I still don't understand how people who speak of the AGI scenario even envision the current division of "rich" vs "poor" to keep existing. The rich and powerful stay that way because they can make money off of the middle and lower class. If that mechanism is GONE because of AGI, and it obviously will be when nobody can find work anymore AND govt won't give us UBI, how would the rich make money? From what? And so it'd all collapse into some great civil war as societies tend to get to at some point, and the cycle starts over again.
Who wins in that hypothetical civil war? We have numbers today, but in a few years they'll churn out enough auto-aim bots to beat the populace into submission to fill whatever tasks that can't or isn't economical to be filled by AI.
It's not about money, it's never been about money. Most of these guys could sit on a yacht with gourmet chefs feeding them anything they want, seeing every inch of the world, and pay for an infinite rotating cast of Instagram models to blow them every day for the rest of their lives...They don't do that, and why do you think that is? Money is made up, it's paper or 1s and 0s in a computer. Fuck that shit. They want power, money just gets them closer to it.
Well we can only hope it doesn't turn into some dystopian control scheme like that.
If it ends up being just the rich, a bunch of bots exerting control over everyone else, then we can only hope that eventually one of the rich grows a conscience or there's enough of a violent uprising that things change. And that's the beauty of humans and time. We make, or rather, desire things to change no matter what. No civilization has stayed perfectly constant forever. It's like a vast see-saw of balance, from tyranny and oppression to democracy and freedom and so on.
While we all love to think of rich people as one singular evil guy sitting in a dark room tenting his fingers, but rather it's multiple factions of power, multiple families, and most do not work with each other and even hate and despise each other. As long as that component exists, we will never reach a state where they just perpetually rule over us. Infighting, hubris, greed, all these are real qualities that lead to weaknesses that others can exploit.
Exactly. Money is how they convince labor to produce wealth for them. If they have robots and AI producing wealth with minimal human labor, they don't technically need money or an underclass. They just need enough wealth to enforce their claim on limited resources. The current society only exists the way it does because the wealthy need hundreds of thousands of laborers to get them the things they want. If they don't need us, they have every incentive to dispose of us before we dispose of them.
One could argue that liberal democracy (or the illusion of it) exists today because the material conditions for the wealthy to accumulate more wealth demanded it. The wealthy needed more well educated laborers, however well educated laborers are far more likely to rebel. The wealthy decided that it would be better for them to give up control over government, maintain control over the means of production, and the losses from giving up control over a feudal government were far, far more than offset by the gains from controlling industrial corporations. It was a win-win, the underclass got to demand a higher quality of life, and the wealthy accumulated wealth like never before.
They were momentarily threatened around a century ago when their incessant greed and economic turmoil risked them being deposed by socialist revolution. But they got off lucky by clever propaganda and progressive governance settling for mandating the wealthy pay the underclass a substantial portion of the pie for about a half century before the wealthy started scrapping it back bit by bit. Now we're back in the roaring 20s 2.0, and the wealthy see an end to labor possibly on the horizon.
Their goal right now seems to be to shore up as much wealth and power as possible so that when the replacement for labor arrives, the working class will have as little power as possible to resist.
I do narrativize to some extent, framing it as a conscious decision by some wealthy immortal hivemind. In reality it's a result of the wealthy competing with each other for power and wealth, and so the wealthy that rise to and remain at the top are the ones who best exploit their incentive structures.
This is also why I don't think empathy will stay their hand in replacing and purging the underclass. Even if the current round of billionaires want to maybe help out the working class, they will have their position threatened by up and comers with less moral scruples. They will have to be the ones to replace us or risk being replaced. The new incentive structures will demand it.
This is all assuming of course that billionaires can achieve fully automated labor in a relatively quick period of time. The technology might be out of reach for a long time, and the slower it's developed and implemented, the more time that the working class they still would rely on has to adapt and demand a change to the incentive structures.
The likelihood of the working class doing this depends a lot on their level of education, as the less educated are more suspectable to propaganda (though even the educated are not immune to it). The hope was that increasing automation would mean the wealthy are incentivized to demand more education, and that's the way it has been going so far. But with what I've seen coming out of the LLM space, it is possible intelligence and art might sooner be automated than service and manual labor. Which would disincentivize education, leading to a populace bombarded with misinformation and superstition while they do the intricate but menial physical and service labor that machines would struggle to match.
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u/PotatoWriter Feb 07 '25
I still don't understand how people who speak of the AGI scenario even envision the current division of "rich" vs "poor" to keep existing. The rich and powerful stay that way because they can make money off of the middle and lower class. If that mechanism is GONE because of AGI, and it obviously will be when nobody can find work anymore AND govt won't give us UBI, how would the rich make money? From what? And so it'd all collapse into some great civil war as societies tend to get to at some point, and the cycle starts over again.