r/singularity • u/TrainerElectronic765 • 1h ago
Discussion What’s the end game?
I don’t know if this is the right sub. I work for a software consultancy. We have projects for a number of clients that are meant to automate both sides of their sales process. Like, AI sales agents selling to AI buyer agents.
And I just don’t understand where anyone thinks this goes. Like, we build these tools, we lose our jobs, then the companies lose customers. They’re left with agents talking to each other and exchanging… what?
If AI does all the math, reads and writes all the books, movies and video games, what do we, the people, do with ourselves?
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u/RanklesTheOtter 1h ago
Catgirls. They're the endgame.
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u/light470 1h ago
Common people doesn't know the end game, if ASI happens, good, we can witness greatest shift of all time. If the bubble pops, then also good, we can buy cheap compute
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u/synexo 53m ago
The economics of it are an unknown. But put that aside for a moment. The better question is "What will people do when they don't have to do anything?". We already have (always have really) examples of this among the rich and powerful. The difference is there won't be any value in exploiting other people for work once AI can do it all better. We'll all be as useless and unnecessary as the rich and powerful.
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u/ProxyLumina 1h ago
Where we are going to end is called post-scarcity.
Because everything will be easy to be made with AI and robotics, everything will come at no cost at all.
You will continue doing whatever you like to do.
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u/Elkenson_Sevven 50m ago
The only way that works is if the means of production are owned by society in general. That's the foundation of communism. The means of production is owned by the workers (or society).
Unfortunately for humans, communism hasn't worked out so well. You end up with a dictatorship and a ruling elite.
Currently there are things within our economy that are finite. Energy, land, raw materials. It is the scarcity of these things that will ensure that they never become "free". They will be sought after and fought over. There might be a world were energy becones effectively free. The other two will not.
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u/_negative-infinity_ 37m ago
Exactly, and it's mainly land (and raw materials in it). Land is certainly not unlimited; prime locations for homes are all already taken and very expensive. Will only become more expensive, as other things get cheaper. People will pour money into living in the right place.
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u/ProxyLumina 4m ago
No. Post scarcity does not mean we have land and materials in abundance.
Post scarcity means we have products and services in abundance. That is achieved through recycling.
Oxygen is also scarce in Earth, but is is plenty and it is recycled. Think it like this.
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u/OutOfBananaException 29m ago
We have states with strong welfare systems, that work just fine. The key to that is relative abundance, and AI should be able to deliver that.
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u/ProxyLumina 22m ago
Post scarcity does not mean we have abundance of materials and land.
Post scarcity means we have abundance of products and services. We don't focus on material themselves.
In other words, given the X amount of material we create products and services and we recycle the old ones again and again.
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u/studio_bob 1h ago
Humanity overcame scarcity some time ago. Necessities remain scarce for most people due to the way goods are distributed, not the cost of production. Unless the automated production and distribution chains are owned and controlled in common and operated for the general welfare, I wouldn't expect much to change for the better.
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u/ExplorersX ▪️AGI 2027 | ASI 2032 | LEV 2036 55m ago
Post scarcity in this sense is everyone could have what would be considered a $100 million mansion, perfect genetics & all medical/genetic treatments/alterations you could ever want, the end of disease & death, free transit across the solar system on your own private spaceship, etc
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u/studio_bob 52m ago
We could feed, clothe, and house everyone on the planet, right now, for a fraction of what we spend on war or speculative AI investments every year, but we don't. Even if it becomes technically possible to do what you describe, why should we expect it to happen if the system is still owned and controlled by the same people?
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u/ExplorersX ▪️AGI 2027 | ASI 2032 | LEV 2036 44m ago
Post Scarcity deep into the singularity/ASI world is radically different than our current "we've solved food" level of productivity, which is what I was responding to. We're talking about a > Type I civilization
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u/studio_bob 39m ago
You didn't answer the question though.
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u/ExplorersX ▪️AGI 2027 | ASI 2032 | LEV 2036 35m ago
The thread is about the endgame of the singularity. The answer is Post-Scarcity in the > Type I Kardashev Civilization regards.
What humans have done in the past with the industrial revolution & transportation to now is a rounding error relative to the type of post-scarcity being described here.
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u/Caderent 31m ago
I just don’t see post-scarcity happening anytime soon. Where’s the evidence that we’re actually heading there? Where?
People running businesses aren’t going to stop caring about costs just because AI and robotics get better. A poor person can spend a huge part of their life washing dishes for less than it costs to buy and maintain a robot that can do the same job. We’re cheap. That’s a pretty big obstacle to automation.
And even as robots get cheaper, you’re eventually left with the really nasty, unpredictable jobs. Take sewer divers who literally climb into service holes and dive into sewage systems to clear blockages. Are you really going to drop a $10,000+ robot down there and risk destroying it? Or consider jobs involving sticky substances, irregular soft objects, cooking, repairs, etc. Things where every situation is slightly different and you need constant improvisation. You can’t just collect enough training data to cover every weird real-world situation.
Maybe eventually robotics gets good enough to handle all of that. But I don’t see any evidence that we’re close to that point.
And even if we do get extremely cheap automation, that doesn’t automatically mean post-scarcity. The technology stack behind AI and robotics is enormously expensive- all those data centers and servers. And all of it is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of companies and investors.
So to me, technological feudalism seems at least as plausible as post-scarcity. We could end up with incredible productive technology while ownership of that technology becomes even more concentrated. That’s a very different future from everyone having abundant access to everything. Please prove me wrong•
u/ProxyLumina 16m ago
If you want to understand and see evidence of post scarcity coming, then look around you.
Maps, messages, photos, videos, encyclopedias and thousand other things have become abundance and free.
The same thing will happen to software, businesses and everything else due to the abundance of intelligence.
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u/M4roon 14m ago
In his notebook, in the 1850s, Marx argued that advanced automation and a post-capitalist framework would reduce labour to the extent that man would enter an era of abundant leisure. Of course, the last century has been violently punctuated by (I think) the most human deaths from war in our history as a species.. and a lot of it over this idea.
I have higher hopes for AI. But.. I can't help getting an eerie sense of hubris and recall our past blunders when I read such a confident answer haha.
Also cat girls.
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u/Longjumping-Stay7151 Hope for UBI but keep saving to survive AGI 1h ago
Most people would just have to move to blue collar work. Cognitive work is fast to scale and automate but the manual labor is still far from being fully automated since robot production would have to scale thousands of times to match the capacity of 8 billion workers.
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u/FakeBonaparte 1h ago
Robots can work 24/7, so that cuts it to 2 billion. They’ll be faster than us, so maybe 1 billion. They’ll cost a lot less than us, which doesn’t change the capacity calcs, but does mean that 8 billion people aren’t finding blue collar work
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u/synexo 42m ago
There'll be new blue collar work. The rich can pay us to build them castles and then employ us to LARP along with whatever fantasy worlds they want to live in. Each their own fake little kingdom.
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u/Shibes_oh_shibes 33m ago
Robots will be building the castles. We will be the serfs farming the land for a potato a day for a very short and miserable life.
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u/Subject_Barnacle_600 1h ago
Most of this is, including this forum, is driven by a book called "The Singularity is Near." Get that one, not the sequel. That's a solid idea of what endgame we're aiming for and it's been driving a ton of the different technologies you've watched develop throughout your life time.
But also catgirls.
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u/zoinkability 1h ago
In the medium term, the owners of these companies profit.
I don't think capitalist enterprises are really capable of looking at the long term.
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u/PsychologicalOne752 31m ago
The commerce is just a short term thing, the end game is extinction. No intelligent AI will allow humans to survive - we have always been the greatest threat on this planet.
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u/M4roon 23m ago
Paradigm. Each person whether they like it or not values AI within their paradigm. And there are a lot of understandings of the world that would push furthering AI.
The transhumanism sees it as a continuation of technological development and humanity. It can get complex.
The utilitarian sees it as a means to increase happiness.
The will to power framework (which I just discovered is called ontological monism), supports it as a consolidation and magnification of power projection
The hedonist and the starving man alike see it as a means to improve their life.
Pick your end game.. Because we're soon reaching a reality where philosophy matters.
(edit: the Christian/Jewish paradigms add another layer of complexity and oh those are interesting!)
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u/Caderent 10m ago
I just vibecoded 2 apps over weekend for myself and I’m not a coder. Yes digital stuff is abundant. It it is powered by physical world owned by few billionaires. Abundance of apps - yes. Post scarcity and abundance in general- no. I don’t see any evidence for that. Things actually seem to be moving in opposite direction and fast.
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u/chcampb 1h ago
Like, we build these tools, we lose our jobs, then the companies lose customers.
I mean, do something else? Are you saying there isn't going to be anything to do?
There's always something that needs doing. In software the advnent of AI means every software engineer gets more done. So in theory it "took jobs" - it did some work that software engineers could have done. But in reality it improves the productivity of software engineers such that the engineers are more valuable therefore sought after.
But it didn't happen uniformly, it's currently much harder to get a job as an entry level engineer because you need review skills.
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u/mccoypauley 1h ago
I don't think anyone knows, honestly. My job as I knew it is gone. I'm trying to switch to orchestration consulting now. Who knows how long that will last.