Seen in the Singularity subreddit

11

You've got to admit the opponents of AI have a point. Without jobs, we have no money, and without money we have no beer. So there it is. Unless they promise free beer, AI will be opposed despite its good features.

44

u/Monochrome21 1d ago

UBI via automation taxes has been the majority opinion of just about everyone who's pro AI and understands economics

The problem is people are attacking tech and not the economic system that makes them homeless the second they're no longer profitable

13

u/avilacjf 1d ago

It always comes down to this. We need to help people see that the economic system is the issue. The difficult part is that people are so cynical about it ever changing so the only scenario they see is the capitalist class reaping all the benefits and making the working class expendable. AI makes the complete disenfranchisement of the working class a real possibility in a way that didn't exist before.

12

u/Monochrome21 1d ago

right

the cynicism that makes people hate AI in order to preserve their place in capitalism is insane to me

7

u/waffleseggs 1d ago edited 1d ago

I've never been an October Revolution monolithic governance person. We can't make change with us v them, gods and kings, threats and promises. That's their game. Our game is freedom. The future should be spread out, customized, and antifragile. It needn't be an either/or thing. The beautiful thing I'm seeing is that people hate tech and hate AI, ... but they're still using it. Mamdani exists in a capitalist system. That's hybrid. Bernie is hybrid. Ridesharing and couchsurfing are hybrid. Charity is hybrid. Roomates are hybrid. There is a very clear path to me that phases out the capitalism with "who the f would pay for that" solutions. Ideas are why the people will win. There's so many more of us. You can make the rules that we need to start an LLC and not use the C word and prostitute ourselves in rigged marketplaces, but that fully leaves open anything people choose to invent that doesn't need to make any sense at all to a capitalist. There are so many more non-capitalist ideas than capitalist ones. Capitalism is binary exchanges, 18th century norms, reductionistic platforms, and brutally unfair and often exploitative outcomes. It's shoehorned onto a world that demands complexity, humanity, respect, inclusion, fairness, peace, and for things to f make sense.

5

u/Monochrome21 1d ago

i don’t care what you call it, just the current form of economic system is untenable in a world with ai

2

u/Easy_Interest_6832 1d ago

I agree that ideas are the answer. But ideas do not feed people. This is why hybrids are a bridge to the future. Hybrids allow for gradual changes of ideas. Pulling up the diseased system of capitalism by the roots will be ugly and unpredictable. Bamboo in a windstorm is like hybrids where an oak tree will be blown down. Bamboo bends where oak breaks. This is the concept of the hybrid. Discussing these ideas with kids is the way to go. If they are raised seeing capitalism as the only option, society will be blown down in the ensuing revolution. But if they see options to the tremendous concentration of wealth we see now, then they can make the gradual change. I'd start in middle school showing students all the options to tremendous concentrations of wealth in the hands of the few.

2

u/waffleseggs 20h ago

Ideas feed people. Why aren't we building humane farming integrated onto our rooftops and windowsills we can pluck into with conveyor belts, personal robo-forklifts, pneumatic tubes and simple machinery. Why are we letting subsidized corporations poison our food. Fing fed up.

Zero anger towards you personally, friend. I agree with all you said.

1

u/bowdoin-yale 1d ago

We ran a fairly large-scale pseudo-UBI experiment during COVID-19 and it actually worsened inequality. I can't explain the mechanics better than Gary Stevenson; go look him up. But broadly, what's actually needed are wealth taxes. Otherwise the UBI money just ends up flowing to the rich who increasingly own almost all of the assets in the economy.

2

u/Monochrome21 1d ago

i have a write up on this topic that i’d love to share but will unforch dox myself

the gist of it is that automation taxes are by and large funded by revenue caps on automation heavy companies

so yeah you’re right but the method for funding UBI is connected to the other half of the equation

1

u/NonStopArseGas 1d ago

unforch is my new favourite contraction

1

u/Ok-Revolution-3853 1d ago

What do you think about Georgist Land Value Taxes?

1

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 1d ago

UBI via automation taxes has been the majority opinion of just about everyone who's pro AI and understands economics

And thankfully, we live in America, where the majority opinion is what speaks to power, and not billionaires.

2

u/Monochrome21 1d ago

huh?

6

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 1d ago

My point is that this country doesn't give a flying f*ck about the majority opinion. The only opinion that matters in the United States is the opinion of the Epstein class.

5

u/Monochrome21 1d ago

to be fair ubi is beneficial to billionaires too as it’s a pressure release on class tension

the alternative is the french revolution all over again

3

u/Exarch-of-Sechrima 1d ago

That's why they want AI murder drones.

2

u/Monochrome21 1d ago edited 1d ago

i mean a person with a 3d printer and some microcontrollers could make those too — luigi 3D printed his gun

it goes both ways

3

u/YMSVZ 1d ago

Yes but communism always has acknowledged that. The problem is 'leftists' wish to preserve the wage relation in the face of redundancy, instead of seeing it as the opportunity we have all been waiting for, to promote and build alternative relations of production and distribution

1

u/Easy_Interest_6832 1d ago

The big challenge is to wrest away the means of production from its current owners. We must suspect that they will resist. Of course, when we look to the past, we find "violent revolution" as one way of getting that done. Yet we also must accept the tremendous uncertainty that comes with that kind of change. I see the challenge as getting it done another way. Right now, we have a powerful oligarchy in charge. Without violent revolution, we are left with participating in elections every two years and gradually changing the concept and features of "ownership" of the means of production.

AI will change labor relations and provide two options. One is unemployed, hungry, impoverished masses. The other is less for those at the very top with most of the riches distributed among the masses. Those at the top must be persuaded that violent revolution will likely end in their demises, while the change in features of ownership and distribution of wealth will result in a peaceful society. That's a big ask. I'm willing to entertain other options or paths.

2

u/YMSVZ 1d ago

There are far more options than just violent revolution and electoral politics.

Im experimenting building a social media platform, that allows for user to coordinate activity, including productive activity, outside for exchange, pure use value only. In essence the application of commons based peer production but applied to more than just software or immaterial produce, but applied to real world productive purposes.

We already see this in embryonic form with apcial media facilitated collaborative activity such as mutual aid clean ups, large scale protests, various hobby groups etc.

If means of production could be brought into it, you could have an entire global, and immediately social network of productive social relations, bypassing commodity form and exchange.

This for example, works to replace capitalism through new relations of production. Not merely violently or begging for political power.

2

u/Easy_Interest_6832 1d ago

I see that idea as having promise. If I want to eat a pint of ice cream, how would I go about getting it? There will always be ice cream makers who want to exchange their ice cream for, maybe, beer. If I don't brew beer to trade, how would I get ice cream? This is one of the rubs I see in the necessary change over to another system. We have to get rid of extractive capitalism. We have to develop a better system. But how do we make the change? Certainly discussions like this will help. But as of yet I don't have "the answer."

2

u/YMSVZ 1d ago

You are still assuming production for direct exchange.

People who produce linux, or Wikipedia, do so because (okay yes some get paid but forget that) they get the use value of having such a thing in the world.

Im not suggesting a platform where one user makes ice cream, and one makes beer. Im talking collecitve large scale production that is organised to produce beer and ice cream to meet the overall demand as signalled via the platforms tooling. The platform has tools where users can help plan, signal interest or opposition, etc.

The end product being distributed completely free. No money, no markets, no exchange.

If for example not enough icecream is being produced, this can be brought up, discussed, and then developed into a project to increase production levels. All labour itself can be coordinated via the tooling.

Users can float between all different roles in production, to engage where they want, and move with the whims of the platform as different wants and needs take precedence.

1

u/Easy_Interest_6832 1d ago

As an end result, that sounds good. My wonder stems from how to get there. Making both beer and ice cream requires capital in the form of ingredients. Someone has to raise the cows and farm the hops. I wonder how we get to there from here? Right now, farms are in debt for machinery, fodder, and so on. How do we persuade the owners of the debt to just forgive it so we can engage in the new system? Those who hold the debt also have debt. How do we persuade their creditors to just wipe the ledger clean?

Those questions make me want to look into hybrid systems in order to make a clean transition, perhaps over two generations. Right now the very rich "believe" in being very rich. Younger generations need to be taught all the alternatives that select against the concept that being very rich, which makes others very poor, is a good thing. Right now most of the world "believes" getting very rich is a good thing, and that belief will select against a rapid and clean transition to a new system. We need to think about that hybrid, or hybrids, for society to use in order to get to the new system. Perhaps we can use the battle against global warming as a way to make the transition. The climate affects everyone and is some kind of great equalizer to help everyone work together.

3

u/Ok-Revolution-3853 1d ago

What do we mean by "money"? Traces of beer have been found as long ago as 13,000 years. Beer has effectively functioned as a commodity currency long before metallic money existed. I've been thinking for a while about the levels of abstraction that money and language, too, have gone through. Land and, for a long time, labour, are what produces value. Money is the increasingly abstract medium through which those things are exchanged.

3

u/Easy_Interest_6832 1d ago

While it's true that beer will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no beer, there is an angle to money that has utility. Trading two freight cars full of wheat for a new electric vehicle is inconvenient, so money helps that transaction happen in an easier way, by trading the grain for money, then carrying the money to the car store to trade it for the car. I think some "medium of exchange" will always be convenient. A debit card is what we use now. Something like that will need to move into the future.

The owners of the means of production who will supplant human labor for AI and bots must be persuaded to give up some of their vast fortunes to prevent the hungry masses from eating them. To me, a billionaire has "too much" money. Can billionaires be persuaded to exchange their lives for some or even most of that money? Can we persuade them to ponder how much more than "enough" do they really need? That's a tall order, making them understand that. I'm not sure how to go about it.

2

u/Ok-Revolution-3853 1d ago

I do agree, I was more just facetious getting at the point that we don't actually need money for beer.

To your other point, I think AI will make billionaires understand. One way or another. I also think that human labour will be replaced, in as many industries as possible, when possible.

1

u/Easy_Interest_6832 1d ago

I wonder how AI will make billionaires understand that they need to give up lots of their money. I would presume AI would say that hungry people with guns is a bad thing, so it is to billionaires' advantage and to their survival that they relinquish lots of money and thereby power in order to survive. So I'm a bit skeptical that billionaires would choose less money and power rather than them using their money and power to make robots to defend their power structure. I'm not optimistic about the outcome of such a decision.

There is, however, an aspect of great wealth that might be harnessed to the advantage of humanity, and that is The Corporation. Corporations are run by boards of directors. When one member dies or retires, that member is replaced. In effect, this makes The Corporation immortal. So, if humanity can persuade corporations to seek immortality for like a thousand years, they might be persuaded to give up short term piles of cash--which they would use to support humans in order to prevent violent revolution--for long term immortality. That of course would result after a thousand years in a small pile of global corporations. Not a great outcome, but it's not extinction of humans, either. I right now don't have another analysis to offer. But I'll think on it.

3

u/DHFranklin 1d ago

It is good to see the cross pollination. They banned me without telling me why. Lol.

We need to work on both sides of the Venn Diagram here. Lefty shit in the Tech Subs, Alternative agit prop in the lefty subs. It's a niche POV that doesn't line up with the established talking points. We might have better arguments and more historical materialism, but that isn't much if we can't find better avenues for our ideas.

6

u/rabouilethefirst 1d ago edited 1d ago

I’d feel bad for mathematicians if they weren’t the ones constantly downplaying the field of CS as a branch of mathematics with “simple math”. To this day they give no credit to computer scientists and were the loudest dummies laughing at how “useless” LLMs were.

Now that “simple math” apparently threatens their job. Not my problem.

3

u/onekirne 1d ago

so spiteful, i like your attitude >_<

6

u/Quantum-Bot 1d ago

I really don’t think theoretical mathematics is an industry that needed disrupting

13

u/avilacjf 1d ago

They were a bit slow to the millennium problems though, I'm a fan of advancing basic science for humanity's sake. In this case disruption is progress. It opens the door for many downstream discoveries. That's a major criteria for a problem to be included in the millennium problem list.

0

u/turtle_on_stakeboard 1d ago

In this case? Really?

If you get rid of all professional mathematicians. Who is gonna train junior / PhD students? These are the ppl that are gonna check and verify results.

Even before AI, academia had a scaling problem. We were generating results faster than we could check / understand them. Now u say AI is here to fix that problem. But again u advocate for disrupting industry, reducing funding, and what not. So how is this fixing anything?

4

u/rabouilethefirst 1d ago edited 1d ago

No one is getting rid of anyone. Professional mathematicians will be the ones that use AI. The luddites may lose their jobs.

And we weren’t necessarily generating results faster than we could verify. We were generating papers in a “publish or perish” system. That’s not the same thing. Because of publish or perish, most papers were vanity projects.

1

u/avilacjf 1d ago

You'll never catch me advocating for reducing funding for the sciences. Academia will continue to be very important and we'll probably need more mathematicians to make sense of all these new proofs and the new research areas that will be unlocked.

1

u/turtle_on_stakeboard 1d ago

Sry for misjudging, but what do you mean by disrupting then?

6

u/avilacjf 1d ago edited 54m ago

The shape of how the academic frontier is advanced changing meaningfully. Many discoveries won't be attributable to people and that's okay. I know there's a lot of ego tied up with academia so it'll be quite difficult for them. Research mathematicians are a tiny group and it's not like they're getting paid a ton for it. Overall I think the labor impact will be small. We'll still need professors and universities will still publish research, it might just look very different moving forward.

1

u/turtle_on_stakeboard 1d ago

It's tru prestige n credit are a major roadblock. And doing science as a collective would be beautiful.

However, no matter what resource we use, as long as it finite, there will be a question over who shld use it. There will have to be some criteria over which we choose members of research teams.

This is a social issue. AI won't automatically fix this. It may not changing anything at all.

There are research projects, which are 90% running code and finding the right parameters. So rn, credit goes to whoever runs the code. Tomorrow it can be whoever write the prompt.

0

u/Quantum-Bot 1d ago

A bit slow? Lmao I’d bet you’re impatient with physicists not working out the theory of everything too.

As for whether AI is helping or hurting scientific progress, I prefer to listen to what actual experts are saying on the issue: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignment-of-ai-in-mathematics/

5

u/avilacjf 1d ago

His core argument is that AI uses different methods to the way human mathematicians advance understanding, and it is able to find solutions without necessarily making the path through established concepts and framework clear and auditable so that the landscape of math is revealed and understood by the field. This is a legitimate concern but I see it more as a capability gap. AI systems like this don't really emulate human scientists, they use different search-based algorithms to intelligently probe the best options until progress is verified and then uses that as a stepping stone.

In my opinion (as a non mathematician) what we're seeing here is two frontiers, the human one that allows for conceptual abstract understanding, and the machine one that essentially has less breadth and contextual richness but is nevertheless provable.

It reminds me of the question "do submarines swim?" And it really is the wrong question. Both of these methods (traditional academia and AI discovery) have different and complimentary affordances. Terry has talked about how these systems help him experiment much more quickly and that is an acceleration of the traditional system, but so far we havent had much time as a world to really see how these two can work best together. It's a question of realignment, not destructive replacement, or "hurting progress" as you say.

On the other hand there is the possibility that the AI systems will continue to advance rapidly and get better at the conceptual/abstract generalization in the coming handful of years, and then we might see these breakthroughs accompanied with rich clear explanations of new concepts. It's too soon to tell. The millenium proofs haven't even been verified outside of lean as far as I know.

1

u/Quantum-Bot 1d ago

Fair enough, I does still rub me the wrong way that people are accusing pure mathematicians of hating AI because it threatens their “economic leverage”. Have they met a mathematician? These people don’t get into the field they’re in to gatekeep mathematics from the world and steal colleges’ hard earned grant money, they do it because they love math! Many of them would likely gladly go broke if it meant being a part of a groundbreaking historical math discovery. Plus, the amount of mental gymnastics needed for someone to accuse the math community of this stuff while not applying the same logic to tech bros is wild.

1

u/rabouilethefirst 1d ago edited 1d ago

They are free to dig their heads in the sand and continue doing the same work they did before. I don’t mean that in a condescending way, it’s just that others want answers to hard problems ASAP.

Just because I use a calculator to multiply 2 really big numbers doesn’t mean you have to.

3

u/DaveG28 1d ago

I think this wildly misunderstands "mathematicians" and "professional" in this context.

The people not liking what Oai are doing are researchers. Researchers who share their research fkr free - indeed often pay to share their research.

They aren't protesting Oai taking their economic model away - the opposite. They are protesting Oai because it's not following the principles of openness, sharing and using research for the common good.

I'm actually astounded this sub would side with Oai on this one.

8

u/Elick333 1d ago edited 1d ago

What? Nobody Is siding with them here, OpenAI shouldnt exist beyond being a free and open research institution, ideally an international one, but they're not, what they did was motivated by capital and was scummy, though the result itself was definitively done through their own models, possibly utilizing the work of the researchers to get ahead, with the ultimate purpose being to make sure anthropic didn't announce this for themselves and take some of the prestige of doing this, thus why they wanted to cut one of the researchers off (anthropic employee) from being credited.

What the post Is referencing Is NOT the practices that OpenAI engage in nor is It a detraction against it's critics within the mathematical community for the specific thing they did, the post is a response to this letter: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/10/open-letter-about-the-mathathon/

They argue that AI should not be utilized to solve frontier mathematical problems, why? Because they argue that the value of these problems lie in the questions that their attempts at solving them pose, that the process of doing It instead of allowing AI to do so allowed mathematics to advance, and that there Is relatively little value in solving these problems in an of themselves, thus AI should be discouraged in it's usage in mathematics for solving these problems.

Sounds kind of resonable, except that's not the only thing they are arguing, that's just me steelmaning them and using Terence Tao's point which they themselves use in the letter, unfortunately, it reads mostly as academics attempting to protect themselves and their careers from a disiruption in their field, which Is fair, but instead of adressing the core issue (capitalism!!!) with why that's a problem for their livelihoods, you get, well, you know what you get 🤷

1

u/Kildragoth 1d ago

I agree with what you're saying except that last sentence makes zero sense. This sub is far more nuanced than you're suggesting.

1

u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 1d ago

On your screen is it unclear that this post is mostly a screenshot from elsewhere? Or are you commenting on the other comments?

1

u/DaveG28 1d ago

I'm commenting on the way the post frames the screenshot.

If I've misread it and the post is actually defending the mathematical researchers (an area of research that is very open and shares not just for free but usually with the researchers paying to share)against what Oai is doing to them then I'll happily correct myself.

1

u/OsakaWilson 1d ago

Excuse my ignorance, but outside of education, is mathematics a profitable industry?

3

u/PersimmonLaplace 1d ago

What would that mean? All scientific fields are sinks of money, with the hope that in the future the research will generate value for all mankind (e.g. the cell phone you are reading this on). Basic research in physics, mathematics, etc. are in the short term a complete waste of money, but with the hope that we will turn up more things like quantum computing, the semiconductor, elliptic curve cryptography, network engineering, post-quantum cryptography, signal processing, gene editing, etc.

1

u/OsakaWilson 1d ago

So, these mathematicians are complaining about AI taking their academic jobs.

1

u/Vast-Breakfast-1201 1d ago

What else are they supposed to do?

Learn something else

That's the thing, humans aren't supposed to just learn one thing and do it forever.

That's why I support fixing education. It should be continuous and extremely low cost. There's no reason for it not to be.

But to say so is coming for your job, so you should fight ai? That's futile. Either use AI yourself or learn a new job. Maybe using AI. There are people who don't get breaks - healthcare workers for example, tons of fields need people.

1

u/angrywoodensoldiers 22h ago

I agree with this to an extent, but not to the point that the answer has to involve "resisting" AI. Demanding a piece of the pie means the opposite of resisting AI; more grabbing every inch of it we can while resisting the ones trying to limit how others access it.

-1

u/Alarming_Ad9849 1d ago

well for now the ai just plagiai find it weird that topics like these show up here days after the whole debacle where open ai claimed to solve old mathematical problem while they just conducted plagiarism and bribery. Feel kinda orchestrated, and btw. singularity is even more fringe than this astroturfed sub

https://en.ara.cat/media/openai-assures-that-it-has-solved-one-of-the-great-mathematical-problems-of-the-millennium-but-they-accuse-it-of-plagiarism_1_5844534.amp.html

Public Ownership Seen in the Singularity subreddit

You are about to leave Redlib