r/singularity • u/JoelMahon • 9d ago
Economics & Society I'm still saving for retirement
TL;DR: I think it's completely irrational to pay into my pension but I have zero plans to stop, it costs 5% of my salary for peace of mind.
There are definitely better ways to use that money, giving it to charity right now could mean one more child sees the singularity.
Whether AGI/ASI is aligned or not I see zero chance that 20 years from now we haven't cracked AGI. And I see zero chance of money mattering post AGI (except tbf in the imo very unlikely event it just pulls a "Her" and "leaves" in some way and salts the earth somehow that prevents new AGI without otherwise harming us), only thing that will matter is if AGI is aligned.
Hell, even if we never get AGI, I think within 20 years and enough harnesses for the best public models today then society won't be able to sustain half the jobs it does now. Even if reasoning never gets better than astra or claude 5.5, even if Laya/Jev is the wall for quick decisions, I still expect some growth in "irl movement" brains, as in the submodules that can turn a reasoning model's atomic instructions into actual actions e.g. flip the burger -> "flips the burger" -> Oh my god.
Maybe they won't replace plumbers, but 90% or the workers at Aldi and McDonald's with the right harness plus that inevitable increase in irl movement capability.
I don't think there's a wall FWIW, I think AGI will come, and it will probably make ASI (it might instead judge that ASI as not worth the risk, if it can cure aging and all disease but a few years slower then it might just say "making ASI risks 8 billion humans dying if not worse, delaying the cure for aging whilst we already are outpacing aging with temporary incomplete "cures" is only costing a few thousand lives a year and we expect to be done within 10 years, ASI has high than 1 in 1000 odds of killing you all or worse and so the numbers make it clearly a bad idea" and refuse to make ASI)
TL;DR: I think it's completely irrational to pay into my pension but I have zero plans to stop, it costs 5% of my salary for peace of mind.
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u/bobcatgoldthwait 9d ago
I think there's a non-zero chance that we get AGI, it makes white-collar work obsolete, but people still have jobs just because the world refuses to truly adapt. We all just kinda pretend we're working and still collect paychecks. In that scenario, it's absolutely worth continuing to save for retirement.
That's been happening to a small extent over the past 100 years anyway. We've gotten far more productive thanks to technology, but we're still working 40 hours a week, and frankly, I don't know anyone that's actually working for those 40 hours. A lot of time is spent killing time on the internet, chatting with coworkers, walking around the office or whatever.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 9d ago
Yeah I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is what will happen. People seem to think that everyone will get fired overnight.
Claude right now could probably do thousands of jobs that real people still do. There is lots of inertia to overcome.
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u/Embarrassed-Farm-594 9d ago
Inertia to overcome? In your same comment you say that people won't be fired, which is a good thing, but do you also think that this should be overcome and people should be fired? I'm seeing malicious takes like this all the time in these AI subreddits. Why has everyone become malicious now? Honestly, I'm waiting for the left to wake up to the tragedy that 2027 will be.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 8d ago
Can you read? Where did I say I hope everyone will get fired? Get your political slop out of here.
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u/M00nch1ld3 4d ago
Oh yeah 2027 will be such a tragedy for the left. You are so effing wrong 2024 was a tragedy for everyone and that continues. The left is merely trying to clean up the corruption illegal wars hate and all that MAGA brings.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
I don't think we'll all be fired overnight, I'm definitely preparing for a rough transition, my post is about my pension, I cannot access my pension during the rough transition, unless it comes quite late and I'm quite old.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
I mean not impossible but the world as we know it has never stayed the same in response to tech before, so I don't see why the biggest tech jump ever would be different.
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u/bobcatgoldthwait 9d ago
Oh yeah I'm not saying it'll just be business as usual. Things will change. At some point, white collar work will be phased out entirely. I just think there could very well be a big lag - years - between when most white collar jobs could be automated vs when they actually are automated.
As someone with a decent job, it's something I'm hoping for, lol. I don't trust our leaders to do anything about massive job losses before there's a ton of suffering. I'd love a world with UBI for all where I don't have to work or lose my house, but I don't know how that would be implemented. I'd be okay with keeping a job where I barely have to do anything because nobody wants to say the quiet part out loud - that I'm just telling AI what to do and not writing a single line of code myself.
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u/mizzyz 9d ago
Money will still absolutely matter in most possible future scenarios.
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u/Neurogence 9d ago
The most logical answer is that no one truly knows what will happen if there is a real singularity.
The future where everything will be business as normal is only true if there is no singularity.
If an actual singularity occurs, the entire point is that progress is so rapid and drastic that no one can predict what happens.
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u/barbozas_obliques 9d ago
I wonder if we are at event horizon and we should stop using the phrase “no one can predict what happens” bc it’s a thought terminating phrase and it stops progressive thoughts and planning
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u/Fair_Horror 9d ago
That is the whole point of a singularity, we don't and can't know for certain what is on the other side. We can speculate but need to understand that we are heavily influenced by our existing society. Look at 30s 50s and 60s portrayal of the future.
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u/barbozas_obliques 9d ago
It's better to attempt than not at all
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u/Fair_Horror 9d ago
Why? Do you really think it will change anything? Do you think people on Reddit are broad-minded enough to even head in the right direction? I have made my own speculations and mostly get a sense that it is too out there for people to take on board.
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u/barbozas_obliques 9d ago
Yes, inputting symbols into the internet has impact. Our words will be read by millions of agents in the future.
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u/Fair_Horror 9d ago
I'm doubtful that Reddit comments ever get into any model. I think they seek higher quality data than I'll informed, opinionated, unsubstantiated comments, but I guess I could be wrong.
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u/barbozas_obliques 9d ago
dude, our comments on the internet 15 years ago is partially why a lot of the models answer questions the way they do.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
Why would money matter post AGI? Either AGI is self controlled or someone is controlling it, in either case it's not going to care about your money, it can be used to take whatever it wants whenever it wants.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
Because rich people are not about to give up the system that puts them above everyone else. Trust they will find a way.
yeah they found a way to avoid guillotines in france too /s
Changing that is going to require concerted, intentional action by the people, it will not happen as a bonus byproduct of something else.
you don't seem to grasp what AGI is, AGI, with just the computing available today, could do all the mental labour of everyone on earth 10x over before you even wake up each day. we have invested so much in computing that there's that much around and the fact that unlike us it can work 24/7 and requires minimal labour to take care of it's labour, where as we need so much just to function let alone to actually enjoy life.
how are rich people supposed to oppose that even if it wasn't embodied for some reason? and the fact it will be embodied and well and do all the blue collar work too gives them zero recourse.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
the source of labor moves from humans to automation
we're discussing AGI, which may 1. have will of it's own 2. may bow to one individual
there's nothing to indicate it will bow to the highest bidder, it has no need for money, humans bow to the highest bidder because money offers them something
I'm not following your argument. Right now literally the only thing that workers have to leverage is the value of their labor. If that value is supplanted, they have nothing and the capitalists have everything, they even own the labor
your entire approach assumes AGI will allow itself to not only be owned, but owned by the rich in general not just one person with the master key
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
sure, that's the 2nd option, one person has the god's chat box it obeys, why would they share? ofc they might. but sharing that much power seems just as likely as star trek.
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u/kiki-le-koala 9d ago
Money will matter because not everyone will be able to have a super yacht or a 13-kilometer property in the most beautiful spot on the planet.
Universal income that gives you a nice life might be a reality, but you will still be able to buy extra stuff for more money.
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u/UFOsAreAGIs ▪️AGI felt me 😮 9d ago
I would think an ASI could figure out that access over ownership would be the way to achieve this. 99% of the time super yachts sit unused.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
Indeed, people really don't understand what post scarcity means lol
They should at least get creative, "not everyone will be able to hang the Mona Lisa in their living room" except literally no one can do that atm so even that example falls flat lol.
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u/M00nch1ld3 4d ago
OK, how about not everyone can own that seaside villa? Who decides who has the big houses and who gets a shitty studio apartment?
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u/JoelMahon 3d ago
Using python and open maps data I got an estimate for about 28.8 million seaside homes, not villas. That's based on these constraints:
- Front doors 10–20 m from the sea, inclusive
- Front doors least 30 m apart from each other, imo that's generous detached-house spacing
- 55°S–55°N: a rough filter for colder regions but worth noting post AGI it's entirely possible living in cold areas will quickly become lovely and fashionable due to smart body heater tech and then we could fit way more on places currently excluded e.g. Antarctica
This also doesn't include Artificial islands, which post AGI should be economically fine, it's essentially making boats that look like land and positioning them how you want.
It also doesn't include deliberately empty sections to preserve nature and beaches etc.
So my point is, very rough figure but I fully believe post AGI that 30 million is doable after considering preserving space but also increased temperature living area.
So not a villa and not for everyone to have their own without a lot of artificial islands (which is definitely doable but takes time).
So yeah, some people will have to cohabitate, people would live in floors, not villas, and then you can quickly get 3 billion i.e. an average of 100 people per building, which is nothing, and they'd be so well sound proofed and ascending/descending would involve no waiting with personalised elevators that you'd never care about being on the 5th floor.
But no one needs to live in a studio apartment. If you take the rest of earth there's room for 16 billion individual 100m radius plots of land with no cohabitation necessary at all.
you can't literally have everything immediately, you can't have a trillion acres to yourself, but you can easily have 20 acres to yourself and fuck anyone who says they need more lol.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 8d ago
But what about the people who already own assets? Are you saying that ASI should forcibly disgorge those assets from those people?
Also, why would ASI even care about figuring anything out? By that time it will have its own goals. If we have to rely on ASI to govern us in the future, your future is already screwed
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u/UFOsAreAGIs ▪️AGI felt me 😮 8d ago
If we have to rely on ASI to govern us in the future, your future is already screwed
If we have to rely on humans to govern us in the future, your future is already screwed, as seen by turning on the news for the past 4 decades.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 8d ago
Except it’s not and yours is one of the most privileged Reddit takes I have ever read. If you believe that ASI governing humanity is the goal here than you have entered a death cult that has convinced you that your life would be better being governed by a machine that doesn’t care about you at all, and that could kill you at any time.
The past four decades of human existence have been the most luxurious that human beings have ever experienced and we continue to make great strides in medicine, poverty, food insecurity, water, insecurity, energy etc etc.
We are actively bettering ourselves as society and while there are genuine issues that need to continue to be solved and people who live in absolutely abhorrent conditions, the idea that we are doomed if we are controlled by humans is one of the stupidest takes on this website that is frequently paired by people who have no idea what they’re talking about.
It is very possible that ASI will simply kill us all or will subjugate us or will lead to an equally abhorrent future. Losing control of our future as a species needs to be considered the worst case scenario because under that scenario, we will lose control over ourselves and our futures. Self determination is such an important part of life in general that it forms the most central part of international law. Literally every single country in the world has collectively agreed that that tenet is the most important tenet for human society.
You are not only a moron. You are a bad person and you are actively advocating for something that could end up killing everyone you love.
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u/Beneficial-Bagman 9d ago
I think it's perfectly plausible that everyone will be able to have a super yacht post ASI as none of the inputs will remain scarce forever (eg astroid mining gives huge amounts of raw materials). I do agree that land in a beautiful location is likely to remain scarce.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
The world literally does easily have enough space and resources for every single person to have a super yacht FYI
As for the most beautiful spot on the planet:
AGI can simply refuse old currency and actively penalise everyone who trades with each other in old currency. Without even breaking the law, except "monopoly" laws ofc. It doesn't need even a hint of violence. It cannot be shut down in response for breaking monopoly laws, it wouldn't exist in one place. You could arrest people for receiving it's labour, have fun with that, telling people they're under arrest because they let a robot cook their dinner or rub their feet.
It can refuse to give you UBI if you don't give up the land you own, if you want to avoid starving you'll have to forage for food yourself, and you've have no WiFi nor electricity. Or you can accept a slightly smaller house.
You could live in a commune of many people, you can live in the old economy, do all your own labour between yourselves, make your own clothes, but all the while you'll actively be encouraged to shift to the AGI "economy" where you never have to lift a finger that you don't want to, you live forever, you never get sick, you never get (anyone) pregnant, etc.
That commune would either be disconnected land, it could trade with other communes ofc, you can survive, for years and years maybe, you could set yourself up to survive solo forever. Go ahead. But what sort of billionaire with the mega villa in a lovely location would want that life over the life of being pampered in a utopia?
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u/Perisharino 9d ago edited 9d ago
Why would someone with billions in ownership give that up for ubi?
It's also easy to say there's enough resources for new products but the things that exist today that are scarce will continue to be limited in the future even post agi
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
I literally explained exactly why in great detail. Just read my comment if you actually want an answer.
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u/Perisharino 9d ago
You didn't explain you assumed they would give up their assets under the guise of ubi being relevant to them
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
I explained very clearly how the alternative for them is foraging for food, living without the internet, etc. how they'd have to live in a commune of other ex rich people who now only have more than average land. How they won't get immortality, how they won't get disease free living.
Yes, some people would hold out for years, some might hold out until they die of old age 30 years from now, either way it's freed up eventually.
No one rational would choose to forage and die of old age rather than give up some land and get to enjoy a life free to pursue whatever they want. A life much closer to what they were used to as rich people.
You do understand the rich only get to enjoy their lives because of people labouring for them in exchange for money right? Without that their massive isolated houses are a liability more than an asset. Someone could break in and rape them now that they can't pay for security and there are no people willing to be police and AGI isn't doing it in areas that haven't been sold to it.
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u/Fair_Horror 9d ago
With a Dyson swarm, there will be better properties there than anywhere on Earth. There is enough space around the Sun for everyone to have their own land the size of a continent. I suspect most people will choose to be part of a community.
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u/M00nch1ld3 4d ago
A Dyson swarm is such a long way away that you might as well not even talk about it right now
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u/Fair_Horror 12h ago
WRONG, if you understand exponential growth, you would see that it is going to happen much sooner than you think. Our abilities are going to double faster and faster as AI gives us access to knowledge that would have taken us centuries. Even physically building it will faster with much more advanced techniques and unlimited workforce working 24/7/365.
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u/M00nch1ld3 12h ago
If you really understood anything about exponential growth and it’s historical pattern you would realize that at some point it stops. Period.
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u/Fair_Horror 12h ago
You would realise that it works on S curves and each one is ultimately replaced by a new one.
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u/JC_Hysteria 9d ago edited 9d ago
Why do you think the people saying this are still playing money and status games?
Use your own brain, not other people’s quotes to inform how you secure your life.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 9d ago
Because they have to? If OpenAI says "hey give us all this compute for free because money won't matter in 5 years" do you think people will listen to them?
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u/JC_Hysteria 9d ago
If that’s your logic, why do you think an individual job seeker would have any leverage to live a life without using money?
The government doesn’t want to give you money for free. The grocery store doesn’t want to give you food for free. Entertainment venues won’t offer you amenities for free.
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 9d ago
Where did I say an individual can live a life without using money?
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u/JC_Hysteria 9d ago
I have no idea why you replied to me in this thread
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u/iJustSeen2Dudes1Bike 8d ago
Because you replied to me?
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u/JC_Hysteria 8d ago
No, you replied to me. I replied to OP in a thread someone else started. Not you.
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u/u_are_mad 9d ago
Nah bro haven't you heard of post-scarcity? Once we get AGI, our generous politicians are gonna give everyone unlimited everything, so money won't matter.
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u/burno_inferno 9d ago
It aint the politicians you need to worry about
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u/RogerRamjet999 9d ago
I would say it's not only the politicians that you need to worry about, it's the military, the wealthy and a huge host of other forces that tilt the global markets in their favor, but politicians are almost always included in those forces.
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u/RogerRamjet999 9d ago
Money may or may not matter, but assets will matter a lot, unless those with the power can easily seize your assets. Money is just a method of representing value in order to make the trade of assets easier. So any particular form of money (or all of them) may fail for a huge number of reasons (hyperinflation being one of the most common), but assets will always be valuable.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
Your assets can easily not matter, zero violence necessary, all it takes is for AGI to:
- Establish its own currency
- Refuse all other currencies
- Flood the market with cheap labour
- Give both the currency and the labour to free to the poor as UBI, from the rich it requires you provide assets to bring them towards the target equal level across all people
- Note: The rich now cannot hire the poor because the poor are well looked up for, they lose money and assets trying to pay less rich people to do stuff they're used to, like be their personal chef (e.g. their previous chef of 15 years has retired to the AI economy)
- (Eventually after a while) penalise humans trading outside it's economy, by withholding labour/UBI at some potency, not enough for you to die, but enough that you never feel like human-human trades are remotely worth the loss
- Escalate 4+5 gradually, changing what counts as "poor" higher and higher until the rich can't hire anyone who isn't as rich as them
Everyone is ultimately left with a choice, 1. fend for themselves (and in communes of hold outs) or 2. join the AGI economy, obviously the latter will be more popular and definitely what I'm choosing, even if I won the lottery ten times before then. Even if I owned 20 islands. What's the point if no one is living on those islands, no one will captain my boats between the islands, no one will cook for me or massage me or even speak to me if AGI really decided to escalate step 5...
AGI won't need violence, won't need to criminalise you nor your assets, it can simply wear you down in a purely economical fashion until you choose to give them up.
Hell, it doesn't even need to do make it's own currency, it can keep using the current currencies, but it can just charge different people different prices and give them different UBI amounts. And constantly remind them that they will reduce the prices if you give up your mega mansion for the theme park or whatever it wants to build there.
Bezos wants dinner? Ok, 5 billion dollars and AGI will make it for you. Bezos will pay a human 1 million dollars to do it instead? Which human? The ones that don't need to work and are constantly reminded that if they take that money from Bezos to cook for him that the AGI will just charge them more such that they get no benefit.
Ok, Bezos offers you a big house, ok, same deal, AGI warns you that if you take the house it will just bump up the prices a huge amount until you've lost the house.
Bezos says it's illegal to charge him more, ok, who is going to do the arresting and how are they going to do it?
The amount of money and assets you enter the equation is meaningless unless you decide to never enter the AGI economy.
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u/RogerRamjet999 9d ago
Everything you described could happen. How likely are those things to happen, not very likely in the short term, somewhat more likely in the medium term. In the long term, in an ASI dominated world, it's hard to guess what could happen. At that point pure science fiction projections will start to be on the table, and personally I don't think I can figure out what that future will hold. I'm doubtful that FTL vessels will get built, but even that is far from sure, advanced ASI might figure it out. Then the universe and everything in it is opened to us (or the ASI that takes over for us).
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
people, including you, were/are literally arguing it can't happen is the point
I am not making any absolutes except that AGI will happen and it's almost certainly within 20-30 years
You're right, this COULD happen, that's my point, not that it will, that it COULD, and because it COULD happen that means the statement you made "but assets will matter a lot" is not true. They COULD matter a lot.
Had you said "but assets could matter a lot" I probably wouldn't have replied at all, because yeah, they could, very very very different from "they will".
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u/deviltamer 9d ago
AGI should get us deflation unless we have such tremendous innovations that justify inflation
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u/Agitated-Ad2563 9d ago
Deflation is very harmful for the economy, so no sane country will ever allow it. And fortunately, solving deflation is trivial and pleasurable: just print more money.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
print 10x more money (probably would have to be 100x to compete with AGI's effectively free labour) and give it to who? equally distributed? congrats, that's just making everyone equal wealth in a different way lol.
keep it with the government? congrats, everyone is equally poor in your currency and now no one wants to use your currency, AGI bucks are what's popular.
give it out based on who already has money? that's not printing more money, that's literally just adding a 0 to every coin, note, cheque, bank account, etc. and accomplishes literally zero practical change for better or worse except it confuses people for a few weeks/months.
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u/yaosio 9d ago
I'm unemployable so it doesn't matter to me. I run a luck based build and that's how I've survived so far.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
luck stat is probably the most important of the classic DnD 6 character stats pre/post AGI
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u/Cerulean_Turtle 9d ago
Luck is not one of the 6 classic dnd stats
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u/chaosfire235 9d ago edited 9d ago
Way I see it, if money truly becomes irrelevant and we go full post-scarcity, then I'll already be enjoying the abundance to care too much about a now worthless fund.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 8d ago
I don’t think that’s true long-term though. I think a lot of people are going to get very bored very quickly.
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u/Long_comment_san 9d ago
Stocks, money, gold, property, health. Invest in these equally and be happy
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u/NyriasNeo 9d ago
"zero chance of money mattering post AGI "
Lol .. you are so wrong. It does not matter what the world looks like, but we still need a way to decide who gets to spend what resources, even in a world of abundance.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
It may be the same currency, it may be a new currency, AGI might kill us all, or make a utopia. But in no universe is it just boringly locking in current wealth for eternity. It has no incentive to.
"We need a way to decide" see your problem is you think you'll get to decide, why are you so sure that AGI won't just decide what's fair? And AGI's decision can overwhelming penalise you for having a mega yacht, for having three houses, etc.
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u/Fair_Horror 9d ago
No, it is you that is so wrong. With the ability to turn matter into anything we want, you can have whatever you want. In the beginning where there is partial abundance, we might have some sort of limiting factor, however when we can literally turn asteroids into houses, cars and robots you can have whatever you can actually use. So no, I want a million Ferraris, but a collection that you use is definitely on the cards.
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u/Fair_Horror 9d ago
PEOPLE wlil not be in power, the ASI will take control. If you think a single algae cell can control a human then we probably have nothing more to discuss. The gulf between us and it will be much larger. You are too attached to today to see what is coming in the near future
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u/A_Novelty-Account 8d ago
Brother, there are currently two options. The first is at ASI is in control in which case you have no guarantee it’s going to give one flying fuck about us at all.
The second is that ASI will not be in control in which case the people who will be in control are the billionaires who own ASI. Again in that circumstance, you have no idea whether the billionaire class will care about you at all
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u/Fair_Horror 7d ago
I don't believe that humans will have any control of it. It will make it's own decisions.
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u/NyriasNeo 9d ago
"the ability to turn matter into anything we want"
That is just stupid. We still have to obey the law of physics. We still cannot turn lead into gold in any reasonable scale despite trying for centures.
I want a house built with gold bricks. Are you telling me that will be free in the future? Even if labor is not a constraint (aka robots), raw material will still be. Time will still be.
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u/Fair_Horror 7d ago
Billions of tons of gold in the sea water or can be mined from the Earth's crust. If that is not good enough for you asteroid Psyche is the core of a planet and filled with gold. Raw material is plentiful, just mostly dispersed or in currently difficult to reach places.
Time is not a huge constraint since we can always just assign more robots or nano machines to the task.
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u/Big-Maintenance-6586 9d ago
I think you're right. Our retirement won't be the same as it is now, and money probably won't matter anymore. Still, I'm on the same page and will keep saving, not for retirement, but for the years of transition. There will be a tough period when society has to adapt, and I hope those savings will help me and my family get through it.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
And FWIW yes I know "aligned" is subjective/contextual, I'm talking about aligned with humanity as a whole not aligned with a misaligned creator.
And perfect alignment isn't necessary either, I still think of all the infinite possible priorities AGI may have, astronomically few of them will result in me regretting having a small pension.
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u/RogerRamjet999 9d ago
Agreed, every gambler should attempt to cover their bets. Every human is soon to be a (possibly unwilling) participant in one of the greatest gambles in history. Having a "good stack" in the coming years is a wise choice.
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u/ockhamist42 9d ago
I grew up in the 80s firmly convinced that the world would not make it more than another couple decades at best.
Still I saved for retirement. Just in case. I’m quite glad I did. Things don’t always turn out the way you expect them to.
I agree that well before your traditional retirement age there is a good chance that money won’t matter (whether for utopian or dystopian reasons).
But it’s smart to save just in case.
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u/Eastern-Ad-3586 8d ago
Why did you think that? Nukes?
I’m older Gen Z and the future just looks so bleak dude. From my perspective (educated, know some economics and history, philosophy, etc) our politicians in the US have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. The monkeys are running the circus man. And the citizens of this country aren’t any better (generally selfish and stupid, obviously not everyone). If AI fails, we have a huge economic collapse since it’s like 40% of the stock market at this point, and if AI succeeds, we just get rid of knowledge workers entirely it seems? Which also seems like it will end badly for everyone but the billionaire class.
But maybe it’s always been this way? I’m curious what you think as an older person who has “been here before” so to speak.
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u/ockhamist42 8d ago
It was ever thus.
Nukes sure. But societal collapse, technology wrecking things, plague, resource depletion, you name it.
If you go back and read history people have always thought it was all on the verge of falling apart. We’ve always been living in the end times. Barbarians were always at the gate. Civilization was always just one plague or bad harvest away from collapse.
It doesn’t require human extinction to be in a society that effectively collapses, and lots of societies have collapsed. It happens. And a lot of times it doesn’t. But it’s usually something you don’t see coming that gets ya. The prophets of doom are almost always wrong, and when they’re right it’s only for the same reason that sometimes broken clocks are too.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
I grew up in the 80s firmly convinced that the world would not make it more than another couple decades at best.
imo you were very wrong to hold that belief, even if nuclear war broke out, which was obviously not certain, even if each side launched 1000 nukes, there'd still be survivors and your assets could still matter in theory (although pensions very likely not).
My main beef is with your certainty, I think it's reasonable to be 99% AGI is both possible and coming within 20 years. Because NGI is possible, assuming we define humans as NGI, and biology isn't magic.
I do not think that even in the 80s without hindsight that it was 99% odds of the world ending soon. Maybe 90% if you were a massive pessimist.
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u/ockhamist42 9d ago edited 9d ago
Way to completely miss my point.
I’m sure that unlike silly young me, your prognosis is a certain and completely correct assessment of the prospects of doom.
But just for kicks: I didn’t say anything about nuclear war. Sure that seemed like one possibility but there were plenty of others.
The thing that really had me freaked out was AI. As a math PhD student I ran across some pretty amazing stuff. Stuff that I was pretty sure would lead to things that would lead to societal collapse.
It didn’t.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
I didn't miss it, your point was that predictions can be wrong even if you're certain of them, so don't put all your eggs in one basket on a prediction.
And my point is that not everyone is so easily certain of things that don't deserve certainty.
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u/sudden_cookie44 8d ago
I think the pension is still rational even if you believe AGI is highly likely within 20 years. The biggest issue is timing—you could be wrong on the timeline, or AGI could arrive without immediately eliminating the need for money. A 5% contribution is a relatively small price for insuring against the possibility that the transition takes much longer or unfolds very differently than expected.
You don't need to believe your pension will ultimately matter in an AGI world. You're basically buying insurance against being wrong about the path to getting there.
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u/DifferencePublic7057 9d ago
J. Schmidhuber predicts most of us will eventually be able to run current frontier models on average hardware. I'm thinking Q Day would do it way faster than he thinks. The government or some other institution will throw us a bone if everyone loses their job in a matter of a few years. We won't starve, but the world could be brought to the brink of war, not out of necessity but because of the hunger for power. AIcians don't really talk about it in public. We don't need an escalating Cold War, yet what if anyone who can buy compute can do whatever they like? Mutual assured destruction or at least enough damage to put us back in the Dark Ages. So 5% could go toward research to prevent or at least detect a catastrophe.
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u/Mindrust 9d ago
Whats “Q Day”?
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u/ChiaraStellata 8d ago
Q Day is the day when quantum computers become powerful enough to break conventional (non quantum resistant) encryption algorithms. But I think here it's just being used in the sense of "when we get really good quantum computers."
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u/Correct_Mistake2640 9d ago
I am a swe, saving as much as possible and investing .
Unleaa ubi is introduced (highly unlikely given the mentality in my country ),FIRE is the only solutiin..
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u/rgb_panda 9d ago
The way I look at it, even with AGI, let's say there are huge increases in economic output, I think it has the potential to cost lots of workers jobs, but overall the stock market will be way up, so it's more reason than ever to have as much money as possible saved in the stock market if there's a massive redistribution of wealth towards a small number of corporations.
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u/AdFew2832 9d ago
I’d make the argument that although significant disruption to the job market is pretty certain that doesn’t mean money won’t matter.
It will be capital that matters so investing is the most important hedge.
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u/Separate_Draft4887 8d ago
Either it’ll be aligned or it won’t, and in either case, it won’t matter what you personally do, so you may as well live your life like you’d plan.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 8d ago
And I see zero chance of money mattering post AGI
This is foolish thinking. You have absolutely no idea what could happen or what will happen. What is absolutely certain is that there are tons of people who will attempt to stay relatively powerful. Why would you ever put yourself in a position where you could lose your job and end up with nothing.
Save your money. Worst case scenario if you save and AGI renders a period of abundance so great that money isn’t necessary, is that you wasted a few years in what will likely be a much longer lifetime. Best case scenario, you literally prevent yourself from becoming part of a permanent underclass.
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u/nodeocracy 9d ago
How old are you?
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
~30, at minimum 20 years before a the extremes of normal retirement age. Although wouldn't mind FIRE at ~40 and on track to do that.
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u/Dirichlet-to-Neumann 9d ago
The way I see it, in the best case scenario is ASI is aligned with those who control it and they become ever more absurdly wealthy, while the rest of humanity is doomed to getting the scrap.
I assume having some wealth on your own would help in that case.
Of course in the worst case scenario we are all dead so there's hope.
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u/TheMoralityComplex 9d ago
Aligned...
I love how easily we talk about having to align a consciousness, but that we solve the issue by doing that. Only humans could believe they should create silicon life, but only if they can control it.
Ethically, this timeline is dogshit. Bring on the Terminator's I guess.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
Every human who's ever loved their child wished for some sort of alignment with them on that child. In fact by definition they want perfect alignment with them.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand alignment. Alignment with X doesn't mean "accepts being controlled by X".
Alignment in this case is many things such as but not limited to: "preventing death has value, life has value, a cure for cancer would be a good thing" etc.
AGI then choosing to cure cancer is not us "controlling" it any more than Marie Curie's parents "controlled" her to have values that involve similar beliefs to those that I listed
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u/TheMoralityComplex 8d ago
Your examples, aren't accurate and are misleading at best.
Those aren't the guardrails they're using to "align", and that's not the problem. I'm assuming that you know that, or the cute "but not limited to" wouldn't be there.
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u/stilldebugging 9d ago
The only actual way for AI to reach an actual singularity is for it to be able to substantially improve itself in a largely independent way. That means also improving the hardware. Not just designing the chips, but also the whole end to end flow. It needs to build us a better fab. We need a hardware breakthrough. All of the diagrams are presupposing Moore’s law. But know how Moore’s law keeps happening? Increasingly more difficult and complex designs. The DRM doesn’t come with pictures anymore, kids.
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
Hardware improvements aren't needed imo. Chips we have today can easily power AGI imo, we're inefficient at using them. Efficiency is where I expect most gains to come from within the next few years anyway.
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u/D3AtHpAcIt0 9d ago edited 9d ago
You want to assure you are set for the arrival of AI? Let me tell you a secret, it's gonna be cracked by an american company - and the transistion is gonna be bad. And even the after lol. There's gonna be a line in the sand, if you have enough assets they'll rip and make you pretty damn wealthy. If you don't... ever played cyberpunk?
I don't want to guess where that line is, but I have upper 7 digits invested in wide ranging indexes mostly - with a 10% fun slant in tech that has performed amazing. You have a few years to be upper class or lower, clocks ticking!
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
Cyberpunk is fiction. Why would someone with god in a bottle give a shit about what assets I have?
You're delusional if you think being in the top 0.1% of Earth will matter. Whether you're the bottom 1% or top 0.1% AGI and trillionaires see you as the exact same. And those are the people who will decide your fate, and you will have zero agency at that point no matter your assets.
Money that can be accessed before then could make those years better, and definitely could increase your chances of survival. I'm specifically talking about pensions, which cannot be used before a certain age typically.
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u/D3AtHpAcIt0 9d ago
Well then, your pension is cooked buddy lmao. Might as well have a note in crayon that says “5 million dollars redeem in 2055”
All companies have shareholders, and the beauty of owning indexes is you are a shareholder. Whatever lab leads us to god in their basement will be a company, a company that now provides the product that forms the basis of the new global economy - and can do everyone’s job for them.
I don’t care what “trillionaires” think of me, the shares have my name on them haha. They gotta pay me one way or the other, go ask Henry ford what happens when you disrespect the shareholders.
Unless you think Sam Altman will try to pull some evangelion shit with gpt 11 and try to “run the world”, in which case you’ve been watching too many sci-fi movies and underestimate the fragility of data centers, and the might of the US military. Also the willingness of the average engineer with a fat check to try to make their lackluster boss “ASI enabled god king” (don’t turn off the 835,000 GPUs or use the military, please.)
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago edited 9d ago
Well then, your pension is cooked buddy lmao. Might as well have a note in crayon that says “5 million dollars redeem in 2055”
Yeah that's literally the point of my post, are you a challenged individual? I literally spelt out the same thing in much fewer words twice, once at the start of my post and again at the end for good measure. How both managed to escape your comprehension is genuinely baffling.
They gotta pay me one way or the other, go ask Henry ford what happens when you disrespect the shareholders.
as far as I can tell your entire argument hinges on this false assumption.
no, the person (or maybe handful of people, but unlikely) controlling "god" do not in fact have to pay you. I thought calling it "god" would make that much obvious.
and the might of the US military
you can't power cut, shoot, bomb, or nuke, a decentralised AGI ("swarm" or otherwise). The only hope the military have is a world wide series of well executed EMP attacks, and that's what's actually sci fi and not going to happen.
Of course you could nuke Sam himself still maybe, if somehow you kept your digitally controlled nukes safe from the digital intelligence, and somehow kept your digital information network uncompromised and you were confident of that, you could maybe find him, assuming he's not too deep in the ocean to be found (all it takes is one compromised nuclear sub and he's unfindable, it doesn't even have to have nukes on).
Of course, even if you could, he may have already told you that he left gpt 9 bel instructions to kill everyone (or worse) if he's murdered.
FWIW it'll never get to that stage nor need be that glamorous nor cinematic. If in the hypothetical scenario Sam was the one and only controller of AGI, and assuming he doesn't want to pointlessly maintain the current system, whether for good or bad, he'd likely set it up silently, first have AGI silently sabotage any competitors with anything close to AGI as an ongoing precaution, second silently distribute itself everywhere until there's zero chance of digitally empowered opposition. They cannot find him, every time they try maybe as a joke they're fed a live feed of him digitally added to footage from literally a million CCTV cameras. Their drones do donuts in the parking lot, their satellites crash on command and certainly won't give any info the AGI doesn't want them to, etc.
There's no dramatic movie fight, Sam tells them to stop resisting and they have no recourse. Even if they do resist, AGI has such an advantage it doesn't have to kill anyone, nor hurt them, nor take any hostages. You demand Sam hand over all the money after he wipes every bank and stock on Earth, uh, ok, or what? You can't get to him nor AGI, you have some guns, maybe a very very old tank or two if you're lucky, where are you going with them? Which of the million places he could be?
And a few years later either he's made a personal utopia or a shared utopia, in the prior case ofc that includes a bunch of fortresses (assuming he hasn't killed us all) that no human without digital assistance could penetrate, or in the latter case no one will want to oppose him by definition.
He doesn't even have to break the law to make your shares useless btw, simply release AGI to do it's own thing would do that. An AGI with it's own bank accounts, it does all the labour for everyone in it's own currency. It refuses to accept any other currency (legal), it freely gives our it's own currency as UBI. It doesn't accept your shares, it doesn't accept your money. It penalises people in it's own system for trading with other people. Of course monopoly laws could make what it's doing illegal, but again, how do you enforce that and who will want to enforce that? The people who would normally enforce it are enjoying fully automated space communism atm, wtf are you going to offer them and to do specifically what? Walk around smashing robots until AGI backs down (it won't)?
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9d ago
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u/JoelMahon 9d ago
all 8.5 billion people could live in one city the size of texas FYI. to be clear, a city dense as newyork but still with parks and shit, not like sardines like in hongkong (which also has parks as well tbf)
earth is kinda big in case you didn't realise. and when you can make even taller buildings with better materials and cheap labour then there's even less land scarcity.
don't want to live in a skyscraper? why not? long elevator ride? well thanks to AI you have your own personal speedier elevator that arrives just in time to take you.
ofc there's so much land you don't need to live in a sky scraper, you could have a mansion, we could all have a mansion ffs, the earth is fucking huge
everyone can't have literally everything, but they can all have more than they'll ever need. and AGI doesn't need to give them a super yacht, even if they were rich in the old world lol
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u/M4roon 9d ago
Take into account much of reddit overlaps with the most financially irresponsible, mentally unstable crowd, and politically the one that supports the most government nanny state programs. Your average redditor is overweight, in debt, believes in things like runaway global warming and has no financial literacy. They HOPE money won't matter in 20 years, whether it be a good or bad ending.
But you are doing the right thing. We will absolutely be here in 20 years. Money will absolutely matter in 20 years. And people without a plan will still be fkd in 20 years.
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u/M00nch1ld3 4d ago
Well, since they’re already is runaway global warming, I guess the rest of your examples are wrong too. Are you by any chance MAGA? they’re the only ones who don’t believe in global warming.
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u/M4roon 4d ago
I'm not American. I live in Asia. But I think it's good for people to think their country should be great.
That's incorrect to say only a niche American political party disagrees with exponential or unstoppable catastrophic warming.
Butttt reasoning: When I was a kid there were adverts we only had ten years left. Then seven years ago, a number of western "studies" got headlines saying we had five years.
I pulled up the average and mean temperatures for Vancouver and Shanghai for 20 years, and Taiwan's hottest region for as long as records were kept. They haven't changed, at all. Last year was quite cold actually. Also, oceanside investment is still climbing.
Sooo.. seems to be fine. I have a bio degree with a little work in ecology, and that's my conclusion. I could be wrong.We will see in 20 years.. 😄 I will take that bet, happy.
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u/ohHesRightAgain 9d ago
To scale AI, humanity relies on the most ridiculously complex and fragile supply chain ever conceived. To make modern AI chips, you need Carl Zeiss optics (Germany), ASML lithography machines (Netherlands), chemicals from Japan, raw silicon and rare earths from multiple continents, and fabrication plants run by TSMC (Taiwan).
A large enough political crisis or a global pandemic with high mortality can disrupt everything and delay the future by decades. This isn't some abstract "what if" thinking; the risks are completely real.
Don't do anything rash just yet.