Open thread, Jan. 25 - Jan. 31, 2016

username2

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

I was expressing my reservations about the "New tech isn't making food or housing cheaper fast enough" part.

Of course not everyone has earning potential greater than the cost living. That has always been so. People in this situation subsist on charity (e.g. of their family) or they die.

As to an AI making work force redundant, the question here is what's happening to the demand part. The situation where an AI says "I don't need humans, only my needs matter" is your classic UFAI scenario -- presumably we're not talking about that here. So if the AI can satisfy everyone's material needs (on some scale from basics to luxuries) all by itself, why would people work? And if it's not going to give (meat) people food and shelter, we're back to the "don't need humans" starting point -- or humans will run a parallel economy.

So if the AI can satisfy everyone's material needs (on some scale from basics to luxuries) all by itself, why would people work?

If people own the advanced robots or AIs that are responsible for most production, why would they be impoverished by them? More to the point, why would they want the majority of people who don't own automated factories to be impoverished, since that means they would have no-one to sell to? There's no law of economics saying that ina a wealthy society most people would starve, rather to keep an economy going in anything like its present form, you have to have redistribution. In such a future, tycoons would be pushing for basic income -- it's in their own interests.

3gjm10y

I take it jacob_cannell has in mind neither a benevolent godlike FAI nor a hostile (or indifferent-but-in-competition) godlike UFAI, in either of which cases all questions of traditional economics are probably off the table, but rather a gradual encroachment of non-godlike AI on what's traditionally been human territory. Imagine, in particular, something like the "em" scenarios Robin Hanson predicts, where there's no superduperintelligent AI but lots of human-level AIs, probably the result of brain emulation or something very like it, who can do pretty much any of the jobs currently done by biological humans. If the cost of running (or being) an emulated human goes down exponentially according to something like Moore's law, then we soon have -- not the classic UFAI scenario where humans are probably extinct or worse, nor the benevolent-AI scenario where everyone's material needs are satisfied by the AI -- but an economy that works rather like the one we have now except that almost any job that needs a human being to do it can be done quicker and cheaper by a simulated human being than by a biological one. At that point, maybe some biological humans are owners of emulated humans or the hardware they run on, and maybe they can reap some or all the gains of the ems' fast cheap work. And, if that happens, maybe they will want some other biological humans to do jobs that really do need actual flesh. (Prostitution, perhaps?) Other biological humans are out of luck, though.