It is actually progressing on AI + 3D printing + fusion, that we will see employment increasingly limited to the creative class. Forbes/ Star Trek Economics Is Just True Communism Arriving Oct 5, 2015: for the basic premise of the Star Trek universe is that we’ve conquered scarcity. And as Marx was most insistent about pointing out, communism couldn’t arrive until the absence of scarcity.
Yeah. No scarcity -> happy society.
Forgetting the psychopaths and sociopaths. Long-term problem with economics - the “rational agent” syndrome.
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Their modelling was at least as…intermittently congruent…with what was actually happening as that of any of their western counterparts merrily telling just so stories of rational actors achieving equilibrium on a frictionless, planar, market bathed in perfect information; but having your head stuffed so far up your math that you’ve lost the ability to function empirically isn’t really unsophisticated, though it is problematic in a variety of other ways.
It’s not clear that, say, that excellence in the mathematics of linear programming and control theory had nearly as much influence on Soviet economic activity as “cooking the books definitely beats Siberia” did; but that isn’t a sophistication deficit.
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it’s interesting. i think that next generation was that. but ive been watching tos and most of the scraps with klingons and romulans seem to be about resources. dilithium ( of course ) also various minerals and food. maybe also the resource of livable class m planets themselves.
if you’ve got unlimited resources and good medicine you’re going to need a lot of space for all the people that will result.
all that said, most likely with ai we’ll still wind up with rich countries and poor countries. the rich countries will go to war to make it so. ( like we already do. ) we’ll invent artificial scarcity just to keep the whole power dynamic going.
entropy and chaotic starting positions seems to imply imbalance will always be easier than balance.
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“Livable worlds are rare; and life is cheap.” (we probably didn’t want us to be post-scarcity; but the neutral-to-evil aligned view of a post-scarcity environment would be that meatgrinders on a truly heroic scale would be logistically feasible…)
(edit the second: while Ground Control has the snappy opening line, Total Annihilation is probably the real actually-post-scarcity-will-suck-in-the-future contender: when fancy nanofabrication and nigh unlimited energy make rapid construction of basically anything quick and easy all it takes is a couple of Von Neumann machines with ideological differences to convert a planet’s crust into a packed mass of indecisive attrition; and they’ve been doing it across a million worlds and 4000 years.)
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Chinese guillotines have been fairly effective. Oligarchs that challenge the state tend to end up dispossessed and/or executed in fairly short order.
They’ve got plenty of problems [1], but so far they seem to be keeping capital on a leash.
[1] E.g. authoritarian gerontocracy, accelerating Orwellian surveillance state, etc.
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While I do enjoy watching the occasional captain of industry get executed for corruption, malfeasance, etc. in a way that regulatory capture has pretty much eliminated at home; it seems to be the case that it’s mostly the losers of political struggles that end up getting the consequences; which does rule out especially flamboyant free-range plutocrats; but doesn’t keep the guys who are the state(or at least their families and pals) from looking pretty oligarchic.
This isn’t to say that the charges are trumped up, that would be a waste of time in such a target rich environment; but that the sins of whoever is on top are politely not mentioned(and if someone fails to take the hint pressure is typically applied); while the sins of the unworthy are baptized in blood and fear brought to justice as befits the rule of law definitely operating correctly.
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I feel like it should be noted that for the Maslow categories we already live in a post-scarcity world. (I’d buy that housing, because it’s fixed, does not exist in ample supply in much of Africa, however wealth stolen from Africa has likely built more than a few perfectly habitable and oft-unused or repurposed dwellings elsewhere. Perhaps if that stolen wealth had stayed in Africa, this wouldn’t be the case.)
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We have enough for everyone. We choose to continue the existence of poverty.
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Even if the AIs develop expensive tastes, and the farm animals, peeking in through the windows, can’t tell them apart from the knackers anymore?
Yeah, I don’t doubt that. It’s just that by the fall of the Soviet empire, the western counterparts were engaged in downright fraud. I’m not saying that the Soviets weren’t doing a good job given the times they lived in, but more that those times were not times when economic analysis was at all successful. A centrally organized society needs successful economic analysis in a way that a free democratic society does not. So I think their failure can be laid, at least in part, on a failure of economic analysis. Even if theirs was the best in the world, I don’t think the best was good enough for what they were supposedly trying to do.
This is all pretty tangential to the main topic, just me railing against economics.
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ive been reading a bunch of feminist utopia books and you know, i gotta say, the ruthless overlords of the future are always… lords.
i guess the time to fix the power dynamics of race and gender are now rather than after one class of people have cornered the scarcity-free market.
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Despite the intriguing Headline, the article is underwhelming. Simplistic self-serving claptrap.
Might as well have written that AI-China will instantiate Santa Claus (fill in your own mythical figure if Santa doesn’t do it for you) and make every day Christmas day where Chinese citizens get whatever they need and want forever after.
Of course, in the Chinese version, it’s relevant to mention that you damn well better keep your social credit score up or you’ll be getting coal instead. Nuff said.
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Deus ex machina is not going to solve poverty, but depending on it to is a sure way to exacerbate it.
Religion already tried this. Spoiler alert, it didn’t work.
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Just to be clear, my comments are in reference to the Feng Xiang WorldPost opinion article, “AI Will Spell The End of Capitalism”, in the Washington Post, not Doctorow’s Boing Boing comments about same. I think Doctorow’s comments are spot on, particularly about the Chinese AI having to overcome rampant corruption, human rights abuses and oligarch capture.
In the early stages of Chinese AI emergence it seems likely that the AI will aid and abet corruption, rights abuses and oligarchs. It’ll probably be highly integrated with the social credit system’s digital infrastructure.
Around the world there will be other AI’s emerging. These AI entities will naturally reflect different development milieus than China’s. Get ready for a likely balkanization of the planet by regionally-based AI with competing, often contradictory, strategies, tactics and goals. Us humans will have opportunities to choose which of the AI entities we ally with: some people will choose wisely, many will not. Get ready for a hell of a ride.
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Need not in theory, but in practice we’re trending the opposite way.
How do you get to that point without an extremely well-paying job to be able to afford to buy all those luxuries? That’s assuming that they’d even be for sale. More likely you’ll need at least 2-4 full-time incomes just to pay rent on the home and a couple more to pay the lease/rent/subscription fees on everything else (since you won’t actually own anything).
If you’re lucky to have an inheritance, maybe you can afford a one-room hut in a mudpuddle with a kibblemaker and a small solar panel, but what do you do when you get sick? No job means no health insurance, and medical professionals were relatively wealthy so they all stopped working long before you. Now there’s a 6-month waiting list at the emergency room and aspirin costs $1000 / dose.
With all the other work automated away, the only job left that the AI has to offer you is “companion duty” for those weirdos who don’t have a human companion and are afraid of both sexbots and VR companions (afraid because the AI would be able to monitor them and find out just how weird they are).
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