No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass(borretti.me) |
No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass(borretti.me) |
I should have more faithfully heeded the advice from "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by John Bogle, but I was close enough with index funds to do far more than I need.
I just today filed a request for permanent Mexican residency, uploaded the required documents, and scheduled my appointment next month. For $56us, why not?
I am very lucky to make this transition now. I know that.
> Now, some people believe these machines can be made to serve humanity. Does it sound reasonable to imagine a superhumanly intelligent being that is happy to work as a butler to talking primates, forever?
The whole crux of the piece to me is that the AI can be 100% aligned to follow human instructions, and we'd still end up unable to control the AI because every human who can has an incentive not to, while also having an incentive to prevent anyone else from controlling the AI.
An LLM will never try to overthrow me because I will overthrow myself.
What's left is tautology.
I’m certain I would not have believed a Fable transcript, or an Opus 4.8 or a GPT 5.5 one, for that matter. Is it so hard to imagine ourselves back then?
Also consider: if "AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at human level or better", doesn't that simply entail the AI being able to run 'autonomously, indefinitely' and 'independently of instructions' in the same way as the current state of being run by human overseers?
If we take the initial premise as plausible, for the sake of this argument his thesis seems to hold together very well.
This seems too simplistic of a description of how money would work in such a world. Money is just a way to distribute your power to influence people. You never pay for machines or software. Think about buying anything, say a pen. You do not really pay for the metal in the pen. You pay the cost associated with extracting and processing the metal by humans along the production chain. If there were no humans along the chain, the cost could go down to zero.
So far, there are no “AIs” being paid.
That said, taking for granted some of its premisses, indeed saying that cost goes to zero in term of money is no big deal.
That is, money is purely human conventions. So if humans are put out of the loop, not only monetary cost goes to zero, the whole notion can skipped.
Of course, there is still some energy and material needed to run data centers, which do have costs in whatever unit one might measure them with.
A market is a place where human encounter to trade. Without humans, there is no market.
We do with mere local scalar currency because using vectorial computation taking into account everything that can be probed and measured into account integrated into a single whole is out of reach for human representation, even for the most intellectually gifted human person.
Money is a stupid unit, that tries to conflate everything in a single scalar and proves every single time that it's not able to deem what something is worth in all its intricated relationships. But somehow humans seem unable to leverage at scale on any tool that would be more sophisticated in all their socioeconomical exchanges. Once again, if one eliminate humans from the equation, or isolate as a ridiculously marginal factor, money and market become irrelevant.
All that said, once again, that stand on a very large set of "if"s.
I don’t follow this train of logic.
AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. Some people will profit immensely, and society as a whole will benefit but it might be a bumpy road getting there. But if it did go wrong for some reason, Feudalism is more plausible than the other scenarios presented.
This is literally the opposite of what the article says.
So it is different this time is it?
People are different? Unlike any other species, we can't be supplanted? Obsoleted? Out competed?
A few thousand years at the top of the food chain, and suddenly that few thousand years is "what can never change".
Despite technological change snowballing in speed since we started reliably accumulating/sharing cultural knowledge.
Despite that technological change now allowing machines to make faster cognitive progress in a year, than any human. That factor alone, makes competence/capability obsolescence difficult to avoid, outside of technological collapse.
I don’t believe the blog poster promotes a “popular uprising”, I only skimmed the article.
The blog poster anyway don’t understand that the “overclass” in their understanding is wrong. The “c-level” are obviously much richer than the “underclass”(=the labour commodity), but they are not necessarily capital owners.
Remember that Terrans are the most based race in StarCraft. Protoss got too stiff.
I have no idea what that looks like, because if I did I wouldn't be here commenting on HN :D But I suspect some people will play their cards well and get some luck, and come out on top, just like some people have always done.
I argue against this here: https://borretti.me/article/on-vulgar-materialism
Of course I don't expect a single post to erase a huge divergence in worldview about the relationship between money and power, but that's my argument.
Or you run "money primaries", financially filtering the menu of candidates before democratic voting. Or you pay/lobby for (non-democratic) judicial appointments, which is a strategy that's been openly pursued since 1971: https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/powell-memo.pdf
That permanent underclass might easily end up a lot smaller than you think.
And then you think … maybe that’s not coincidence?
Man, I just. don't. care.
Why should I worry about this hypothetical future dystopia, which seems to me incredibly unlikely to come to pass, rather than the glaring and terrifying current dystopia being enacted by Donald Trump in the USA?
"And who will stop this? Sam Altman? How many divisions does he have? The state doesn’t let corporations own nuclear weapons or fighter jets, it won’t let them have access to autonomous AI weapons either."
Elon Musk's SpaceX. He could land a large rocket wherever he wants, it's basically a missile.
He got a guy elected that was conducive to his world view and very unlikely to sic the FBI on him. Maybe he can do it again.
There are a lot of premises this article takes for granted besides that one too, but yeah, I get it, its fun to make up what the future is going to be like on a super-grand scale where everything is a simple absolute. People were doing the same thing 100 years ago.
Doesn't this prove my point? In feudal Japanese society, wealthy merchants were lower status than poor samurai, i.e., they rich could not buy political power. "The wealthy" and "the ruling class" are not always the same group of people.
This is the kind of stuff I imagine they read to each other at meetings of Peter Thiel's 'Dialog' events while they sit in a circle taking turns sipping blood from palestinian baby skulls.
If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, AI replacement within a few years is more likely than not. Elevator mechanics will probably do fine. Web designers, not so much. Expect elite overproduction, where there are too many educated people for the jobs that require such education. The US is there now, if you're a new college grad.
Now, there are several ways that can play out. The Gulf oil states have a huge jobs program for their own citizens. Most Saudis work for the government. Not doing the real work. 92% of construction workers in Saudi Arabia are not Saudis. This works out OK if the money is available.
Egypt used to work that way until the oil ran out. Egypt used to guarantee a government job to all college graduates. That had to end. Then youth unemployment hit 34%. Now it's down from the peak. [1] Not clear how that was achieved. Anyone know?
So that's the welfare state approach. Requires a rich government with an income stream that doesn't come from the lower classes.
Then there's the mass underclass result. Something like the favelas of Brazil. Lots of shacks, crowding, homelessness, and the usual urban dystopia movie world. That's what happens by default. Attempts to revolt result in a new boss, same as the old boss. "Workers of the world, unite!" doesn't work for non-workers. That's a stable situation.
Some combination of those two scenarios is the most likely outcome.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.1524.ZS?location...
Once people become desperate enough, it will all fall apart. Money is a social construct, universally recognized, and the longer it exists, the more likely it is to continue existing. So far, many people haven’t even tried AI in any form other than chatbots. Agent-based applications are in the single digits compared to chatbot usage. Not much will change in this regard, because most people lack algorithmic or logical thinking (Hacker News is an echo chamber), so after the coming turbulent years, there will be a natural stabilization in AI usage.
By the way, can you imagine what Earth would look like if AI physically wiped us out—8.3 billion people over the course of a few months or years? How much biological material would that be?
Yeah, probably I should have listed some more premises, i.e. that corporations maximize profits, the state maximizes power and security (I don't entirely buy the Realist framework, but if you want to predict how things work out "in the limit", rather than tomorrow, it seems alright?).
And naturally every "therefore" becomes weaker the further out into the future you try to predict.
My reading was that the Samurai were part of the overclass but were pretty useless, albiet still potentially dangerous, and just sat around devouring resources for hundreds of years, so perhaps the overclass of the future could do the same. The samuri weren't all rich, but they didn't dishonor themselves with labor, which is a similar thing and they certainly held power over the state. The end of the samuri was, perhaps, an example of the state getting what it wants despite the desires of the permanant overclass, supporting what you said, but it took a long time to get there.
I suppose you are thinking of the Samuri as an arm of the state and not "the rich".