"Among anxious laptop workers, these trends have fed half-ironic chatter about the coming of a “permanent underclass”: Once AI renders virtually all human labor commercially useless, most people will be condemned to eternal subjugation and precarity. No company will pay you for work that a robot can do better. And no market economy will let you climb the income ladder if your labor has no value. In Silicon Valley, such reasoning has generated a peculiarly dystopian variant of hustle culture: Make your fortune in the next five years, and you’ll claim a place in the perpetual aristocracy of AI owners — fail, and you’ll forever be at their mercy.
All these claims are wildly speculative. It’s not certain that today’s AI labs have functioning business models, much less the wherewithal to develop omnicompetent robots. Yet of all the nightmare scenarios spun by fatalistic futurists, AGI-induced neofeudalism strikes me as among the most plausible.
AGI may or may not decide to liquidate the human race. But it will tank the value of human labor, more or less by definition. We don’t know how ordinary people will fare in a world where the wealthy can do without their talents and exertions. But it is reasonable to worry that the answer is “not too well.” After all, there are already societies in which workers enjoy relatively little economic leverage over elites. And they typically aren’t nice places to be an ordinary person.
It’s therefore worth examining precisely how AI could generate an immutable oligarchy —and what can be done to prevent that from happening."
The most likely AI apocalypse
OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to build an artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a machine that can outperform humans at all labor. That could lead to a permanent oligarchy.Eric Levitz (Vox)
Miguel Afonso Caetano
in reply to Miguel Afonso Caetano • • •"This dissonant combination of commodity wealth and mass poverty is not unusual. To the contrary, large resource endowments appear to correlate with slower economic growth and higher corruption — a phenomenon that economists and political scientists have dubbed “the resource curse.”
Scholars have attributed this paradox to many different factors. But Drago and Laine emphasize one in particular: Large commodity endowments can reduce elites’ incentives to increase ordinary workers’ productivity.
Vast energy or mineral deposits provide investors with a ready source of profits — and states, with an easy source of revenue. The former don’t have to hazard capital on complex production processes to secure returns, while the latter need not bother with the headaches of forming competent tax collection services, the fiscal costs of developing a skilled labor force, or the political risks of cultivating an educated populace and diverse economy with competing power centers. Oligarchs and public officials can just feather their beds with c
... Show more..."This dissonant combination of commodity wealth and mass poverty is not unusual. To the contrary, large resource endowments appear to correlate with slower economic growth and higher corruption — a phenomenon that economists and political scientists have dubbed “the resource curse.”
Scholars have attributed this paradox to many different factors. But Drago and Laine emphasize one in particular: Large commodity endowments can reduce elites’ incentives to increase ordinary workers’ productivity.
Vast energy or mineral deposits provide investors with a ready source of profits — and states, with an easy source of revenue. The former don’t have to hazard capital on complex production processes to secure returns, while the latter need not bother with the headaches of forming competent tax collection services, the fiscal costs of developing a skilled labor force, or the political risks of cultivating an educated populace and diverse economy with competing power centers. Oligarchs and public officials can just feather their beds with commodity revenues instead.
According to Drago and Laine, AGI could fuel an even more extreme version of this dynamic. With the aid of superintelligent robots, the theory goes, capitalists won’t need to curry favor with pesky workers in order to turn a profit. And states won’t rely on ordinary people for tax revenue. To the contrary, as machines condemn most workers to perpetual unemployment, governments will have few funding sources beyond the windfall profits of corporations. The typical person’s economic leverage over public and private powers will be kaput. And states and businesses will have little material incentive to invest in their education or well-being."