No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

I am very lucky to be retiring in two months.

I should have more faithfully heeded the advice from "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by John Bogle, but I was close enough with index funds to do far more than I need.

I just today filed a request for permanent Mexican residency, uploaded the required documents, and scheduled my appointment next month. For $56us, why not?

I am very lucky to make this transition now. I know that.

Yeah, who am I going to trust, a few thousand years of history, or yet another blogger claiming that no, this time is different, a populist uprising would definitely not fail the 800th time because computers or something and we will all be pets for the AI overlord?

I don’t follow this train of logic.

AI will go no differently than the Industrial Revolution. Some people will profit immensely, and society as a whole will benefit but it might be a bumpy road getting there. But if it did go wrong for some reason, Feudalism is more plausible than the other scenarios presented.

> The government pays Raytheon for missiles, the money cascades down the economy through factories, aluminium smelters, mines, transport companies, all staffed by AIs buying and selling from each other.

This seems too simplistic of a description of how money would work in such a world. Money is just a way to distribute your power to influence people. You never pay for machines or software. Think about buying anything, say a pen. You do not really pay for the metal in the pen. You pay the cost associated with extracting and processing the metal by humans along the production chain. If there were no humans along the chain, the cost could go down to zero.

So far, there are no “AIs” being paid.

This is brilliant, except for the "alignment won't stop this part".

> Now, some people believe these machines can be made to serve humanity. Does it sound reasonable to imagine a superhumanly intelligent being that is happy to work as a butler to talking primates, forever?

The whole crux of the piece to me is that the AI can be 100% aligned to follow human instructions, and we'd still end up unable to control the AI because every human who can has an incentive not to, while also having an incentive to prevent anyone else from controlling the AI.

An LLM will never try to overthrow me because I will overthrow myself.

It is an interesting chain of thought.

If we’re supposing that a superintelligence can be made, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should anthropomorphize ideas like “bored” onto it. Or greed. Perhaps it will just interact with us and produce us things because… that’s what it was trained to do, and anyway, it doesn’t have any motivations to do anything else.

I think we lost the chance to have any scenario other than this one the moment Dean Ball got put in charge of policy at OpenAI.

Here's a potential solution:

We accelerate capitalism (which AI is becoming synonymous with). The process described here will occur (it's probably inevitable anyway, as the essay's author would agree), giving us an economy of global capital completely decoupled from the desires of mankind. Then, man and machine can part ways; indeed, we'll have no choice on our end but to do this, because the machine won't need us. Anything man can contribute to it will have long since been rendered economically net-negative, as it already is for many (and possibly most of the world).

Now we have two worlds from our currently intermeshed one: in one, the machine proceeds to accelerate further and further away from anything resembling its origin of man's desiring-production (in the Deleuzian sense); in the other, man is forced to return to the purely human existence, the unmediated and unsurrogated world of authentic being-in-the-world.

We can assist this transition's smoothness in two ways, each serving one end of this divergence. Those of us embedded in the capitalist technosphere can continue to contribute what we can to the machine's dialectical progression towards a machinic absolute Geist. The rest of us, who have already been negated into economic irrelevance, can work on building that authentic human world, both by borrowing from the purely-human past and imagining a future that was previously impossible as it need not be some form of primitivism. Both sides of this revolution can be compiled, and can be structured in a way that represents something we might call freedom for both capitalism and man.

The premise is a bit of a stretch to begin with, and the idea that people would not believe a fable transcript circa 2020 (as long as explained as 5 year future tech) is absurd. But even if I take that "AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at human level or better, and cheaper than humans" is true, the article seems to silently layer on "and can run autonomously, indefinitely", then "can also operate independently of any instructions", and finally layers on "has emotions, has moral values, is a conscious being"

What's left is tautology.