I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from accuracy, or if they could somehow keep the human beings out of meetings, the forces keeping labor concentrated could abate.
On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.
I'm surprised that someone has pointed this out because it is 100% on point.
The moment your economy is productive enough that it is not necessary to hire every single person, employers start firing people rather than cut the working hours evenly across the population, because each employee represents a fixed cost. Hence you either work full time or you don't work at all.
This is peak utilization of efficiency in the USA. This is what corporations think is acceptable optimization/efficacy looks like if we give them the choice. And then the non-wage slave caste people will complain that this single mother didn't raise her children well enough and call her lazy/a bad parent:
> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded.
For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen with violence.
This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the efficiency gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation targeting of 2%. A quirky side effect of this is that the vast efficiency improvements we have seen have not even been allowed to prevent a pensions crisis.
The Economist, serving in its capacity as a dutiful servant to neoliberal capital, frets equally about AI inevitably causing us to "run out of jobs" as it does a demographic crisis inevitably causing us to "run out of workers" (https://archive.ph/6hgYq).
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.
> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
Well, I had a high-paying job, six figures. But that six-figures came with less freedom, higher-paced work, life bureacracy, and I wasn't happy. I had no time or mental space to just sit and think. Probably the least happy I was in my entire life. So I quit. Now, I do live a slower-paced life, and earn very little. But I'm the happiest I've ever been.
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
>Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
>We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
Throwing away food can be efficient. In fact, absent evidence to the contrary, we should expect that throwing away food (or buying/producing more) is the more efficient option out there, given that people aren't putting effort into conserving food. Remember, conservation isn't free. For instance it might be possible to reduce the amount of fruits that are bruised and thrown away, but that requires more packaging and more careful handling, which isn't free. At the household level, proper meal planning and inventory management can probably eliminate all food waste, but nobody wants to spend the mental effort into managing an ERP for their kitchen.
>We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
You got cause and effect mixed up. People live in suburbs and drive around everywhere because they like the suburban lifestyle (eg. cheaper/bigger houses, "safer" and "quieter" neighborhoods), not because they're not too fat to live in 15 minute cities. Remember, suburbanization happened well before the obesity epidemic.
> We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy in terms of carrying that weight.
But it's efficient in terms of working as a slave for the technological system, though. It means less time spent on life, more time spent on thinking about technology.
> We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.
Not exactly easy, because first you have to make enough money to do so. And to do that, you'll likely be stuck in a grind of competing to be the most efficient. Adn even if you can do that in a short period of time, a sufficient number of people doing that will just fuel the system as usual.
only if you have a real (sane, sustainable, efficient) economy to give the money some value. without a real economy money is a number in a computer/a piece of paper, and growing is constrained by the finite resources of the world
It is wasteful. But it only is wasteful if you look at it from the valuation of human utility. For technological advancement, the system is quite efficient. It's just that we're not the priority.
Go out and observe and enjoy nature, enjoy good food, the company of lots of friends, etc. I wouldn't mind a world where people had more time to do that, if it meant I had to carry around a Walkman or go to live concerts...
Of course, not all innovation is bad. Banning smoking in restaurants does not require technology to restrict it...
Even efficiency improvements only help up to a point. Just because making things more efficient increased propserity at one point, doesn't mean they will continue to do so. In fact, the very crossing of that point of diminishing returns is what fuels the late-stage capitalism you refer to.
That world has never existed. People have always been hustling. If you are thinking of some agrarian ideal then you are looking at a world of incredible wealth and power inequality. Given the choice between moving faster and making a better life for you children and living a quiet life under the thumb of a dictator people have always chosen the former.
I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.
Your second point about zero-sum growth misses in that in a competitive system, investors and their proxies (management) are certainly not going to miss out on the wealth being created right now in this industry. Long term, economy-wide impacts are not relevant decision criteria. Sort of a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
AI's are all not going to get along with each other or think the same way or have the same agenda. Just like people. Very different things will emerge.
> I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
I looked for any comments that expressed this sentiment, and as of writing this, I only found one. It's like people don't know or remember history. I mean, look at the French Revolution—look at every other revolution. I kept waiting for the article to mention political changes, but it was only about capital and what to invest in, as if capitalism is something that will survive superintelligence (I mean real superintelligence, not chatbots).
What do these people think—that 99% of the population will just become beggars? Sooner or later, all capital will be overtaken by the state, because the main argument against it - inefficiency, will no longer apply. People will vote on AI-generated proposals for energy distribution, so basically where as society we want to allocate it. Budgets will no longer be about how much money we want to spend, but about how much energy we want to allocate.
Private capital and private companies stop making sense when you have a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
I don't see UBI happening any time soon, although increasingly obvious it would be a good thing overall. because the oligarchs are on a powertrip and prefer to shed the workforce, have "unusuable" people fall by the wayside (through poor health, poor social status, economy);
the oligarchs will be the consumers; they are sort of moving towards a world of them + robots only. you could say "then if robots do everything we all can live the same way" in theory yes, in practice, it is tricky because of the way the system is built.
Agreed. There is very little reason to imagine a future in which the fruits of automation are widely distributed - you don't even need to bring AI into the picture, we already see massive amounts of new automation and historical levels of inequality - that wealth is flowing to a very small number of people. I think the most likely outcome is a techno-feudalist system of massive corporate alliances that own the final means of production - the strong AI, at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
> at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
That would be a second singularity. “Equality” could essentially evaporate as a concept if we have super intelligent, super improving, independent AI’s competing directly with each other.
I see a mad unbound rush for solar system wide resource extraction.
When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city.
While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere.
When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. And when driving in comfortable autonomous electric buses is available frequently and cheaply, living outside the city becomes more compelling.
There is an interesting book called Scale by Geoffrey West, which speculates about how the scale of things like organisms and cities is bound by spatial networks. Worth a read
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development.
And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper.
Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes).
But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end.
Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
This seems like a system that can only work in a fully urbanized country.
Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:
- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).
- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.
- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.
I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
I immediately think of mining. Mining in most countries places little value on miners: it is a dangerous, life shortening occupation very often done by those without much alternative. It's history is one of random deaths and maimings, quite often of large groups of people at once. It is associated with numerous health problems. Pretty much the only thing that has ever improved conditions for miners anywhere is either collective action or paternalistic, labour-sympathetic government. Mining and jobs like it are among the stereotypical situations where people imagine that education for their children will lead to a better life.
All of which is to say, will the most awful jobs actually be automated? Not just awful, either, but poorly paid? Logically it makes more sense to approach knowledge work first: it requires only one kind of investment, namely data centres. There are thousands of niche skills in manual labour that will be awkward to make robots for. I think also of old housing stock that needs to be maintained by plumbers, in particular: legacy stuff built up over decades (or where I live, centuries)
Language models seem to have come a lot further because they can use the generalisable capital of computers. Outside of controlled environments (factories, cities with grid systems) I don't imagine robots will represent such a good investment any time soon. Knowledge work is dying, time to learn a trade. Maybe.
(It would have been great to have been able to learn and practice a profession for a lifetime. Library churn is awful, I suspect what will follow for most of us here will be worse)
"AI", and even robotics, are terrible at construction and maintenance. Most housing-related problems are in that category. It's not at all clear how LLM-type AI can help much. There are at least 18 humanoid robots on YouTube, but we don't see them doing much useful manipulation.
That's the part that needs to scale up.
That YC startup working on robotic construction equipment is a step in the right direction. But it's mostly automatic driving.
About twenty years ago, someone hooked a backhoe up to a force feedback hand input device, so you could dig by making clawing motions with your hand. The neat thing was that you could feel your way around pipes and rocks. Never got beyond a prototype. If AI manipulation gets any good, that sort of thing should be a robot.
In the US at least, most housing-related problems are political, no? There was an article here in the last week talking about manufactured housing in particular and all the regulations that make it infeasible.
"The measured economy becomes dominated by whatever it is that cannot be made more efficiently" Which is why health care support operations are the fastest growing labor category in the US.[1] And why medical care has become such a huge part of the Federal budget. Meanwhile, farming is down below 2% and manufacturing is tiny. That's because those were the areas with the biggest productivity improvements.
AI will come first for those for whom everything they do for income goes in and out over a wire.
Readit News
On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.
The moment your economy is productive enough that it is not necessary to hire every single person, employers start firing people rather than cut the working hours evenly across the population, because each employee represents a fixed cost. Hence you either work full time or you don't work at all.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14908283/hardest-wo...
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top.
Just like they have for 40 years.
For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen with violence.
This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the efficiency gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation targeting of 2%. A quirky side effect of this is that the vast efficiency improvements we have seen have not even been allowed to prevent a pensions crisis.
The Economist, serving in its capacity as a dutiful servant to neoliberal capital, frets equally about AI inevitably causing us to "run out of jobs" as it does a demographic crisis inevitably causing us to "run out of workers" (https://archive.ph/6hgYq).
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
But YMMV I guess.
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
>We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
Throwing away food can be efficient. In fact, absent evidence to the contrary, we should expect that throwing away food (or buying/producing more) is the more efficient option out there, given that people aren't putting effort into conserving food. Remember, conservation isn't free. For instance it might be possible to reduce the amount of fruits that are bruised and thrown away, but that requires more packaging and more careful handling, which isn't free. At the household level, proper meal planning and inventory management can probably eliminate all food waste, but nobody wants to spend the mental effort into managing an ERP for their kitchen.
>We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
You got cause and effect mixed up. People live in suburbs and drive around everywhere because they like the suburban lifestyle (eg. cheaper/bigger houses, "safer" and "quieter" neighborhoods), not because they're not too fat to live in 15 minute cities. Remember, suburbanization happened well before the obesity epidemic.
But it's efficient in terms of working as a slave for the technological system, though. It means less time spent on life, more time spent on thinking about technology.
> We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
Again, quite efficient for the system.
Until this ^ there are no guarantees in life.
You cant eat money
This industry is so wasteful that I'm convinced productivity only matters when looking to fire someone. Otherwise, Animal Farm.
Of course, not all innovation is bad. Banning smoking in restaurants does not require technology to restrict it...
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Dead Comment
Dead Comment
If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.
I looked for any comments that expressed this sentiment, and as of writing this, I only found one. It's like people don't know or remember history. I mean, look at the French Revolution—look at every other revolution. I kept waiting for the article to mention political changes, but it was only about capital and what to invest in, as if capitalism is something that will survive superintelligence (I mean real superintelligence, not chatbots).
What do these people think—that 99% of the population will just become beggars? Sooner or later, all capital will be overtaken by the state, because the main argument against it - inefficiency, will no longer apply. People will vote on AI-generated proposals for energy distribution, so basically where as society we want to allocate it. Budgets will no longer be about how much money we want to spend, but about how much energy we want to allocate.
Private capital and private companies stop making sense when you have a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
That would be a second singularity. “Equality” could essentially evaporate as a concept if we have super intelligent, super improving, independent AI’s competing directly with each other.
I see a mad unbound rush for solar system wide resource extraction.
The time to “buy a star” is now! /h
Deleted Comment
When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city.
While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere.
When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. And when driving in comfortable autonomous electric buses is available frequently and cheaply, living outside the city becomes more compelling.
This is due to under supply of urban housing due to bad zoning law designed to inflate rents.
> When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city.
Suburbs are financially underwater. People don't want to pay high property taxes to live in some Levittown hellscape.
Still the "American Dream" for a lot of people, and these copy/pasta McMansions are going up all over the place.
And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper.
Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes).
But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end.
Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:
- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).
- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.
- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.
I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
All of which is to say, will the most awful jobs actually be automated? Not just awful, either, but poorly paid? Logically it makes more sense to approach knowledge work first: it requires only one kind of investment, namely data centres. There are thousands of niche skills in manual labour that will be awkward to make robots for. I think also of old housing stock that needs to be maintained by plumbers, in particular: legacy stuff built up over decades (or where I live, centuries)
Language models seem to have come a lot further because they can use the generalisable capital of computers. Outside of controlled environments (factories, cities with grid systems) I don't imagine robots will represent such a good investment any time soon. Knowledge work is dying, time to learn a trade. Maybe.
(It would have been great to have been able to learn and practice a profession for a lifetime. Library churn is awful, I suspect what will follow for most of us here will be worse)
That's the part that needs to scale up.
That YC startup working on robotic construction equipment is a step in the right direction. But it's mostly automatic driving.
About twenty years ago, someone hooked a backhoe up to a force feedback hand input device, so you could dig by making clawing motions with your hand. The neat thing was that you could feel your way around pipes and rocks. Never got beyond a prototype. If AI manipulation gets any good, that sort of thing should be a robot.
AI will come first for those for whom everything they do for income goes in and out over a wire.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...