3000 year old critique you just uncritically parroted. It is the the original thought terminating cliche. People have always been calling each other ideologically brainwashed NPCs and themselves independent maverick free thinkers.
Except my thoughts are original and critical, everyone else is just a sheep. /s
Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics
Because they have different concerns, and time and attention are scarce. With all possible social changes like the article suggests this focus could change too. Ultimately, when things will get too bad, uprisings happen and sometimes things change. And I hope the more we (collectively) get through, the higher are the chances we start noticing the patterns and stopping early.
With all possible social changes like the article suggests this focus could change too.
I have an anecdote from Denmark. It’s a rich country with one of the best work-life balance in the world. Socialized healthcare and social safety net.
I noticed that during the election, they put the ads with just the candidate’s face and party name. It’s like they didn’t even have a message. I asked why. The locals told me nobody cares because “they’re all the same anyway”.
Two things could be happening: either all the candidates are really the same. Or people choose to focus on doing the things they like with their free time and resources. My feeling tells me it’s the second.
You need only look at the US, where the rich are given all the benefits in changes in law, and the commoner gets nothing except some get the perverted glee of causing someone else to suffer first, not realizing they're on the menu to be sacrificed later.
It will have to be displaced and reset by a nonviolent popular uprising.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. What do you think the newest pet project of Musk is about? I'm talking of his America's Party initiative - an obvious attempt to direct any popular uprising, be it nonviolent or otherwise, into he same old river bed.
When you say "popular" you have to take into account who decides what's popular these days and why billionaires are tripping all over themselves to get equipped with "social" media of their own.
Democratic societies always involve years of media and other manipulation to plow and seed the minds of the general public with presumptions, associations, spin, appeals to emotion, and so on. The will is a product of belief, and if beliefs are saturated with such stuff, the so-called “will of the people” - a terrifying and tyrannical concept even at face value - is a product of what people have been led to believe by tyrannical and powerful interests. Add to that that most people are utterly unqualified to participate politically, both because they lack the knowledge and reasoning skill, and because of their lack of virtue, acting out of undisciplined fear or appetite. And sadly, much of these disqualifying flaws also characterize our political leadership!
Our political progression follows the decadence described in Plato’s Republic - the decline into timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny - to the letter.
In so-called democratic societies, the association of monarchy and aristocracy with tyranny is unthinking and reflexive, but it is not rational. This is a conditioned prejudice that is ignorant of history. And partly it comes from a hyperliberalism that substitutes a live-and-let-live attitude, situated within a context of objective morality and norms and laws drawn from it, with a pathological, relativizing revolution that seethes at the very idea of moral limits, views them as “tyrannical”, and thus seeks to overthrow them. This necessarily leads to tyranny, as morality is the only protection against tyranny; when the authority of objective truth and good are destroyed, power fills the vacuum. We become psychologically and spiritually conquered. The paradox of such “anarchy” is that it is exactly the condition under which “might makes right” can flourish.
The society built on empathy would have been able to work out any issue brought by technology as long as empathic goals take priority. Unfortunately our society is far from being based on empathy, to say the least. And technology and the people wielding it would always work around and past the formal laws, rules and policies in such a society. (that isn't to say that all those laws, rules, etc. aren't needed. They are like levies, dams, etc - necessary local, in time and space, fixes which willn't help in the case of the global ocean rise which AGI and robots (even less-than-AGI ones) will be like)
May be it is one of the technological Filters - we didn't become empathic enough (and i mean not only at the individual level, we are even less at the level of the societal systems) before AGI and as a result woudln't be able to instill enough of empathy into the AGI.
-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
-- Therefore the AI generates greatly reduced wealth
-- Therefore there’s greatly reduced wealth to pay for the AI
-- …rendering such a future impossible
-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
-- Corporate profits drop (or growth slows) and there is demand from the powers that be to increase taxation in order to increase the UBI.
-- People can afford the products and services.
Unfortunately, with no jobs the products and services could become exclusively entertainment-related.
exclusively entertainment related
We may find that, if our baser needs are so easily come by that we have tremendous free time, much of the world is instead pursuing things like the sciences or arts instead of continuing to try to cosplay 20th century capitalism.
Why are we all doing this? By this, I mean, gestures at everything this? About 80% of us will say, so that we don't starve, and can then amuse ourselves however it pleases us in the meantime. 19% will say because they enjoy being impactful or some similar corporate bullshit that will elicit eyerolls. And 1% do it simply because they enjoy holding power over other people and management in the workplace provides a source of that in a semi-legal way.
So the 80% of people will adapt quite well to a post-scarcity world. 19% will require therapy. And 1% will fight tooth and nail to not have us get there.
Ask how many of your neighbours can name three Supreme Court justices (or hell, their senators and representative) versus who can name three Khardashian sisters?
TBH, I'd hope for the end of "broad" social status. I'd love to see a retreat towards smaller circles where status is earned through displays of talent and respectable deeds, not just by dominating/manufacturing/buying a media presence.
When you're fighting strawmen you aren't grappling with the actual content of an argument you're purportedly opposed to, but it does serve the ego, as it's nice to tear down something you don't like but can't explain why.
UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.
You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources. They will also control robots with guns.
Less than 100 years ago we had a guy who convinced a small group of Germans to seize power and try to exterminate or enslave vast majority of humans on Earth - just because he felt they were inferior. Imagine if he had superhuman AI at his disposal.
In the next 50 years we will have different factions within elites fighting for power, without any regard for wellbeing of lower class, who will probably be contained in fully automated ghettos. It could get really dark really fast.
So then there's no need for AI workers.You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources.
Let me rephrase that from 'So then there's no need for AI workers.' to 'So then there's no money to pay for AI workers.'
The UBI approach creates a closed economic loop: Company A pays taxes → Government gives UBI to consumers → Consumers buy from Company A → Company A pays taxes... This is functionally identical to Company A directly paying people to buy Company A's products, which makes no economic sense.
It's like Ford paying his workers $50/day, but the only customers buying Ford cars are Ford workers spending their $50/day wages. Ford would go bankrupt - there's no external value creation, just money circulating in circles.
Where does the actual wealth come from in this system? Who are the net buyers that make the businesses profitable enough to sustain the UBI taxes?
UBI in an AI-dominated economy can't create a functioning economy - it's just an imaginary self-licking ice cream cone.
On the other hand, on a much broader scale, the planet itself is a closed economic loop. There's a finite amount of resources and we're all just cycling most of them around back and forth.
Arguably, a significant amount of "growth" has come from taking resources that formerly were not "on the books" and putting them on. The silver in the New World wasn't in (Western) ledgers until the 1500s, the oil under the Middle East was just goo until the late 1800s. The uranium ore in your backyard suddenly got a lot more interesting after 1940.
New value can come from inventing new and useful applications for existing resources or by finding new external inputs (maybe capturing some of that radiation the giant fusion sphere overhead is blasting in our direction).
Or the technological singularity happens before that, and either AI will kill us all, or humans will merge with AI.
I like your optimism, though.
A while later, the world is living in a dichotomy of people living off the land and some high tech spots of fully autonomous and self-maintaining robots that do useless work for bored people. Knowing people and especially the rich, I don't believe in Culture-like utopia, unfortunately, sad as it may be.
This is a problem our ancestors faced with the enclosure of the commons. As dispossessed subsistence farmers, they had no other option to survive other than selling their labor. Their land was privatized and with it their way of life destroyed.
We still live in the world where the commons is enclosed, subsistence farming is effectively illegal.
I genuinely wish what you speak of happens should reality play out that way, but I think a lot of people will die with shit eating grins on their faces, even after they run out of shit to eat, because it means someone with blue hair is starving, too.
Also "rendering such a future impossible". This is a retrocausal way of thinking. As though an a bad event in the future makes that future impossible.
This a late 20th century myopic view of the economy. In the ages and the places long before, most of human toil was enjoyed by a tiny elite.
And overall wealth levels were much lower. It was the expansion of consumption to the masses that drove the enormous increase in wealth that those of us in "developed" countries now live with and enjoy.
Some kinds of growth are beneficial in a phase but not sustainable over time. Like the baby hamster.
Doesn't mean we should continue with the old ways.
The GP was claiming that it is "20th century myopic" to not notice that in the past the products of most human toil went mostly to a small elite. My very point was that that old way of doing things didn't generate much wealth, not that the way things have changed is all good. I'm not advocating for any of the old ways, I'm saying that having an economic system that brings benefits to all is an important component of growing the overall wealth of a society (and of humanity overall).
The entire point of capitalism (at least until the very recent past) was to harness the production capacity of labor to create profit. Since elites generally do not engage in labor, there is no sense in which capitalism has ever involved "elites producing for elites".
Of course, expanded automation may tweak this a bit, since elites may no longer rely on human labor to facilitate production. That would change things ... substantially, which was really the original point.
If we arrived at a scenario in which elites used highly automated production to simply produce for themselves, what does that economy look like compared to today? Is it wealthier or poorer overall? Is it self-sustaining?
In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI
Productivity increases make products cheaper. To the extent that your hypothetical AI manufacturer can produce widgets with less human labor, it only makes sense to do so where it would reduce overall costs. By reducing cost, the manufacturer can provide more value at a lower cost to the consumer.
Increased productivity means greater leisure time. Alternatively, that time can be applied to solving new problems and producing novel products. New opportunities are unlocked by the availability of labor, which allows for greater specialization, which in-turn unlocks greater productivity and the flywheel of human ingenuity continues to accelerate.
The item of UBI is another thorny issue. This may inflate the overall supply of currency and distribute it via political means. If the inflation of the money supply outpaces the productivity gains, then prices will not fall.
Instead of having the gains of productivity allocated by the market to consumers, those with political connections will be first to benefit as per Cantilion effects. Under the worst case scenario this might include distribution of UBI via social credit scores or other dystopian ratings. However, even under what advocates might call the ideal scenario, capital flows would still be dictated by large government sector or public private partnership projects. We see this today with central bank flows directly influencing Wall St. valuations.
Increased productivity means greater leisure time.
Productivity has been increasing steadily for decades. Do you see any evidence that leisure time has tracked it?
IMO what will actually happen is feudal stasis after a huge die-off. There will be no market for new products and no ruling class interest in solving new problems.
If this sounds far-fetched, consider that this we can see this happening already. This is exactly the ideal world of the Trump administration and its backers. They have literally slashed funding for public health, R&D, and education.
And what's the response? Thiel, Zuckererg, Bezos, and Altman haven't said a word against the most catastrophic reversal of public science policy since Galileo and the Inquisition. Musk is pissed because he's been sidelined, but he was personally involved, through DOGE, in cutting funding to NASA and NOAA.
So what will AI be used for? Clearly the goal is to replace most of the working population. And then what?
One clue is that Musk cares so much about free speech and public debate he's trying to retrain Grok to be less liberal.
None of them - not one - seem even remotely interested in funding new physics, cancer research, abundant clean energy, or any other genuinely novel boundary-breaking application of AI, or science in general. They have the money, they're not doing it. Why?
The focus is entirely on building a nostalgic 1950s world with rockets, robots, apartheid, corporate sovereignty, and ideological management of information and belief.
And that includes AI as a tool for enforcing business-as-usual, not as a tool for anything dangerous, original, or unruly which threatens their political and economic status.
wealth is not a thing in itself, it's a representation of value and purchasing power. It will create its own economy when it is able to mine material and automate energy generation.
The Cobb-Douglas production function (Cobb & Douglas, 1928) illustrates how AGI shifts economic power from human labor to autonomous systems (Stiefenhofer &Chen 2024). The wage equations show that as AGI’s productivity rises relative to human labor decline. If AGI labor fully substitutes human labor, employment may become obsolete, except in areas where creativity, ethical judgment, or social intelligence provide a comparative advantage (Frey & Osborne, 2017). The power shift function quantifies this transition, demonstrating how AGI labor and capital increasingly control income distribution. If AGI ownership is concentrated, wealth accumulation favors a small elite (Piketty, 2014). This raises concerns about economic agency, as classical theories (e.g., Locke, 1689; Marx, 1867) tie labor to self-ownership and class power.
Wish I had time to study these formula.
We already have seen the precursors of this sort of shift with ever rising productivity with stalled wages. As companies (systems) get more sophisticated and efficient they also seem to decrease the leverage individual human inputs can have.
Currently my thinking leans towards believing the only way to avoid the worse dystopian scenarios will be for humans to be able to grow their own food and build their own devices and technology. Then it matters less if some ultra wealthy own everything.
However that also seems pretty close to a form of feudalism.
In a feudalist system, the rich gave you the ability to subsist in exchange for supporting them militarily. In a new feudalist system, what type of support would the rich demand from the poor?
A serf's week was scheduled around the days they worked the land whose proceeds went to the lord and the commons that subsisted themselves. Transfers of grain and livestock from serf to lord along with small dues in eggs, wool, or coin primarily constituted one side of the economic relation between serf and lord. These transfers kept the lord's demesne barns full so he could sustain his household, supply retainers, etc, not to mention fulfill the. tithe that sustained the parish.
While peasants occasionally marched, they contributed primary in financing war more than they fought it. Their grain, rents, and fees were funneled into supporting horses, mail, crossbows rather than being called to fight themselves.
The fact that self-interest may play a role in the careers of many politicians doesn't undo the damage that this attitude has caused to our polity.
"They're all fuckers, they're the same" is the attitude that leads to people being unable to differentiate between one party that is subject to excessive corporate lobbying and donations, still starts too many wars, and frequently makes mistakes but nevertheless is fundamentally trying to improve most people's lives, and another that wants to destroy Medicaid.
I prefer to judge my political opponents by what they actually do, and by that metric, it is self-evident from both their public and private speech, and from the legislation that they seek to (and sometimes do) pass, that Republicans would like to destroy (or at least massively downsize) redistributive programs that provide assistance to the poor.
Now, as to why they might want to do this, I remain mute and disinterested, since in 61 years of life, I've never heard any explanation that doesn't deconstruct under cross-examination.
https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot...
Except for the Founding Fathers, who deliberately created a limited government with a Bill of Rights, and George Washington who, incredibly, turned down an offer of dictatorship.
Tecumseh, Malcolm X, Angela Merkel, Cincinnatus, Eisenhower, and Gandhi all come to mind.
George Washington was surely an exceptional leader but he isn't the only one.
It shows how rare this is.
More often what happens is that leaders make small and often imperceptible choices to not amass more power over time, and that series of choices prevent the scenario like what you're describing from occurring.
Can you name a US President, other than Washington, who reduced the power of the Presidency? All the ones I can think of increased it.
Passing up absolute power isn't the only way that a leader can show humility and grace, true leadership is more subtle and is expressed in the day to day decisions that a leader consciously makes which strengthen institutions rather than consolidate power.
Dwight Eisenhower led the largest army ever fielded during war and afterwards became President yet yielded his power and warned against the undue influence of the industrial-military complex, a system that he could have easily exploited for personal gain.
Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon not for personal gain, but because he believed it was best for the country knowing that it would cost him in the next election.
Outside of the presidency civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X held immense informal power and did so not for personal control, but for collective liberation. Their efforts ultimately ended in their untimely deaths but their sacrifice ultimately benefited the people they represented.
One of the most decorated military officers in U.S. history, General Smedley Butler spent his later years openly criticizing American imperialism and war profittering. He exposed a plot by wealthy elites to stage a fascist coup against Franklin Roosevelt which would have seen him put into a position of power. Rather than profit from the system he once served he spent his later years working to dismantle it.
True leadership isn't only about refusing a crown. It's more often about refusing to build a throne in the first place and choosing instead to lift others up and dismantling systems of oppression.
I don't know much about your examples, but did any of them turn down an offer of great power?
Not parent, but I can think of one: Oliver Cromwell. He led the campaign to abolish the monarchy and execute King Charles I in what is now the UK. Predictably, he became the leader of the resulting republic. However, he declined to be crowned king when this was suggested by Parliament, as he objected to it on ideological grounds. He died from malaria the next year and the monarchy was restored anyway (with the son of Charles I as king).
He arguably wasn't as keen on republicanism as a concept as some of his contemporaries were, but it's quite something to turn down an offer to take the office of monarch!
Though that said, the other problem is capitalism. Investors won't be so face to face with the consequences, but they'll demand their ROI. If the CEO plays it too conservatively, the investors will replace them with someone less cautious.
As the risk of catastrophic failure goes up, so too does the promise of untold riches.
I don't think these leaders are necessarily driven by wealth or power. I don't even necessarily think they're driven by the goal of AGI or ASI. But I also don't think they'll flinch when shit gets real and they've got to press the button from which there's no way back.
I think what drives them is being first. If they were driven by wealth, or power, or even the goal of AGI, then there's room for doubts and second thoughts about what happens when you press the button. If the goal is wealth or power, you have to wonder will you lose wealth or power in the long term by unleashing something you can't comprehend, and is it worth it or should you capitalize on what you already have? If the goal is simply AGI/ASI, once it gets real, you'll be inclined to slow down and ask yourself why that goal and what could go wrong.
But if the drive is just being first, there's no temper. If you slow down and question things, somebody else is going to beat you to it. You don't have time to think before flipping the switch, and so the switch will get flipped.
So, so much for my self-consolation that this will never happen. Guess I'll have to fall back to "we're still centuries away from true AGI and everything we're doing now is just a silly facade". We'll see.
However, I recently got a 100 EUR/m LLM subscription. That is the most I've spend on IT excluding a CAD software license. So've made a huge 180 and now am firmly back on the lap of US companies. I must say I've enjoyed my autonomy while it lasted.
One day AI will be democratized/cheap allowing people to self host what are now leading edge models, but it will take a while.
Human skill was already democratized in that anyone can obtain skills, and businesses have to be good at managing those people if they want to profit from those skills - ultimately the power is in the hands of the skilled individuals. But in the hypothetical AI future, where AI has superhuman skill, and human skills are devalued, it seems like there will be a more cynical, direct conversion between the money you can spend and the quality of your output, and local/self-hosted AI will never be able to compete with the resources of big business.
20 years ago we all thought that the Internet would democratize information and promote human rights. It did democratize information, and that has had both positive and negative consequences. Political extremism and social distrust have increased. Some of the institutions that kept society from falling apart, like local news, have been dramatically weakened. Addiction and social disconnection are real problems.
humans serving technology == evil
it's the power structure that determines the morality of technology. & power structures are a technology in and of themselves.
it follows that power structures which serve humans are good, and power structures that control humans are evil.
how do the things You create interact with humans and our power structures?
"The very process of human innovation" will survive, I assure you.
So far, I see no grand leftist resurgence to save us this time around.
Did the rise of fire, the wheel, the printing press, manufacturing, and microprocessors also give rise to futures without economic rights?
The rise of steam engines did. And the printing press and electrical engines did the opposite.
It's not hard to understand the difference, it's about the minimum size of an economically useful application. If it's large, it creates elites, if it's small, it democratizes the society.
LLMs by their nature have enormous minimal sizes, and the promise to increase by orders of magnitude.
Conversely a lot of very bad things led to good things. Worker rights advanced greatly after the plague. A lot of people died but that also mean there was a shortage of labour.
Similarly WWII, advanced women's rights because they were needed to provide vital infrastructure.
Good and bad things have good and bad outcomes, much of what defines if it is good or bad is the balance of outcomes, but it would be foolhardy to classify anything as universally good or bad. Accept the good outcomes of the bad. address the bad outcomes of the good.
The scary thing about AI is that people might end up with the right to do problematic things that were previously infeasible.
This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance.
Sincerely curious if there are working historical analogues of these approaches.
You have to ask, if we have AGI that's smarter than humans helping us plan the economy, why do we need an upper class? Aren't they completely superfluous?
Historically the elites aren't just those who have lots of money or property. They're also those who get to decide and enforce the rules for society.
We already have conscious feelings about these things, but it's virtually impossible to enforce it into the market at scale in a meaningful way.
We could take a broadly agreed on sentiment like "I really want the caregivers taking care of my grandparents in the rest home to be qualified and adequately paid so they'll do their best", and mysteriously the market will breed a solution that's "the agency is charging $50 per hour and delivering a $12 per hour warm body that will do the bare legal minimum to avoid neglect charges."
We try regulation, but again, the market evolves the countermeasures of least-cost checkbox compliance. All because we aren't willing to take direct command over economic actors.
It's not necessary for everyone to be exactly equal, it is necessary for inequalities to be seen as legitimate (meaning the person getting more is performing what is obviously a service to society). Legislators should be limited to the average working man's wage. Democratic consultations should happen in workplaces, in schools, all the way up the chain not just in elections. We have the forms of this right now, but basically the people get ignored at each step because legislators serve the interests of the propertied.
So it would depend on which class the AGI decided to side with. And if you think you can pre-program that, I think you underestimate what it means to be a general intelligence...
From what we're seeing the whole society has to be rebalanced accordingly, it can entail a kind of UBI, second and third classes of citizen depending on where you stand in the chain, etc.
Or as Norway does, fully go the other direction and limit the impact by artificially limiting the fallout.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The idea of taxing computer sales to fund job re-training for displaced workers was brought up during the Carter administration.
Althogh it was written somewhat as a warning, I feel Western countries (especially the US) are heading very much towards the terrafoam future. Mass immigration is making it hard to maintain order in some places, and if AI causes large unemployment it will only get worse.
Mass immigration is making it hard to maintain order in some places
Where is this happening? I'm in the US, and I haven't seen or heard of this.
Although I wouldn't pin it just on mass immigration, but also economic malaise from short-sighted decisions (stopping nuclear power and fracking and just importing energy) and being so weak on crime.
Like in Sweden we pay ~50% income tax plus 25% VAT, etc. so you can barely save up, so even as a professional engineer I can't afford a car or a house instead of an apartment (also as my wife is still looking for work). Meanwhile terrible criminals like the Nytorgsmannen got only ~5 years in prison for over 25 rapes, and was living in a rent-controlled apartment in central Stockholm! I wouldn't be able to afford that at market rates!
But the far-right party also sucks, just making it harder on decent non-Swedes like myself and my wife (doubled the time to citizenship for example), while doing nothing about the aforementioned criminals (the Nytorgsmannen is actually Swedish too).
There is no common sense party that'll just put criminals in prison and embrace economic growth (no AI act, etc.) and free markets and competition - hopefully Elon Musk's new party will do well, and a sort of Musk-Zubrin-Kuan Yew-Bukele pragmatism will become popular.
For closer to what the OP is referring to, see the riots in the UK last year.
I can't afford a car or a house instead of an apartment (also as my wife is still looking for work). Meanwhile terrible criminals like the Nytorgsmannen got only ~5 years in prison for over 25 rapes, and was living in a rent-controlled apartment in central Stockholm! I wouldn't be able to afford that at market rates!
This almost reads like a satire of right-wing populist propaganda, people's real economic grievances are getting redirected towards the most inconsequential and powerless scapegoats in society, immigrants.
This is especially tragic for people who themselves are immigrants who will also become the target by these populists. The more people suffer economically, the more they are looking for real alternatives. Then an "outsider" right populist comes in and offers just that, except of course with the backing by the wealthiest class of society, the ones actually responsible for your economic grievances in the first place.
This pattern repeats itself all across the western liberal democracies. Its not the people rising up, it's the richest people in the world holding on to power while the neoliberal house of cards that made them rich comes crumbling down.
> it's the richest people in the world holding on to power while the
> neoliberal house of cards that made them rich comes crumbling down.
What we are seeing time and time again, the parasites are able to reprogram the host, steering it towards its own death.
Like in Sweden we pay ~50% income tax
Sweden median income is 345,529 SEK, or $36k. 90%ile is 658,623 SEK or $69k. For 20-65 year olds it's a bit higher.
(That's from "Total income from employment and business by deciles, sex and age 2023")
Someone on 700k a year - so top 10% income - pays about 26% of their income in income tax.
> Mass immigration is
There is always crime to report. But notice the narratives are never about white collar crime. That might come to close.
There is a global rise in far right populism, and a large part of the justification and rhetoric they use points directly to mass immigration policies. There's a myriad of things they blame: crime, demographic or culture shift, economy.
To be clear, that isn't to say they're right blaming immigration. But its existence has put an enormous burden on democracies in The West. Just look at what a promise to get rid of immigrants did to the US 2016+: a captured, sycophantic, authoritarian government that disregards the rule of law regularly. Leading to regular mass protest and public opposition to LEO.
In Europe it's common to see people point to token heinous crimes - that pregnant woman raped into a miscarriage and her attacker given 12 months, the pedophile gang in the UK - and then use the demographics involved to radicalize people (especially young men - see the Alt Right Pipeline).
I rather regret not being able to justify buying:
since it was set up as a public benefit corporation.
Similarly, there are co-operatives for electric still --- how are they handling solar? Do they afford an option to use one's share of the profits to purchase solar panels and batteries?
What would be an equivalent structure for an AI company which would actually be meaningful (and since circling back to politics is inevitable, enforceable)?
And the rest of us are looking at a bunch of startups playing in the dirt and going "uh huh".
Looking for beta readers: username @ gmail.com
* Review of wealth sources with respect to food
* Socioeconomic ramifications of a free food distribution system
* Implications of artificial wombs, longevity pills, and nefarious people
* Benefits of personal, real-time DNA analysis devices
* Organic, bioluminescing street lamp replacements with 500+ year lifetimes (a bathtub curve extension analog)
* Robotaxi services using machine learning to optimize owner income
* How optimal prisoner's dilemma strategies resolve Hume's guillotine
* Strategies for evading capture in a surveillance state
* What plans an AGI would give itself (that don't involve conquering humanity)
* Ways an AGI could completely disable our emergency call centers
* Rationale behind a Galactic race towards harnessing black hole energy
and more.
At some point, there will be an AGI with a head start that is also sufficiently close to optimal that no one else can realistically overtake its ability to simultaneously grow and suppress competitors. Many organisms in the biological world adopt the same strategy.
I also forsee the splitting off of nation internet networks eventually impacting what software you can and cannot use. It's already true, it'll get worse in order to self-protect their economies and internal advantages.
That doesn't work now because we don't have AGIs to do the chores but when we do that changes.
Rather than fearing the loss of traditional employment, we should embrace the explosion of new roles that AGI will make possible.
Left unchecked, this shift risks exacerbating inequality, eroding democratic agency, and entrenching techno-feudalism
1) Inequality will be exacerbated regardless of AGI. inequality is a policy decision, AGI is just a tool subject to policy. 2) Democratic agency is only held by elected representatives and civil servants, and their agency is not eroded by the tool of AGI. 3) techno-feudalism isn't a real thing, it's just a scary word for "capitalism with computers".
The classical Social Contract-rooted in human labor as the foundation of economic participation-must be renegotiated to prevent mass disenfranchisement.
Maybe go back and bring that up around the invention of the cotton gin, the stocking frame, the engine, or any other technological invention which "disenfranchised" people who had their labor supplanted.
This paper calls for a redefined economic framework that ensures AGI-driven prosperity is equitably distributed through mechanisms such as universal AI dividends, progressive taxation, and decentralized governance. The time for intervention is now-before intelligence itself becomes the most exclusive form of capital.
1) nobody's going to equitably distribute jack shit if it makes money. They will hoard it the way the powerful have always hoarded money. No government, commune, sewing circle, etc has ever changed that and it won't in the future. 2) The idea that you're going to set tax policy based on something like achieving a social good means you're completely divorced from American politics. 3) We already have decentralized governance, it's called a State. I don't recommend trying to change it.
Tech companies are the same old story. They are monopolies like the rail companies of old. Ditto for whatever passes as AGI. They're just trying to become monopolists.