Sterrs's Shortform
post by Sterrs (sterrs) · 2025-02-12T23:06:48.323Z · LW · GW · 10 commentsContents
10 comments
10 comments
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comment by Sterrs (sterrs) · 2025-02-12T23:06:48.319Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Post-scarcity does not exist. The more resources we have, the more we will demand, and no doubt AGI will create demand by existing.
The idea that having more than enough resources to go around means a world where poverty is eliminated is instantly falsifiable by the world we live in.
We know that people in developed countries suffer horribly in relative poverty, and I have no reason not to expect that further improvements to AI will vastly increase wealth inequality.
Replies from: Archimedes, george-ingebretsen, Dagon, Kaj_Sotala, sharmake-farah↑ comment by Archimedes · 2025-02-13T01:55:54.903Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Post-scarcity is conceivable if AI enables sufficiently better governance in addition to extra resources. It may not be likely to happen but it seems at least plausible.
↑ comment by George Ingebretsen (george-ingebretsen) · 2025-02-13T00:04:34.263Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Seems like a pretty similar thesis to this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty [LW · GW]
Replies from: sharmake-farah↑ comment by Noosphere89 (sharmake-farah) · 2025-02-13T00:25:45.053Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I actually sort of disagree with that story, if only because I think we will eventually be able to provide for a lot of people's needs by default.
It's what people want to have is where the post-scarcity dream breaks down (barring changes to the laws of physics):
In essence, I roughly agree with this claim from the post:
Some of my friends reply, "What do you mean, poverty is still around? 'Poor' people today, in Western countries, have a lot to legitimately be miserable about, don't get me wrong; but they also have amounts of clothing and fabric that only rich merchants could afford a thousand years ago; they often own more than one pair of shoes; why, they even have cellphones, as not even an emperor of the olden days could have had at any price. They're relatively poor, sure, and they have a lot of things to be legitimately sad about. But in what sense is almost-anyone in a high-tech country 'poor' by the standards of a thousand years earlier? Maybe UBI works the same way; maybe some people are still comparing themselves to the Joneses, and consider themselves relatively poverty-stricken, and in fact have many things to be sad about; but their actual lives are much wealthier and better, such that poor people today would hardly recognize them. UBI is still worth doing, if that's the result; even if, afterwards, many people still self-identify as 'poor'."
Replies from: ViliamOr to sum up their answer: "What do you mean, humanity's 100-fold productivity increase, since the days of agriculture, has managed not to eliminate poverty? What people a thousand years ago used to call 'poverty' has essentially disappeared in the high-tech countries. 'Poor' people no longer starve in winter when their farm's food storage runs out. There's still something we call 'poverty' but that's just because 'poverty' is a moving target, not because there's some real and puzzlingly persistent form of misery that resisted all economic growth, and would also resist redistribution via UBI."
↑ comment by Dagon · 2025-02-13T00:56:04.428Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well, there are possible outcomes that make resources per human literally infinite. They're not great either, by my preferences.
In less extreme cases, a lot depends on your definition of "poverty", and the weight you put on relative poverty vs absolute poverty. Already in most parts of the world the literal starvation rate is extremely low. It can get lower, and probably will in a "useful AI" or "aligned AGI" world. A lot of capabilities and technologies have already moved from "wealthy only" to "almost everyone, including technically impoverished people", and this can easily continue.
↑ comment by Kaj_Sotala · 2025-02-13T10:34:40.997Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The idea that having more than enough resources to go around means a world where poverty is eliminated is instantly falsifiable by the world we live in.
In the world we live in, there is strong political and cultural resistance to the kinds of basic income schemes that would eliminate genuine poverty. The problem isn't that resource consumption would always need to inevitably increase - once people's wealth gets past a certain point, plenty of them prefer to reduce their working hours, forgoing material resources in favor of having more spare time. The problem is that large numbers of people don't like the idea of others being given tax money without doing anything to directly earn it.
↑ comment by Noosphere89 (sharmake-farah) · 2025-02-12T23:14:18.541Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The one caveat here is that any change to the laws of physics that somehow managed to find a loophole in thermodynamics would let you get unbounded supply to match unbounded demand, and that probably does deserve the name of post-scarcity, but yes people are incorrectly assuming AI will bring about post-scarcity.
Replies from: D0TheMath↑ comment by Garrett Baker (D0TheMath) · 2025-02-13T04:08:53.947Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Infinite eg energy would just push your scarcity to other resources, eg.
Replies from: sharmake-farah↑ comment by Noosphere89 (sharmake-farah) · 2025-02-13T04:29:22.619Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Compute, information/entropy and what people can do with their property all become abundant if we assume an infinite energy source.
Compute and information/entropy become cheap, because the costs of running computations/getting information and entropy like the Landauef limit become mostly irrelevant if you can assume you can always generate the energy you need.
Somewhat similarly, what people can do with their property becomes way more abundant with infinite energy machines, though here it depends on how the machine works, primarily because it allows people to set up their own governments with their own laws given enough time (because everything comes from energy, in the end), and this could end up undermining traditional governments.