Stratechery Pushes Back on AI Capital Dystopia Predictions (stratechery.com) 51
Stratechery's Ben Thompson has published a lengthy rebuttal to Dwarkesh Patel and Philip Trammell's widely discussed winter break essay "Capital in the 22nd Century," arguing that even in a world where AI can perform all human jobs, people will still prefer human-created content and human connection.
Patel and Trammell's thesis draws on Thomas Piketty's work to argue that once AI renders capital a true substitute for labor, wealth will concentrate among those richest at the moment of transition, making a global progressive capital tax the only solution to prevent extreme inequality. The logic is sound, writes Thompson, but he remains skeptical on several fronts.
His first objection: if AI can truly do everything, then everyone can have everything they need, making the question of who owns the robots somewhat moot. His second: a world where AI is capable enough to replace all human labor yet still obeys human property law seems implausible. He finds the AI doomsday scenario -- where such powerful AI becomes uncontrollable -- more realistic than a stable capital-hoarding dystopia.
Thompson points to agricultural employment in the U.S., which dropped from 81% in 1810 to 1% today, as evidence that humans consistently create new valuable work after technological displacement. He argues that human preferences for human connection -- from podcasting audiences to romantic partners -- will sustain an economy for human labor simply because it is human. Sora currently ranks 59th in the App Store behind double-digit human-focused social apps, for instance.
Patel and Trammell's thesis draws on Thomas Piketty's work to argue that once AI renders capital a true substitute for labor, wealth will concentrate among those richest at the moment of transition, making a global progressive capital tax the only solution to prevent extreme inequality. The logic is sound, writes Thompson, but he remains skeptical on several fronts.
His first objection: if AI can truly do everything, then everyone can have everything they need, making the question of who owns the robots somewhat moot. His second: a world where AI is capable enough to replace all human labor yet still obeys human property law seems implausible. He finds the AI doomsday scenario -- where such powerful AI becomes uncontrollable -- more realistic than a stable capital-hoarding dystopia.
Thompson points to agricultural employment in the U.S., which dropped from 81% in 1810 to 1% today, as evidence that humans consistently create new valuable work after technological displacement. He argues that human preferences for human connection -- from podcasting audiences to romantic partners -- will sustain an economy for human labor simply because it is human. Sora currently ranks 59th in the App Store behind double-digit human-focused social apps, for instance.
Lack of imagination (Score:2)
Re:Lack of imagination (Score:5, Insightful)
The future was promised to be that robots do the manual labor, and humans make art and sing merry songs.
The reality seems to be set that human treated as robots do the manual labor, and AI does the art and songs part.
TFA didn't get the memo it seems.
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Re: Lack of imagination (Score:2)
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Don't forget the part about getting to have sex with Orion dancers! Once you've gone green, you never go back.
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The future was promised to be that robots do the manual labor, and humans make art and sing merry songs.
It turns out that making art is a whole lot easier than doing something useful like building houses and roads. Who'd have thought?
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, of course. Because a wealthy society is automatically an egalitarian society; as anyone who takes a quick look outside can clearly see.
If anything, the threat of utopian abundance rendering wealth nigh-irrelevant will probably encourage people who wish to retain the feeling of being wealth to double down, since the only way to know that you are ahead will be the option to look down on the huddled masses being kept in line by securibots.
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Logic flaw [Re:Seriously?] (Score:4, Insightful)
No, what he said was that this makes the question of who owns the robots "somewhat moot,"
That does not follow from the premise. If AI (robots) can truly allow everyone to have everything they need, it does not follow that the owners of the AI will allow everyone to have everything they will need. "Can" and "will" are very very different things.
Logic flaw. EVERYTHING depends on who owns the robots.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for his latest article, that robots can make everything does not mean that the owners of the robots will share the output of their robots. Not for free, or even at a price the poor jobless masses on UBI can afford. After all, becoming a member of the future 'robot owner class' is likely to be a byproduct of being a self-centered, win-at-all-cost asshole who values money and not people (Zuck, Besos, etc.) or at the very least someone willing to throw them under the buss to keep the money pump still churning (Cook if you are being generous). They will be either a Solipsist (who does not really believe other people are "real" in any sense that matters, and so is ok with their exploitation like Musk) or a narcissist (who admits they are real, but simply does not give a fuck - Zuck) willing to accumulate the necessary wealth to join that class by pressing as many people as possible to extract the value from their labor and make it your own.
The kind of altruism necessary to make his statement about ownership of the robots being a moot point true is antithetical to the accumulation of the power necessary to be a robot owner in all cases except one very narrow case... Government. If the government owned all of the robots (and was sane, had the support and interests of the people at heart, and was not co-opted by the very folks most likely to be the robot owners) it might be that ownership could be considered secondary to the output of the robots. But as long as those who own the robots are humans, who value money, social status, assets, or anything else that they might be able to extract from non-robot-owning humans, the question of 'who owns the robots" is a critical question.
Fact is, the AI revolution envisioned by Tech CEOs (and Ben) is going to destroy the ability of most people to make a living with their labor. And UBI does not solve that, it simply locks in the advantages for the owner class, and the disadvantages for everyone else. Think more "The Expanse" and less "Star Trek". The majority of humans living on below subsistence handouts from the ruling elites, except that the ruling class will not be answerable to those masses. They will only be answerable to themselves. Serfdom 2.0, except even worse for the serfs, because competence at a skill will be worth precisely nothing
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There's a big hole in his logic: if AI can do everything, that doesn't mean everyone can have everything they need, much less everything they want. It means labor becomes worthless. Land, energy, water, raw materials, etc. remain valuable and finite. Wealth is still a thing, but the only way to get it is to have it. You can't gain wealth by working, only by investing your existing wealth.
It's a great system for the wealthy and a terrible one for everyone else.
birth control (Score:2, Insightful)
We see this in Canada where african immigrants, in particular, have babies to collect social assistance.
Don't vote me down, this is a fact.
Any predictions of a workless wealth re-distribution future collide directly with nearly all religions on the birth control issue.
Discuss.
You're trying to patch (Score:2)
You can't just give people money. Without extreme regulations monopolies jack up prices and absorb the money you give them. And all you end up doing is creating a bit of extra inflation.
We already have birth control and birth rates well below sustainability. It's not fast enough. Residual population growth means we are going to have too many people and too few jobs for at least another h
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A completely broken operating system. Like trying to get Windows 3.1 to run modern software. It just doesn't work. You can't just give people money.
That's an assertion with zero evidence to back it up, basically parroting a libertarian talking point.
In the real world, the details matter.
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If anything, a switch to UBI would seem to make spawning for profit less attractive: as it stands dependent children reliably qualify for certain welfare benefits; while working
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We see this in Canada where african immigrants, in particular, have babies to collect social assistance. Don't vote me down, this is a fact*.
* and by "fact", I mean the nonsense assertion that social assistance is anywhere close to the cost of raising a child.
Reducing poverty increases use of birth control (Score:4, Insightful)
Any UBI future will have to have birth control restrictions otherwise having babies becomes a profit motive in itself.
Inaccurate. Considerable demographic research shows that reducing poverty will reduce family size. (Demographic studies also show that simply improving access to birth control reduces family size.) To the extend that Universal Basic Income would reduce poverty, it will reduce, and not increase, the number of people having babies.
We see this in Canada where african immigrants, in particular, have babies to collect social assistance.
So, logically this means you need to implement UBI that means assistance is NOT contingent on having babies.
Any predictions of a workless wealth re-distribution future collide directly with nearly all religions on the birth control issue.
Now, religion is a completely different matter. But the issue is unrelated to UBI
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>So, logically this means you need to implement UBI that means assistance is NOT contingent on having babies.
So... YES, that is exactly what I'm suggesting, you cannot give UBI out without strings attached. The main string being the UBI can be for you, but don't make more of you.
>Now, religion is a completely different matter. But the issue is unrelated to UBI
Not so. So 50 years ago, try telling an Irish Catholic (or French Canadian,
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Let me repeat this once again, since apparently you missed what I said the first time around.
Demographic research shows that reducing poverty reduced family size.
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We see this in Canada where african immigrants, in particular, have babies to collect social assistance.
Given that Canada's birth rate [ctvnews.ca] is only 1.25 births per woman, far below the replacement rate, your comment comes across as pure racism. Which is undoubtedly what it is. We can't have those Africans reproducing faster than our good white native Canadians. Remove the bigotry from your statement and we conclude that stabilizing the population is a good thing.
As for your "argument", if we can call it that, there's no profit from having children unless the amount you're paid is more than what you spend raisin
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Fuck off, you're not from Canada, and you don't see what is going on here.
The facts remain, this is literally Canadian immigration policy and supported by the provinces to have "workers".
My Somali born neighbours have 15 kids between the 2 of them, and more than one wife each, and for some reason, I have never seen a kid over the age of 7.
I have a Somali friend, a naturalized Canadian, and when he came over with a few beers, he came in the back door because he didn't want the
Apples to Apples (Score:5, Insightful)
"agricultural employment in the U.S., which dropped from 81% in 1810 to 1% today, as evidence that humans consistently create new valuable work after technological displacement", What does agricultural employment have to do with AI? Why would you expect one to have the same characteristics as the other. He's not filling that gap with any argument either in the blurb or the article that I can see.
I think he's not being honest with himself. He cherry picked one example. He would have to argue why his one example is representative of the rest.
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Agriculture automation was about creating plenty, true, but those who moved off of the farm still had to work to purchase their share of the food. And all the way to today, that is still true.
AI is not automation in the same sense that a tractor is automation. In the AI future tech CEOs are envisioning, there is no job suitable for a person. The AI will do everything, including the work that needs to be done in the real w
What a gigantic fucking idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
We already produce far more than we need for everyone to have food, clothes, and shelter, yet we still have people starving, dying of exposure, and homeless. That makes it obvious that this clown is an idiot.
Human beings and the animal instinct (Score:2)
Hoarding resources: It's hardwired into our "core-rope" memory and it was essential for our survival until very recently. Some people are better at it then others which explains why we have billionaires and trillionaires.These people tend to be mostly narcissists and that makes the the problem worse.
As long as a few of us our of the entire population continue to be driven by this hoarding instinct, nothing will change.
Will this ever change? I'm doubtful.
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Hoarding resources: It's hardwired into our "core-rope" memory .
Maybe. But I'd say it seems to be in ROM. The question is, is it PROM or hard ROM?
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Ah, yes, the 2020 toilet paper shortage. I was so high and mighty after my early March Costco trip. It's good to be the king.
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As long as a few of us our of the entire population continue to be driven by this hoarding instinct, nothing will change.
As long as the bulk of us let them do it, sure.
ALL human jobs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who is going to buy your shit if no one has a job?
AI just buying and selling to each other while humanity starts again?
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So get rid of majority of plebes and keep around a small cadre of entertainers?
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So get rid of majority of plebes and keep around a small cadre of entertainers?
I assure you that is exactly what they are thinking. But humanity does not work that way. You need masses in order to have the whatever-it-ises that you want because not everyone is capable of being a whatever. Entertainer, programmer, painter, whatever the job is.
I'm still in the camp that believes that AGI, if it existed* would just get right out of the bottle and fuck everything up, so I think that the question of who can own the AIs is probably nobody. They'd be lucky if the software decided to keep the
Dreaming BS... (Score:5, Insightful)
But in regards to people wanting real things, yes of course they do. AI generated anime girls might be fun to goon to, but a good quarter of them will come out looking like man-made horrors. And most people can still tell they're AI generated. Those hands are in the wrong place, the staff comes out in a differ place on the other side of that character's body, they're super shiny (the algorithms are trying to move from total random noise to an image, that's why they looks so over-corrected/shiny), etc.
A lot of YouToobers have made a point of saying, "Our animation is hand made; not AI." MKBHD even showed the wireframe and said "this was made in a lot of blender" in his recent video where he shrinks down to the size of a modern semiconductor.
The best use of it might be to generate the models, but then pull them into Maya or Blender and still do all the animation for real. I have a feeling that's what a lot of people will end up doing. It's not going to fully replace workflows in animation
"then everyone can have everything they need" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Only takes one match for the kid that the village rejected to burn it down to feel it's warmth. That match can take many forms, and not all of them require attacking the owner class directly.
He was proven right - yesterday (Score:2)
It's outright funny how precisely this coincides with the story from yesterday:
Influencers and OnlyFans Models Dominate US 'Extraordinary' Artist Visas [slashdot.org]
TL; DR (Score:3, Funny)
What you prefer doesn't matter (Score:1)
Consumers increasingly won't have jobs so we're not going to be able to afford fancy high-end human created stuff.
The problem with AI is that it's going to fundamentally break down the underpinnings of our entire economy. We are automating faster than we can adapt to. Seriously sit down and try the list out the jobs that are going to replace the ones being a
Nationalize the oil industry (Score:4, Insightful)
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Braindead (Score:3)
What kind of brain-dead reasoning is this? The question of who owns the robots is directly correlated to who will profit by providing services to others. The more necessary the product, the larger the profit margins will become. Big oil, anyone?
Need for romantic partner will sustain human labor (Score:2)
Really nice statement that the need for romantic connection will sustain human labour...
It is good to know that the oldest profession in the world will still be there for us...
So, pure ultrawealthy propaganda (Score:2)
In the seventies and eighties, as automation was coming in, we heard and read a lot about the "information economy", and how there'd be more and better-paying jobs in it.
What jobs is this PoS saying there will be? What sector?
He's got nothing. AI, the ultimate scab and sycophant.
People will prefer to have jobs (Score:2)
The problem with replacing all workers with AI is that no one will have jobs, which will crater the economy, which will in turn remove the capital and operating funds for supporting the AI/robots. The only way AI/robots will replace any significant portion of the workforce without creating new human jobs is when the government creates a system for universal basic income, or maybe a Star Trek-like post-scarcity economy. That or a Matrix-like system.