But it's unsettling because it somehow feels more plausible than most thought pieces on where all this is going. Not as a single big-bang, but a multi-year big-squeeze. That and the circumstances being materially different from previous recessions/crises that governments and policy makers won't have a ready-made playbook to refer to.

I expect we'll see governments attempting the old playbook than doing nothing though. Fiscal and, specifically, monetary stimulus.

I mean yes, maybe the humans will just be out of the loop in the budget if agents can do it all. But maybe it's a long tail of getting there. Or maybe it happens suddenly. Who the hell knows. Interesting times.

That seems intuitively right

In parallel there’s an explosion of creative output; Marvel movies turn around in 1 year instead of 4, solely blocked on availability of actors. Some actors license their likeness to unblock their calendar from reshoots so they can earn more. We don’t replace them wholesale because people idolize celebrity.

And demand for movies? Skyrockets. With new mediums to pursue. Classics like Goodfellas resurrected in high-fidelity 3D on the Vision Pro. A combination of diffusion models and Gaussian splatting means every movie can be upscaled to immersive 3d.

Video games enter a second renaissance, with indie developers having the advantage. For large studios, nostalgia is the moneymaker. The remake of Final Fantasy VII across three games that costs $100Ms and decades? Final Fantasy VIII gets rebuilt from scratch with a team of 30. But the rest of the money and team that would’ve been on that project now expand to other, more ambitious projects.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Mars? Why stop at Mars? Let’s start megaprojects to explore the galaxy. Mine asteroids for resources. What’s stopping us? Humans yearn for the unknown. When we exhaust resources or a modality of existence, we dream bigger, not smaller.

I personally see consumer and entertainment spending, and people employed lucratively in these sectors, growing dramatically. Maybe SaaS and a lot of businesses that have traditionally employed white collar employees fade. And a bunch of boring “financistas” don’t know how to make a buck betting in the casino anymore because boring old businesses and things nobody really wanted to do anyway aren’t lucrative anymore.

But, personally, the whole reason I got into software was to build cool stuff. Starting with video games! The type and scale of cool stuff I can build is only getting better, at an insanely fast rate. My bet is we thrive.

It may lead to a very positive future or to a very dark future for most people. Not sure what it will be.

There has been so little thought to the multi-order effects of the future we're pushing toward, and even if AI fails to deliver on its lofty promises, it will likely cause an economic crisis in its collapse.

The people saying that AI will rapidly drive costs down are frankly delusional. The things that people actually need to live like food, shelter, and clothes all have inputs that are physical and real. Even if AI somehow can drive the input costs of those things down, it will be delayed, and people will suffer in the interim.

The AI future that I worry about isn't the terminators coming to get us, it is the top 0.1% using this technology to accumulate more wealth. Unlike feudalism, however, the feudal lords will not be dependent on or responsible for the serfs, they can rely on a small minority of humans for production of critical goods for themselves.

These wealthy people don't really hide how they feel either[1], they are clearly stating their contempt for the unwashed masses below them. As Lasch predicted in his "Revolt of the Elites," they are separating themselves entirely from culture in favor of their own insulated fiefdoms. This is already happening: companies more than ever are orienting toward ultra-luxury: from travel, to housing, and everything in-between.

[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/peter-thiel-billio...

Lol that's set by law. This guy doesn't have a clue. Nice sci-fi, I guess.

Here is roughly what we need now: A workable plan to turn unfathomable productivity gains (which are amazing) into wealth for everyone.

Socialism looking like the correct configuration of the end state. Who knew!

A very simplistic take

Do not confuse the hypothetical details for discounting of the whole narrative, i.e., "Don't miss the forest for the trees."

This is what a lot of us have been banging on about in some form since the opening salvo in generative AI: it doesn't matter what its technical deficiencies are, so long as it's good enough to replace enough labor, enough of the time, to collapse the underlying economic engine (that is, consumer spending). That's what this hypothetical is trying to lay out, and honestly it's not far off from the truth as to what's actually going on.

With constant RIFs but rising profits, there is simply no brake whatsoever to this cycle: myopic boards and self-interested leaders (paid mostly in stock) have no incentive to stop this behavior, even as it kills the economic engine of the past few centuries. They make out like bandits, and use that money to insulate themselves from the harm they created - or attempt to for as long as possible, until governments and/or the public demand their carcasses on pikes for destroying their livelihoods.

It's not a matter of whether or not folks find something to do when work is irrelevant so much as we're not building a society where that's feasible as an alternative. We're not expanding welfare, we're not employing rent controls or price caps/floors, we're not increasing accessibility to housing and healthcare and education; instead, we're letting a handful of practicing sociopaths take everything for themselves under the guise of "number go up, so it must be good".

"So what's the alternative?"

I am so glad you asked, because the alternative is a societal judo throw on contracts and expectations. It's incentivizing larger workforces and shorter work weeks as a means of gauging share value: how many workers can you support with higher wages to spend on goods and services with AI increasing the revenue per employee? It's not paying companies to hire workers so much as markets valuing companies that retain workers despite AI's ability to displace work. It's inverting their tax burden based on how big their workforce is and how well they're compensated (higher paid workforces + larger workforce size = lower tax bill, because worker wages will just get dinged accordingly by income and Capital Gains taxes instead of payroll taxes).

The point isn't to keep nitpicking how these hypotheticals are alarmist, or how a specific detail is wrong, but more to highlight that this is a very real problem in the face of permanent job displacement due to any sort of competent generalized artificial intelligence now or in the future, and deciding to solve it before there's riots in the streets.

You can see the symptoms already if you look hard enough: the gig economy is already oversaturated with workers to the point wages are decreasing for everyone, and autonomous vehicles are displacing them in major metro areas. Commercial shopping spaces are increasingly empty with the exception of major brands, who in turn increasingly consolidate under holding companies. Private Equity is already in crisis with assets nobody can afford to buy at their valuations but unwilling or unable to take losses in the face of angry consumers and governments.

We can't put AI back in the box, but we can at least acknowledge that these problems are here, now, and if we don't address them soon then the entire economy is likely to collapse beneath our feet in the next few years.

Members of the line-must-go-up tribe (I'm not excluding myself) sacrifice everything in order to maximize the number called "Net Worth", seemingly forgetting what's important in life (extreme examples: utter cunts like Zuck or Musk). It's almost like human beings turning "programmatic".

As an aside, the plot of The Matrix would've made more sense if humans didn't become "energy storage" (what babble!) but that the AI discovered human brains were the best CPUs, and that's why they were "farmed"...

No, I am assuming the opposite. I agree: We do need political intervention.

Mass economic displacement often doesn't produce solidarity, it produces fragmentation, scapegoating, and strongmen. People won't agree on why things are bad.

And the state is way more sophisticated than during the labor movements of the last century or two. If it is aligned with the elites and the masses have no leverage, it has numerous tools for massive surveillance, police and military control, and propaganda that will only get more effective through AI. They might not even need the extreme levers, mass confusion alone might be enough.

There's that old joke: "I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.

"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."

The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."

so you become target practice

It may seem that way if you’re tasked with fulfilling such demands and are in the selling software business but it’s quite the opposite on end customers side ie buyer.

Software adds cost and complexity so absolutes minimum that still gets the job done is the aim. Software that enables some efficiency gain is good and worth the complexity of another system. But adding a second piece of something on same doesn’t have same favourable tradeoff. Nobody needs or wants two accounting systems. Or two ERPs. Or two slack clones.

I do think the idea that AI is good for economic growth is for the fairies personally under the current model. I cant square the circle of a consumer based economic model will see higher growth by the apparently significant reduction in said consumers income.

For the 180 on AI regulations you are going to have to explain that to me because as far as I can see there wasn’t any regulation under Biden of AI

We gotta take these bad actors at their word that they're creating AI meant to (eventually) wholesale replace human labor, and act accordingly. That doesn't mean burning down data centers or trying to shove AI back into Pandora's Box, so much as it means not letting them dictate societal trends or reforms necessary to ensure stability and survival through such an incredibly disruptive transformation, provided they're right.

Arguing against proactive reform with regards to AI is the same sort of ignorance I've heard about climate change for my entire life, and folks shouldn't stand for it. We have infinitely more to lose by doing nothing with a "wait and see" approach than if we proactively legislate around its definitive harms.

Who is going to buy flying vehicles when there's no jobs, and said vehicles are manufactured in dark factories like current Chinese EVs are? Certainly not the swaths of the unemployed.

Who is going to pay for MMORPGs curated by human GMs (again), their compute infrastructure, their content, their maintenance? Not the unemployed, not absent profound societal and policy changes!

The fact you're falling all the way back to basic resource extraction as potential outlets for labor is just...I don't even have the words to describe how profoundly out of touch you are with the effort involved, the harms caused (mining is one of the single most dangerous professions a human can possibly do, and your pitch is to send more humans into the mines? Or onto asteroids? Have you ever talked to a miner?), and the pittance of pay doled out to these humans as-is, nevermind in a post-AI society where labor availability far outstrips available roles.

The problem was never "what will humans do when they don't have to work", but "how will humans survive when they can't find work in a society predicated upon it for survival", and wow, you've done nothing to address that question beyond "send 'em to the mines".

Jevon's Paradox falls to pieces in the fact of a proposed tool that can replace human labor wholesale, and ya'll know it. Stop trying to wallpaper over this with historical context alone and actually sit, think critically, and address the core question at hand:

If human labor is no longer required due to generalized artificial intelligence and robotics rendering humans obsolete, how do we prepare for such a potentiality ahead of time without risking the collapse of society due to sudden and mass displacement of labor?

I think you’re a bit out of touch with the common man. People do this constantly, some to a comical degree, going so far as to make two loops on their shopping trip to return groceries they found cheaper at the next store.

you have never been poor (enough) and it shows

1. I buy in bulk.

2. I check amazon vs walmart usually.

The AI could also research which stores are reputable.

> People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.

Sure, there are also people scared of flying in airplanes, those must be a dud too going by your logic.

Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.

Yes, but that is different from going out of your way to purchase the protein bar at the lower price in the place you can find it. You are not going to drive to another supermarket for just the protein bar alone. So there is an intrinsic stickiness. You might hold off on the purchase if you're happening to visit the other store in the near future, but would you drive to a store you've never heard of before /just/ for a bar?

What are we, children? You're acting like I insulted their mother and called the police.

> would you say what you said to someones face?

Yes, of course I would. I have. "That's nuts" or "it's nuts" is such a basic, inoffensive phrase and has no bite.

I've also said "incredulous" and "absurd" and "crazy" and a myriad of other adjectives. I've also had my arguments called those things - correctly. Maybe we keep different types of company, but when I'm having an argument/debate with friends or family, they're not so delicate we can't call each other out when one of us is being ridiculous.

> Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on the amount of people relying on food stamps?

Damn, objective facts and counterpoints related directly to the conversation are holier than thou now? I guess I forgot that when people say things diametrically opposed to basic reality, we're all supposed to just ignore it and let it go.

After all, we wouldn't want to be seen as a loon by a random guy on the internet, offended on someone else's behalf over a one syllable word that wasn't even directed at any individual, but an idea.

I mean, heck, that actually sounds kinda nuts.

*for anyone out of the loop this is a reference to Arrested Development -- incredible show!

Normal in the sense of "you can model a distribution of human behavioral processes or outcomes" that encompasses, say, 95% of humans in a given culture or geography is very much a thing you can do. And I'd go as far as to say a large chunk of the mental bandwidth of the average person is running those simulation models just to operate in a multi-human-agent world.

(If you want to say we observe bimodal or other multi-peaked distributions in practices rather than "normal" ones, I will strongly agree, but that usually isn't the objection when people say "normal is a myth")