I really like that I see more discussion of “ok even if we managed to avoid xrisk what then?”, e.g. recent papers on AI-enabled coups and so on. To the point however, I think the problem runs deeper. What I fear the most is that by “Western values imbued in AGI” people mean “we create an everlasting upperclass with no class mobility because capital is everything that matters and we freeze the capital structure, you will get UBI so you should be grateful.”
It probably makes sense to keep the capitalist structure between ASIs but between humans? Seems like a very bad outcome for me (You will live in a pod and you will be happy type of endgame for the masses).
I don’t see a way Stabilization of class and UBI could both happen. The reason wealth tends to entrench itself under current conditions is tied inherently to reinvestment and rentseeking, which are destabilizing to the point where a stabilization would have to bring them to a halt. If you do that, UBI means redistribution. Redistribution without economic war inevitably settles towards equality, but also… the idea of money is kind of meaningless in that world, not just because economic conflict is a highly threatening form of instability, but also imo because financial technology will have progressed to the point where I don’t think we’ll have currencies with universally agreed values to redistribute.
What I’m getting at is that the whole class war framing can’t be straightforwardly extrapolated into that world, and I haven’t seen anyone doing that. Capitalist thinking about post-singularity economics is seemingly universally “I don’t want to think about that right now, let’s leave such ideas to the utopian hippies”.
I really like that I see more discussion of “ok even if we managed to avoid xrisk what then?”, e.g. recent papers on AI-enabled coups and so on. To the point however, I think the problem runs deeper. What I fear the most is that by “Western values imbued in AGI” people mean “we create an everlasting upperclass with no class mobility because capital is everything that matters and we freeze the capital structure, you will get UBI so you should be grateful.”
It probably makes sense to keep the capitalist structure between ASIs but between humans? Seems like a very bad outcome for me (You will live in a pod and you will be happy type of endgame for the masses).
I don’t see a way Stabilization of class and UBI could both happen. The reason wealth tends to entrench itself under current conditions is tied inherently to reinvestment and rentseeking, which are destabilizing to the point where a stabilization would have to bring them to a halt. If you do that, UBI means redistribution. Redistribution without economic war inevitably settles towards equality, but also… the idea of money is kind of meaningless in that world, not just because economic conflict is a highly threatening form of instability, but also imo because financial technology will have progressed to the point where I don’t think we’ll have currencies with universally agreed values to redistribute.
What I’m getting at is that the whole class war framing can’t be straightforwardly extrapolated into that world, and I haven’t seen anyone doing that. Capitalist thinking about post-singularity economics is seemingly universally “I don’t want to think about that right now, let’s leave such ideas to the utopian hippies”.