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The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top
by cglan 6mo ago
The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
- rmah 6mo agoIf the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
- energy123 6mo agoRobots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.
- glitchc 6mo agoThis is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
- jevndev 6mo agoThis is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model. I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
- pixl97 6mo agoWhile you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life. Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well. LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.
- zozbot234 6mo agoRobots are already way better than people at a vast majority of manufacturing work, but there's still plenty of high-skilled manual jobs around.
- sdenton4 6mo agoWhat are ai and robots other than excess labor, waiting to be allocated? Why does the wealth have to come from the meat bags?
- pastel8739 6mo agoWho is going to buy the stuff that the AI and robots produce, then? What will the point be of producing all this stuff?
- kjkjadksj 6mo agoYou act like I produce the dollars I spend. No, the government does, who debases our currency to print more.
- vel0city 6mo agoYou act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more. Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.
- TFYS 6mo agoThere will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
- CalRobert 6mo agoPresumably the captains of the universe will want ever increasing luxuries and expressions of their power.
- 9rx 6mo agoWhat is the point of producing all this stuff now? Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop. At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.
- repelsteeltje 6mo agoIn Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732963 https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...
- senordevnyc 6mo agoSo the broken windows fallacy for the AI age?
- dag100 6mo agoI feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.
- repelsteeltje 6mo agoYou are right. The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.
- acessoproibido 6mo agoSo you are saying essentially nothing changes ?
- giacomoforte 6mo agoThere won't be any well off people because the machines will rule. Humanity will become second to its own creation. There is no future in which a human ruling class will be lording it over superhuman machine intelligence. I mean look at the clowns who run the world today. They won't be able to keep the machines from taking over.
- thrance 6mo agoHonestly, I'd rather be ruled by my laptop than the Epstein class.
- OkayPhysicist 6mo agoI'd propose that the opposite is just as plausible. Look at the world today: compared to most of the people in charge, plenty in the underclass are superintelligent. Yet the rich remain that way, because the underclass are taught to play by the rules that were written by the rich. Who's to say the same scheme can't be pulled off against the machines?
- redtrees11 6mo ago[dead]
- paganel 6mo ago> The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Which is why Iran bombing a few Western-run data-centers located in the Emirates was cheered by many of the normal people actually living in the West. I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.
- jen20 6mo agoDo you have any sources for "normal" people (i.e. not the terminally online) being happy that datacenters were bombed?
- paganel 6mo ago> i.e. not the terminally online) We're not in 2018 anymore, everyone is terminally online now, you must have missed the shift. I've seen mini-bus drivers watching social media videos (Tik-Tok, that is) while driving from all the way to Germany to here in Romania (from where I'm from), I noticed that because I was one of the passengers. Almost all of the remaining passengers (not middle-class, you can well imagine that) were on their phones for the majority of the trip (30-ish hours or so), that is when they were not sleeping.
- jen20 6mo agoThat didn't really answer the question... However, using your phone does not make you terminally online. That is more of a mental state, and while some Europeans may be in it, my experience is that most are not.
- paganel 6mo ago> my experience is that most are not. As I said, my experience is totally the opposite, but I've started seeing that, i.e. the middle-classes trying to distance themselves from the internet (as present on their mobile phones), such as seeing that, i.e. being terminally online via one's mobile phone, as a "mental state". It wasn't a "mental state" when it was only the middle-classes who were doing it, back in the late-Obama era. Back to your question, the people I shared my ride with, the normal people, have started being very conservative, I would say even luddite, when it comes to their voting choices, if you live in Europe you might have noticed that.
- adverbly 6mo agoSeems like if we want to avoid dystopia, our options are: 1. Full-blown socialism 2. Georgism Georgism may have been right all along!
- 5aq9238 6mo agoGiven that rich people often push Georgism, it looks like a trojan horse. Only rich people will be able to afford land. 3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.
- GolfPopper 6mo ago> 3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the mind of man"?
- adverbly 6mo ago> Only rich people will be able to afford land. That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism > rich people often push Georgism Your user was created 8 minutes ago specifically to make this comment! It seems like its literally you who is pushing things! The gaslighting in this comment is insane!
- 9rx 6mo ago> That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves. Georgism solves for land not being used productively. That means it isn't economical for rich people to hoard land, but it also means that it isn't economical for poor people to hoard land. The difference is that rich people can take that land and start doing something productive with it (build large-scale housing, a factory, farm it, etc.) Poor people can, at best, only afford to hoard it — which Georgism puts a stop to.
- monknomo 6mo agogeorgism would make owning property, such as ai, very expensive. it is a way of ensuring that rents get recirculated back into the rest of society
- bix6 6mo agoWe’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. > Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-decades-federal-reserve/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...
- jmye 6mo ago> We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?
- estimator7292 6mo agoYes. That tends to happen when you don't increase the minimum wage for multiple decades.
- senordevnyc 6mo agoDamn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!
- underlipton 6mo agoHe's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm. And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
- 6mo ago
- CalRobert 6mo agoThe parallel economy could even kinda sorta work except that we made frontier living largely illegal in many places (though I understand you probably could get some cheap land in e.g. Idaho and try to live off it) and the existence of said parallel society represents a clear challenge to capital owners who say trading your labour for their profit is the most sensible way to live.
- pibaker 6mo agoThere is not enough space for 8 billion humans to do "frontier living."
- CalRobert 6mo agoSure, but there might not be enough jobs for them to command the economic power that allows something better. Even so for someone who's been crushed in the gears enough they might give it a try.
- manofmanysmiles 6mo agoIt always intuitively felt to me like there was enough space, but I am now getting the sense that my intuition here has been wrong. Will you define "frontier living" so I can better see the lack of space ?
- CalRobert 6mo agoI assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too. I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in? We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society. But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.
- AndrewKemendo 6mo agoThe idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population It’s thermodynamically impossible for 8-10Billon animals that have no satiation reflex and limited coordination capacity to live on a resource limited rock Absolute Best case future is what I wrote in 2025 which is basically humans living in care facilities managed by machines: https://kemendo.com/We%20All%20Slept%20Well.pdf https://kemendo.com/We%20All%20Slept%20Well.pdf
- AtlasBarfed 6mo agoThat is a strange ideal, and I am an environmental nutso myself.
- AndrewKemendo 6mo agoYou have a better long term plan for humanity? Whats the next 20000 years look like in your mind?
- GolfPopper 6mo agoHey, I saw that movie! The little robots were cute.
- AndrewKemendo 6mo agoWhich?! I’d love to see a version of my short story of someone already did it
- philipkglass 6mo agoI think that the parent means Wall-E: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Plot
- automatic6131 6mo ago>The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population Okay! You first though. What, still here?
- AtlasBarfed 6mo agoEnd state of capitalism is Egyptian pharaohs, a few pyramid architects, and a lot of slaves and whips. The only thing to counter this would be some sort of geopolitical Darwinism, where societies that invest more in their populations would have healthier and stronger societies and militaries. But nuclear Armageddon prevents that from being any sort of slim hope. The current American political climate of extreme service to the ultra rich, vast degradation of the democratic institutions, and infrastructure for a complete surveillance state is bleak. The only hope I have for some sort of human structure in this technological wasteland that might win out is the fact that AI and the tech algorithms in general have taken the demographic collapse associated with urbanization and vastly magnified it. We're already seeing this in places like China. If you have too much centralized control and too much limitation of freedom, The population will simply refuse to procreate, and your country dies a slow death over 50 years.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- poorman 6mo agoI am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
- pjerem 6mo agoI am going to say this for all the people thinking like this : lol
- danesparza 6mo agoHmmm ... there is definitely historical precedence for the article's assertions. There is also precedence for what happens when such a big wealth imbalance is present (spoiler: it's a revolution). This article is methodical in its points. Your retort reads like an easily dismissed hot take.
- hluska 6mo agoAnd your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Humans are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than economic systems. The negative net is easy and very popular today but positivity is just as possible. It’s all about how you read data and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. If you’ve fallen for the doom that’s on you but calling something with so much historical precedence as hope for humanity ‘an easily dismissed hot take’ doesn’t make you look very bright.
- pixl97 6mo ago>And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Dinosaurs are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than _______, hell, they were around 99 million years longer than humans. Species go extinct all the time, most species go though all kinds of things before then, so there is nearly zero correlation between surviving something bad in the past and surviving something else bad in the future. Modern humanity is not anti-fragile any longer like we were in the past.
- disgruntledphd2 6mo ago
- carabiner 6mo agoThe permanent underclass permeates everything.
- zozbot234 6mo ago> Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. People keep saying this, but AI is making intellectual abilities more important, not less. If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is like a supersonic fighter jet. You will still need plenty of ability to steer it properly for the foreseeable future.
- rib3ye 6mo agoI saw a gh for a $100 stringer missile last week. I often wonder if I will miss the stable tyranny of American capitalism if we descend back into warring nation states defended by cheap autonomous munitions.
- jorblumesea 6mo agothey will get poor people to die fighting each other, as it works today.
- mrguyorama 6mo agoThat thing was a toy, not even remotely viable or even a meaningful step towards viability. It was discussed here.
- bluescrn 6mo agoSmall ~$1000 drones have been proven to be very effective weapons in Ukraine though.
- anigbrowl 6mo agoCompared to an actual stinger missile and its usual application, yes. Deployed against soft targets like trucks, cars, or homes, it has the potential to be very effective.
- pixl97 6mo ago
- Nevermark 6mo agoThere isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value. Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy. You can radically change the economy. But it’s going to either use money in the open or some much less efficient warped backroom version of money. You can’t avoid having to pay for valuable things with valuable things. Money is just a ledger. But you can always add inefficiencies to transactions, or mismanage money, and make any problem worse. My point is, there is probably something to what you are thinking but you are misframing it in a way it won’t work, unnecessarily. Consider what you really think should happen and what might be a better way to frame it. Most likely, that means focusing less on money, and more on how resources cycle to create more resources, as apposed to less. And matching that to a problem where you can find reciprocal improvements if it is solved. Some waste is avoided. Some fraud or unchecked damage is eliminated. Some mutual arrangements are magnified, etc. There has to be a resource return cycle of some kind. (Replacing every mention of “money” with “resources” tends to clarify what can work or not quickly.)
- monknomo 6mo agoI think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward
- OkayPhysicist 6mo agoThe problem is currency is inherently clumpy. While value is always judged and assigned to things, the existence of a static, cumulative ledger of it is not a requirement. It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that imbalance for further wealth by way of rentseeking. Wealth provides power which provides more wealth and more power. Eventually your landlords drop the "land" prefix and simply become nobility. Prior to the invention of currency, we had reputation economies. One might be tempted to model such economies as just money economies with implicit ledgers, but that isn't how reputation works in the real world. Being implicit, reputation captures a lot of activity that doesn't warrant an overt exchange of currency. Think of all the things that you appreciate, and make you value a relationship with someone more, that would be terribly inappropriate to pay them for: the friendly guy at the pub who tells you stories of questionable accuracy, a fellow parent watching your kid during a playdate, anything in the romantic sphere at all. Reputation also doesn't add up in anything close to a linear way: The guy who did something really big once and the guy who did something small with extreme regularly over a long period of time both likely have stronger ties with others in their community than the one who sporadically provided middling value. Reputation also isn't particularly inheritable: I might feel some obligation to someone's kid because of my relationship with their father, but that obligation fades rapidly as they entire adulthood, and nobody owes you shit for who your grandfather was. Likewise, gifts from someone who has an embarrassment of excess are valued much less than the same thing offered by someone who has barely enough. All told, reputation economies act as a damping function on wealth and power accumulation, whereas currency economies provide positive feedback on the same.
- gwerbin 6mo agoI like to call this "capitalist feudalism", and it appears to be the overt agenda of big business and their allies/agents in governments around the world, notably but not exclusively in the USA.
- atomicnumber3 6mo agoLuckily electromagnetism is the great equalizer. I'm imagining guerrilla warfare involving giant (in terms of GWh stored) Jerry-rigged capacitors driving electromagnets that are lobbed into places that would be extremely unappreciative surprise recipients of magnetic fields with flux densities measured in full Teslas
- gip 6mo agoI agree with the risk you’re pointing to. Money currently mediates access to resources through labor and markets. We either need to redesign money or a novel way to mediate access to resources. I haven't seen any proposal to make that work, which is a bit scary.
- tasuki 6mo ago> There will be a few well off people with capital. How much capital does one need to be in that group? Is that the same world wide, or location-dependent?