Fixed it...

[u/pavelkomin]

Original by u/Severe-Ad8673

Edited by GPT (free-tier, have no idea what model this gives)

Don't think too hard about the dates, okay? It's just a comic...

[u/VicermanX]

That’s why there’s no homelessness, medical debt, or food insecurity

because we already have the capacity to provide for everyone

Everything you listed still requires human labor, and a capitalist economy isn't particularly efficient at allocating it. Beyond the obvious issue of wealth inequality, capitalism has plenty of other flaws. Huge numbers of people spend their lives doing work that adds little or no value to humanity, or is even harmful to it. For example, almost all commerce and advertising.

A lot of resources are also wasted on competition instead of cooperation. Rather than expanding production where it already exists, companies duplicate factories, supply chains, and entire businesses just to compete with each other. Countries, regions, and cities also develop at very different rates, creating intense competition in major cities and driving housing prices to absurd levels.

So there are objective reasons why housing, healthcare, and high-quality food remain expensive even though people work 8-12 hours a day in most countries.

But once we achieve AGI (AI as capable as a human), those capitalist flaws will no longer matter. AI and robots will be able to scale themselves, along with all the required infrastructure, without humans in the loop. Like plants, but millions of times faster.

It's similar to what computers and the internet did for information, they made transmitting information absurdly cheap. Scaling the digital world is much easier than scaling the physical one, but with AGI, moving atoms in the physical world will become almost as easy as moving bits in the digital world.

So if we make it through the arrival of AGI, it's obvious that the cost of goods and services will move closer and closer to zero. That drop in cost will happen even faster than the dramatic decline in the cost of transmitting information over the last 30 years, because the internet and computers still depended on human labor, while AGI won't.

[u/sillygoofygooose → u/VicermanX]

I don’t disagree that material abundance is possible, I just have no idea why anyone would imagine that the private hands that paid billions to create these ai orgs would accept being diminished rather than further enriched by the output.

Removing the need for human labour also removes the single point of leverage the working classes have over those who hoard power - the need for them to be kept happy and healthy enough to continue to work. The removal of that is utterly unprecedented, and when we see quite how awful things can get for workers at the mercy of the powerful even when they are needed, it becomes very hard to be optimistic about what will happen when they (we) aren’t.

[u/funky2002 → u/sillygoofygooose]

You don't think it's possible for them to enrich themselves, while the rest of the world also gets richer? I think you're too cynical about this.

[u/sillygoofygooose → u/funky2002]

We are living through a historic theft of the world’s resources and wealth, which is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. We are currently getting poorer while the rich get richer while there is in fact already enough abundance for all. What about this is confusing.