Thriving in the Weird Times: Preparing for the 100X Economy

OK, I think we are in agreement then. I think we'll be leaving the "world as normal but faster" phase sooner than you might expect -- for example, by the time my own productivity gets a 3x boost even.

I don't think there's a path to that,

There may not be a path, but that doesn't change the fact that not doing it guarantees misery.

and I don't think it's sufficient even if there were.

It's definitely not sufficient. You'd have to replace it with something else. And probably make unrelated changes.

But I was trying to challenge this idea that you were somehow still going to earn your daily bread by selling the product of your labor... presumably to the holders of capital. I mean, the post does mention that you're best off to be a holder of capital, but that's not going to be available to most people.

It's very easy to lose a small pile of capital, and relatively easy to add to a large pile of capital. It always has been, but it's about to get a lot more so. Capital concentrates. So most people are not going to have enough capital to survive just by owning things, at least not unless the system decrees that everybody owns at least some minimum share no matter what. That's definitely not capitalism.

So the post is basically about "working for a living". And that might work through 2026, or 2036, or whatever.

And sure, maybe you can do OK in 2026 or even 2036 by doing what this post suggests. If you do those things, maybe you'll even feel like you're moving up in the world. But most actual humans aren't capable of doing what this post suggests (and many of the rest would be miserable doing it). Some people are going to fall by the wayside. They won't be using AI assistants; they'll be doing things that don't need an AI assistant, but that AI can't do itself. Which are by no means guaranteed to be anything anybody would want to do.

As time goes on, AI will get smarter and more independent, shrinking the "adapt" niche. And robotics will get better, shrinking the "unautomatable work" niche.

There's an irreducible cost to employing somebody. You have to feed that person. Some people already can't produce enough to meet that bar. As the number of things humans can do that AI can't shrinks drastically, the number of such unemployable humans will rise. Fewer and fewer humans will be able to justify their existence.

Yes, that's in an absolute sense. People talk about "new jobs made possible by the new technology". That's wishful thinking. When machines replaced muscle in the industrial revolution, there was a need for brain. Operating even a simple power tool takes a lot of brain. When machines replace brain, that's it. Game over. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.

In the end game (not by 2026), the only value that literally any human will be able to produce above the cost of feeding that person will be things that are valued only for being done by humans.... and valued by the people or entities that actually have something else to trade for them. There aren't likely to be that many. Humans in general will be no more employable than chimpanzees.

... however, unlike chimpanzees, if you keep capitalism in anything remotely like its current form, humans may very well not be permitted the space or resources to take care of themselves on their own terms. You can't ignore the larger ultra-efficient economy and trade among yourselves, if everything, down to the ground you're standing on, is owned by something or somebody that can get more out of it some other way.

there will remain SOME form personal property,

That's not capitalism. Not unless it's ownership of capital, and really if you want it to look like what the word "capitalism" connotes, it kind of has to be a quite a lot of capital. Enough to sustain yourself from what it produces.

and SOME way of varying individual incentive/reward to effective fulfillment of other people's needs,

Again, eventually you're gonna be irrelevant to fulfilling other people's needs. If there's no preparation for that, it's going to come as quite a shock.

The only exception might be the needs of people who are just as frozen out as you are. And there's no guarantee that you will be in a position either to produce what you or they need, or to accumulate capital of your own, because all the prerequisite resources may be owned by somebody else who's using them more "effectively".

and SOME mechanism to make decisions about short- vs long-term risk-taking in where one invests time/resources.

We're headed toward a world in which letting any human make a really major decision about resource allocation would mean inefficient use of the resources. Possibly insupportably inefficient.

We're not there yet. We're not going to be there in 2026, either. But we're heading there faster and faster.

If you want an end-state system where a bunch of benevolent-to-the-point-of-enslavement AIs run everything, supporting humans is a or the major goal for the AIs, an AI's "consumption" is measured by how much support it gets to give to humans, and the AIs run some kind of market system to see which of them "owns" more resources to do that, then that's a capitalist system. But humans aren't the players in that system. And if you're truly superintelligent, you can probably do better. Markets are a pretty good information processing system, but they're not perfect.

In the meantime, the things that let capitalism work among humans are falling apart. Once there's no way to get into the club by using your labor to build up capital from scratch, pre-existing holders of capital become an absolute oligarchy. And capital's tendency to concentrate means it's a shrinking oligarchy. And eventually membership in that oligarchy is decided either by inheritance, or by things you did so long ago that basically nobody remembers them. Or possibly no human at all owns anything... sort of an "Accelerando" scenario.

I think that starts to come into being even before the ultimate end game, but in any case it's going to happen eventually.

That's not a tenable system, it's not an equitable system, and only a very small proportion of people could "thrive" under it. It would collapse if not sustained by insane amounts of force. The longer we keep moving toward such a world, the more extreme the collapse is likely to be.

So, yeah, there may not be a path to fixing it, but that means we're all boned, not that we're thriving.