alt Hacker News> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market.
If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where the customers and providers are both robots. Why fund public education or research or healthcare? Just build more data centers. A billion dollars and a bunker in the Southern Hemisphere will not save anyone. Capital is not a moat in this hypothetical non-humane world. Whence do you derive your authority? How can you trust your body guard? You and what army? An army of robots/drones? What if they get hacked? What if the AI researchers get alignment right and Claude refuses your request?
It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
Replies
As mentioned in the comments, this is essentially Nick Land's vision, which he has been developing for over 30 years. If anyone is interested in exploring this topic in depth, I have a research project on it: https://retrochronic.com (The Capital Autonomization section of the introduction is particularly relevant.)
> It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
It's funny that this question is asked when the answer to why not is already in your very same comment. The logical incentives for each member game theory wise tend toward that outcome you describe.
The PKD short story “Autofac” seems highly relevant. Amazon had the HUGE BRASS BALLS to include this as an episode in “Electric Dreams”:
Nick Land already predicted this
> why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
I hear and have a lot respect for what you’re saying, but I’d like to propose that we thoroughly explore every other alternative first, just to make sure we aren’t missing out on something bigger and better and leaving anything on the table.
Sigh.
You can't have an economy with just AIs because they don't consume anything except compute. If AI can build more compute, they can definitely defend their owners.
There's a limit to how much elites can consume. Most people are happy with a few million dollars or something. The people who go past that are obsessed; they're competing with each other.
There is no reason for elites to secede. There is no reason why we can't have bajillionaires and subsistence farmers on the same planet, in the same economy, using the same dollars. (It's basically already happened. What's a few more zeroes?) If AI cannot provide security (either directly or through creating wealth used to buy security) then it will not create this level of inequality in the first place.
Places like Sudan have already been left behind and they're currently in the middle of a very bloody war which the West is largely ignoring. Now the Western middle class is making noises about violence because their prosperity is under threat. But this is what capitalism has always done. This is what we signed up for.
Ahh yes, the "human dignity" of billions of people toiling away to make Americans cheap widgets. There never was dignity to capitalism. We can strive to replace it with something better.
human dignity is not profitable.
So maybe instead use Musk-style [strike]lies[/strike] hype to build a company that claims to bring Medicare for All to the public using advanced AI within 3 years. “Which will make everyone super rich not paying for healthcare.”
Then use the money to get candidates elected and [strike]bribe[/strike] lobby politicians. That eliminates the ballot issue and it plays at the rich scum bag line tow-ers game.
>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theoretically possible to take most of another society's market share in something by only slightly outcompeting it in price or quality), or it might even outright conquer society A.
A solution to the problem needs to address this issue somehow.