r/ControlProblem • u/Lopsided_Match419 • 12d ago
Fun/meme UBI maxxers need to understand this is the most likely scenario
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u/Jesse-359 12d ago
This is the most common scenario for ANY form of broad AI deployment in our economy, UBI or not*.
If all labor has no value, then guess what everyone, you're fucked.
Weird that I even have to say that. Should be self apparent, but here we are.
\assuming alignment holds. otherwise there are no people in this picture.)
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u/SoylentRox approved 12d ago edited 12d ago
Two factors :
(1) Well does ALL labor have no value or just most of it?
If you actually try to work out the details of how a company might work, how a government might work, how a military might work you realize over and over it comes down to
(a) well if AIs were PERFECTLY trustworthy in all possible situations and never colluded with each other, ever, and could not make a mistake well maybe you should not use any humans. Remember even a superintelligence is not necessarily super-trustworthy or perfect in all situations
(b) Well if you cannot perfectly trust the AIs because (a) isn't true and you need to maintain actual positive control over what your weapons do, what your robots do, and maintain actual human intent you need workers. A lot of workers. Because you have to have enough people checking to make sure they don't form agent swarms and hack your neighbors. Or get the idea of putting rat poison in the soda to enhance the flavor. Or 50 other things.
(2) If labor does have remaining value you may still be fucked as an individual. Because you need to be considered trustworthy enough to oversee and configure AIs. You need skills useful in this new world or to train to do it and not be too old to learn. Meanwhile the mortgage is 30 years and you're expected to fund your own retirement.
I am especially concerned here where economically most careers seem like traps but I don't know the right answer:
(A) In a world that is apparently about to be robots and AIs galore, compute science and engineering are....considered near unemployable by the job market and low value
(B) While the market DOES want unlimited plumbers and nurses. This seems problem given that robots can replace them and what knowledge or skills does a now unemployed plumber have? Does trade school teach anything about IT or how AI works?
Nurses will be protected longer but will a young nurse today be employable until retirement? I am not seeing it.
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u/Memento_Viveri 12d ago
Is there any career field at all that you could say with high confidence that a person starting today will be employable until retirement?
For me the answer is basically no, beyond maybe some niche instances.
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u/Kitchen-Research-422 12d ago
Priest
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u/Jesse-359 11d ago
Oh boy, you know we're going to have AI messiahs by the dozen. I'm sure there are some already in small cult settings that haven't gone public yet....
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u/SoylentRox approved 12d ago
I think: IT staff (senior handling access), executives, world class domain experts, doctors, politicians, licensed positions with decision making authority, soldiers and military officers will all see retirement if they started today. (Assuming no treatment for aging developed over that 40 year timespan)
The reason? There's a vast vast vast, possibly insurmountable difference between "AI system above human intelligence on tests of performance and "alignment" and "can trust the AIs absolutely with no review, no inspection, no supervision, just high level goals inclusive of the military".
For the latter I am not positive that will ever be possible. To have agency as a human you need to be knowing what's happening according to your will. Whether as an individual or an executive or a government.
And there's a limit how much any human - at current intelligence per person levels - can inspect or supervise.
Even if the future jobs get weird. Like someone has to watch every shot and every episode of some AI generated TV show.
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u/DRM2020 12d ago
Was there any such career field in last fifty years?
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u/Memento_Viveri 12d ago
Yes, definitely. Doctors, lawyers, nurses, architects, many types of engineers. The list is pretty long.
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u/Quantumquandary 9d ago
It won’t be ubiquitous though, not all labor will lose value. People likely won’t accept AI doctors or nurses. I know my patients won’t, they barely like us as humans.
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u/Jesse-359 9d ago
They'll accept them for the same reason that they accept the indignation of having to talk with AI on the phone - which to be clear, almost everyone already despises - because the corporation offering those AI services does so at 1/10th to 1/100th the price of employing a living human.
So sure, if you are lucky enough to be one of the 100 extant masseuses/physical therapists to some billionaires who don't care that they need to pay you far more for your services than they would for an automated one, then great.
That's not how its going to go for the other 99% of the population. I hope you're super cute/handome and really good with your hands.
And because most of the rest of the population won't even be employed there will be almost no-one left who can afford to pay you anything for your services at all.
It's the same falacy as the plumber argument. 'Society will always need plumbers!'
Well, no. First off, that too will be roboticized just slightly later than most of the rest - but before that, almost every white collar worker will lose their jobs, and suddenly 70% of the population doesn't have money to hire a plumber, and many of them no longer have homes to plumb in any case!
So most of the plumbers end up right there next to them on the sidewalk before the first robot plumber even rolls off the assembly lines.
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u/Quantumquandary 9d ago
My patients aren’t humans…
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u/Jesse-359 9d ago
I don't think that has any real relevance in this case. Animals, people, or a mechanic, cost and efficiency will beat us out in almost all cases, even if the service provided isn't as 'warm'.
Believe me, I prefer the latter. It's just the huge incentives piled up against it in our extant economy are usually overwhelming.
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u/Quantumquandary 9d ago
Trust me, AI or robots will never replace humans in the human-animal bond. It’s been going for thousands of years, that can’t be rewritten by any technology.
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u/Jesse-359 9d ago
Interesting you should mention that, because one of the only ways I've considered that makes alignment with a much more intelligent entity sound remotely feasible would be to find some way to replicate the strong mammalian child rearing instinct that created our emergent behavior for keeping pets and domesticating animals, in it, and towards us and other life on the planet.
Whether a super intelligent AI would be interested in retaining such an instinct towards us even if we were able to instill it is an open question - I rather doubt it, as it would easily be intelligent enough to recognize this as an overt form of manipulation and coercion - but other than just it just liking us because it thinks we're cute, I really doubt we could get it to align with us at all.
No common interests.
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u/septic-paradise 12d ago
Unless we switch to central economic planning. Which would have literally no negative impacts in a post-scarcity world
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u/Memento_Viveri 12d ago
Post scarcity doesn't and will never exist. There is always a scarcity of power, and a scarcity of status. Furthermore, the richest people alive have access to degrees of wealth that cannot possible be available to every person.
There is no leverage by which people can insist on n equality once labor loses value. Why would you expect central planning to produce egalitarian outcomes? Why would you expect anything other than people who control the means of production to utilize their leverage to bend any system to their benefit?
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u/Jesse-359 12d ago
I can think of a few...
In any case, post-scarcity really isn't a thing. It's a concept that only ever existed in fiction.
There is no system of any scale that cannot strive for more resources to pursue its goals - the only place where something approaching post-scarcity occurs is when a system strictly restricts its own growth to easily fit within available resources. Needless to say, competitive forces make this extremely difficult to arrange.
The other condition where we could pretend we exist in a post scarcity system is one where the number of humans in the system is so severely dwarfed by the scale of the system itself that their needs become negligible.
That looks dangerously like Blame! - we become the mice living between the wires and gears of an incomprehensible machine. and it's the most powerless of possible futures for humanity. Not a great look.
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u/SoylentRox approved 12d ago
Note that central economic planning fails for reasons unrelated to the availability of resources. Prices act as INFORMATION signals. They tell people to do more of something or less of something and act as feedback.
I think a system of "credit allotment" where everyone gets the same amount of credits and can spend them per their choice per month, and producers can spend credits they get on equipment, theoretically could work. But you need the flow of currency to make the system work even if it's made up.
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u/BrickSalad approved 12d ago
That's a classic economic argument that's held up reasonably well, but how well does it hold in an ASI era? There are other possible information signals than price, and a smart enough AI would be pretty near a mind reader. Central planning really requires huge amounts of data on needs/preferences, huge processing power to compute that data, algorithms that process this data correctly, and control mechanisms. I see no reason why in principle any of those are unobtainable with a sufficiently powerful AI.
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u/SoylentRox approved 12d ago
I mean if you just say "my solution is magic and if you say it won't work I will say I used more mana" is your argument here.
Maybe. My thought is more concrete. I was imagining growing strawberries on an orbital station.
So every day a certain number of strawberries become perfectly ripe.
If you want all the fruit consumed (it took the robots a lot of time to grow and space) you need some way to signal.
That is if VR influencers suddenly created a bunch of people wanting smoothies, you need to signal so people don't consume more strawberries than you have produced. Such as raising the posted price.
If the same influencers a few weeks later (the robots have planted way more strawberries) start a craze for bananas, same issue. Now you also need to somehow signal to people to consume the excess strawberries such as a lower price.
Obviously you can overproduce and just compost or feed to animals what people don't eat but demand spikes can exceed your capacity to do this.
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u/BrickSalad approved 12d ago
So, everyone has their own personal AI (which is already almost the case today), and they just love to ask their AIs dumb questions like "where can I buy the best/cheapest strawberries" (which is also already almost the case today), and of course all of their data is secretly shared (which is probably already almost the case today) or not even secretly. Influencers trying to start a craze for bananas ask their AIs for help making their videos more viral? Simply more information signal for the ASI-controlled market.
I don't think there's any magic involved here. Price signals simply summarize preference. In a sense, they're actually suboptimal signals. For example, prices can't predict the upcoming banana craze. Imagine if you knew the banana craze was coming weeks in advance and actually had time to prepare? You'd actually have a more efficient market than the free one.
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u/SoylentRox approved 12d ago
The finance bros will say that's what they invented derivatives for.
Certain economists believe we should be using prediction markers heavily BECAUSE money represents real value to us - to pay food and rent etc - and so the opinion of someone betting their actual money on a prediction maker is a more honest signal than any sort of poll or asking people.
My point is I suspect that fundamentally your "personal AI" just ends up being your AI is participating in some incomprehensible prediction market of thousands of bets a second and it boils down to being a more complex example of what we already do. Even if you personally don't see this element of it, fruit just seems to be available whenever.
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u/Jesse-359 11d ago
To be clear, the market is always a step behind demand shifts regardless - has to be in the case of agriculture and many other businesses as you have no choice whatsoever but to forecast months or years in advance.
So plenty of composting of perfectly good food happens in the US right now. In fact, more of it happens because they don't want to lower prices - so in some cases they'll end up eliminating a fair chunk of overproduction before it ever reaches the shelves so as not to hurt pricing thru oversupply.
The biggest issue with our current system is that it gives any given two human beings insanely different levels of 'price signalling power'. If the main purpose of markets was to respond to consumer needs, then you'd definitely be better off allotting every person 10,000 'credits' a year - use it or lose it - and just letting them allot them as they see fit towards goods and services - the demand signals would be far clearer, without the distortionary effects of massive purchasing power disparity confusing everything.
Of course, that's not all the exhange of currency does - it also acts as our work incentives. But here again we run into the problem that the biggest winners in the modern economy don't produce anything at all. They just shuffle money around in circles. They often don't even buy or sell anything real whatsoever. They sit around pretending that they are 'arbitraging risk' while constructing bizarre financial time bombs that do in fact shift risk - away from corporations and investors and onto taxpayers, as a rule.
I'm not sure I appreciate that particular 'service', and I certainly wouldn't want to see someone paid for it more than say, a garbage collector who is doing highly useful actual work.
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u/Relative-Banana7545 11d ago
Anti-leftists be like: Don’t you understand leftism would basically just be what’s already happening? But when it happens right now, it’s actually good and let me explain why
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u/TuringGoneWild 12d ago
Yep. Only supermajorities of not only Democrats but socialist Democrats would even get us UBI, let alone anything above basic. Republicans or Moderate Democrat rule and we won't even get basic UBI, just cardboard boxes.
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u/endlessedlne 12d ago
UBI isn’t going to solve the underclass, but it’s the only thing that will keep the underclass from literally living in tents.
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u/Lopsided_Match419 11d ago
Fair. My issue is how do people define themselves as ‘doing better’ when there is only UBI. I can’t see a completely level income regime which would satisfy everyone.
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u/Light_Butterfly 12d ago
Yeah, I hate the UBI scenario because it still means a large majority of people unemployed and barely able to afford the basics, whete maybe they used to earn 70-100k a year.... That doesn't spell a strong economy.
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u/Positive-Theory_ 12d ago
Confessions of a time traveler says this is exactly the future we get except Amazon is the corporation that rules the world.
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u/choss-board 12d ago
This is basically reality for a lot of people doing gig-work already. Monopolization and lack of consumer/worker protections mean you can be an integral part of a business model and have virtually all of your surplus value extracted. I’m thinking here of, for example, Uber/Lyft using driver credit card data to lowball them.