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> what economics model will work without workers?

Without labour? None. Without human workers? All of them. That said, everything we label the humanities has plenty of runway apart from automation.



Capitalism without human workers? How?


> Capitalism without human workers?

Humans only own and consume while robots (functionally, the capital of this economy) provide the labour. Everyone is a founder, but instead of co-founders and employees, you just command a team of AIs and robots. You're still trying to innovate and provide a product, as are others to you. But nobody is selling labour per se.


Everyone is a founder

Surely you mean the top 1%, who have the capital to invest into robots?


> Surely you mean the top 1%, who have the capital to invest into robots?

Whomever we empower. The people left out of the loop would die, suffer in quiet subsistence or be folded into the society. The first two are the "people are pests" solution. You see it in resource-rich countries where the population isn't part of the economic machinery.

The last is precedented; see how ancient Sparta dealt its public allotments of land and slaves. Which way various societies go will depend, in part, on decisions we take today. (Should such a future come to pass, which, again, is predicated on massive leaps in robotics and AI.)


We'll see. Don't forget that AI + robots is a dangerous combination on its own, in more than one way.


> We'll see. Don't forget that AI + robots is a dangerous combination

Also, a totally fictional one.


All possible futures are fictional until they happen.

That said, as limited as AI and robotics are today, they are nevertheless already sufficient to be extremely dangerous.


Leaving aside the convenient assumption that AI will take every job except CEO…this sounds insanely competitive and most people don’t have it in them to do this.


> the convenient assumption that AI will take every job except CEO

One, I don't assume this will happen. I was responding to the hypothetical of an AGI and economic model without workers. Two, I outright assume AI will take the job of CEO. Otherwise, we're still selling labour. What we can provide AI, novelly, is our preferences. In that hypothetical world, most people would presumably let their AI(s) manage their capital. The same way many aristocrats couldn't tell you anything about how their estates generated income.


And also the value judgement shifts more and more from physicality to how much you upset communities, similar to how BS modern art works. We'd be paying not cash for a banana but will be paying in contexts for contexts.


I think most people will just stop working.

Everything will become dirt cheap.

People will play with robots for things like space travel, habitat restoration etc, but it will be more like a passion job.

There will be no more self important rich founders.


AGI will claim the novelty of ‘innovation’ from humans too


> AGI will claim the novelty of ‘innovation’ from humans too

One, sure, we can expand the hypothetical envelope to infinity. That wasn't the question.

Two, I'm not sure. Human preferences need not be rational. Given the choice, many would choose the flawed work of a human versus the synthesized product of an AGI.

Three, if we have an AGI that can do everything humans can do we've rendered the question irrelevant. There is no "economy" anymore because everything can be centrally measured, produced and dispatched. By the AGI. (Or it can destroy us.) Either way, we return to production and consumption of non-AI work products being purely voluntary.




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