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The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. Wh

• SubiculumCode 4mo ago
  When clankers become the new consumer, we won't even be needed :)
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• ivraatiems 4mo ago
  Yeah, reading this, my first thought was: "that's the neat part - nobody!" The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
  • ku-man 4mo ago
    [dead]
• ospray 4mo ago
  At some point a AI that maximises paperclips and one that consumes resources to achieve a few people self interested desires starts to look the same.
  • cgannett 4mo ago
    What people dont understand is we already invented Roko's Basilisk in the 1600s. It just doesnt have the power to torment you for more than 1 human lifetime yet.
• cube00 4mo ago
  > Altman theorized a system where society has "an ownership share in whatever AI creates." In this "universal basic wealth system," people can barter their share of the world's AI capacity. [1] It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock. Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI? > Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1] I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered. [1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-085901000.html https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...
  • ori_b 4mo ago
    Sam Altman is too stupid to realize he's arguing for nationalizing the AI companies.
    • greenavocado 4mo ago
      He will be perfectly happy when his friends crown him the AI czar
    • Terr_ 4mo ago
      I see it more as a mix of grandiose promotion (to investors) and and vague empty promise (to everyone else.) "We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
    • colordrops 4mo ago
      He's not that stupid, he's just gaslighting people.
    • binary132 4mo ago
      I’m quite sure he knows that this is exactly what he’s arguing for and would like his AI company to be one of the main regulated providers
    • 4mo ago
• daedrdev 4mo ago
  FDR created the US welfare system which destroyed socialism in the US. I'm not predicting the future but it has basically happened before.
• theonemind 4mo ago
  The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
  • morkalork 4mo ago
    Must be why they're all hot for humanoid robots: security that doesn't get paid or have families to worry about
    • tremon 4mo ago
      Or might have their own opinion about certain orders.
    • isomorphic 4mo ago
      This is just Terminator with extra steps. They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
  • Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
    Yes! This is something that I have been saying or thinking about too but the rich people contrary to popular belief that they themselves sometimes believe in, but the best way for them to achieve growth is by improving the conditions of people in general. but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows: Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
  • bodge5000 4mo ago
    If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
• windexh8er 4mo ago
  I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.
  • stevenpetryk 4mo ago
    But in this "Elysium"-like scenario, that same class would have automated protection in place that makes them ~untouchable and capable of keeping the rest of humanity incapable of pushing back.
    • windexh8er 4mo ago
      I don't believe this to be true. Sure, for a short period of time they may be "untouchable". Long term, nope. Most of them can't do anything for themselves in terms of real world skills at this point. They are, literally, the most vulnerable without the protection and production of others.
      • shipman05 4mo ago
        If history is any guide, you're technically correct, but it's no help to the lower classes. Many a divine king, high priest, or emperor has died at the hands of those they depended on. But systemic change is rare. A new despot replaces the old and the cycle continues.
    • iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago
      This. And unless people were not paying attention, the automated protection part is getting pretty close to reality.
  • echelon_musk 4mo ago
    They have big guns. Good luck.
• hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
  All you have to do is look at the state of the world today to see this is the endgame. Huge swaths of humanity live on basically subsistence level agriculture, and it's not like we're all sending UBI to them. The top .001% can see the rest of us fall a lot further before they have to worry about who will buy their products.
  • Brendinooo 4mo ago
    This is such an odd take, when the percent of the world doing subsistence farming has never been lower at any point in human history, and a mixture of capitalism and technological innovation is the primary driver of that.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
      To clarify, I'm not arguing that capitalism is inherently bad or that it hasn't pulled huge swaths of people out of poverty. What I'm pushing back against (which I often see in discussions of UBI) is that powerful people will give out free money just out of the goodness of their heart or because "they'll need people to buy their products". We're transitioning out of an era where labor has held (historically) a lot of power, but now technology is heading us down a path where capital will hold the vast majority of the cards. And a lot of the discussion around stuff like UBI just feels like hopium to me: "Surely with an abundance of riches we won't just let people die in the street!" But yes, we actually do let people die in the street already, especially if they're kinda far away. The powers behind tech and AI are not going to give up that power willingly, or from the good of their hearts.
  • iknowstuff 4mo ago
    Hmm I share your concern but we do regularly develop new economies? The EU pumped a ton of money into eastern Europe, the west collectively did the same by outsourcing to Asia which is now the largest market for very significant industries.. Latin America and Africa have been abused and hollowed out for centuries but seeing decent growth now, so I'm more optimistic
  • interstice 4mo ago
• hsuduebc2 4mo ago
  If nothing will change and overhelming majority of wealth in time become owned by the marginal piece of society I wouldn't ruled out that in some future there will be another revolution against the so called ruling class by basically same reasons it was before. That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
• WorkerBee28474 4mo ago
  > What will happen is they will leave us to die. Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
  • bediger4000 4mo ago
    Yeah! Bones, no matter how young, do not make decent concubines.
• philipkglass 4mo ago
  Mamdani was elected in New York despite (or perhaps because of) explicitly running against the interests of rich people. Let the frontier AI labs and their investors burn billions in the R&D phase, then vote for governments to use the Magic Everything Machines for the interests of ordinary people. If today's LLMs don't actually evolve into Magic Everything Machines then UBI probably isn't the right solution anyhow; some jobs will be lost but many others will stick around. In that case just vote for Scandinavian style social safety nets. The franchise in developed countries is much broader now than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
• bluerooibos 4mo ago
  So, back to the author's title - if they leave everyone to die/with no money, who buys their services and enables them to turn a profit?
  • grogg 4mo ago
    The genuine answer is that the workers will rise up. If you want to be a pessimist, we could say the rich will be dragged down with us. But this doesn’t take into account the rapid increase of class consciousness and organizing that is already happening and only gaining momentum. If you’re asking what the logic of the rich is, they couldn’t care less. “Power corrupts” has become a phrase, so perhaps people don’t think too deeply about it. I often hear people confused about the Epstein class, wondering how so much power ended up in the hands of so few depraved people. The truth is that we’re living I a system that not only rewards psychopathy, but nurtures it. Anybody under the delusion that they would behave any differently under the same conditions hasn’t thought deeply enough about how their environment shapes their thinking. The amount of power that the Epstein/ruling class has accumulated has corrupted them to the point that their plan is literally to violently force people to serve them. They already do this and have no problem ramping up the violence as needed to keep living like gods.
    • ku-man 4mo ago
      [dead]
• smashah 4mo ago
  This is why the Epstein Class is planning a mass culling (world war).
• rvz 4mo ago
  > The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale. > What will happen is they will leave us to die. That is the hard truth. Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
  • alexanderdmitri 4mo ago
    why 2030?
• altairprime 4mo ago
  No, they’ll jail those unable to pay into prisons where workers are required to labor without a reasonable wage, and only let the rebellious workers die. The end goal is generally to replace the lost unpaid labor of now-illegal slavery with the more indirect enslavements of debtors prison labor and corp-indentured servitude. They don’t want to reduce the size of the worker pool, they want to reduce the demands of it — otherwise they end up vulnerable to organized labor by the few workers left.
• 2001zhaozhao 4mo ago
  There's no point being the whale in a P2W mobile game if there are no free to play players to stomp over. I think this translates at least somewhat to the real world.
• greenavocado 4mo ago
  The goal of automation is to end humanity
• thinkingkong 4mo ago
  We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living. We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.
  • Andrex 4mo ago
    The true horrific realization I had with Colossus: The Forbin Project was how equally scared and accepting of the AI's message I was. "This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man." "We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple." The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
  • elevatortrim 4mo ago
    Exactly. And this is why ideas like post-scarcity or universal-high-income are not realistic. Because we can already make life heaven on earth for everyone alive. But we won't. Not because we do not have the resources or means of production, but because we do not have the willingness and systems in place. If we do not fix these first, AI-abundance will bring more suffering, not more prosperity. We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
  • jamiequint 4mo ago
    And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.
• cgio 4mo ago
  They will pay us to colonise Mars! One way trip.
  • supertrope 4mo ago
    "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!"
• thewebguyd 4mo ago
  > wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die. It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing." It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich. (I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
  • jeremyjh 4mo ago
    In many places in the world, the only interests of government are those of the rich. I do not think the rich will be petitioned so much as they will be … persuaded.
  • svachalek 4mo ago
    In the US, the government only answers to the wealthy class.
  • Joker_vD 4mo ago
    > It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
  If that's what happens, and "leaving us to die" results in very many people actually dying, then we'll start killing rich people until they realize that this isn't the world that they want to live in either. When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them. Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...
• block_dagger 4mo ago
  French Revolution says the people win in that case but who knows.
  • tuatoru 4mo ago
    No. The French Revolution was a revolution of lawyers, writers, and administrators, the elite who were shut out of the very highest positions. And it was unstable. The great majority of people were just cannon fodder for Napoleon.
• quater321 4mo ago
  [dead]
• GeoAtreides 4mo ago
  And, as we know, hungry desperate people just lie down and die. Maybe nibble at a piece of cake if they have some.
  • tuatoru 4mo ago
    This is true surprisingly often.
• andai 4mo ago
  No, the incentives are aligned. Bread and circus reduces the number of data centers getting bombed and the number of heads rolling. The good AI and the evil AI both point to UBI.
• HDBaseT 4mo ago
  This is clearly the goal. Many billionaires have expressed the desire to eliminate the lower classes. Just take a look at the World Economic Forum and their goals.