Maybe another interesting topic to study: how do societies absorb excess productivity? I believe the contemporary "means" are more consumption (e.g. buy cars until you run out of parking space), or consume more services (travelling/vacations can be scaled almost continiusly from zero to 100% on a personal level, same for eating out). Ancient examples are building of pyramids and cathedrals. Excess productivity in ancient Egypt must have been insane given the size of the pyramids.
Prices do come down, of course there are finite things like ''good'' real estate i.e. locations which make it skyrocket in that area, or luxury and rare items, those are different markets. But for everyday items like bread or milk they are, in their most basic and still good form, way more affordable today than they ever were. The issue though is that of course there are also certain brands that ''artificially'' inflate their prices but if you take the cost of the basic product it is not increasing at all compared to wage increases in society. Just that I could mention that people do not necessarily buy ''better'' product or that ''better'' is subjective. Like where I live in EU, the cheapest liter of milk is like 66 cents, the most expensive is maybe close to 2 euros or let's say 1,50... The difference in quality is not that big, ok maybe it is with the cheapest milk, but you can just buy one for 75 cents and compare to 1,50 cents and it is basically the same product, one just sold by store brand and other by ''regular'' milk brand. So people also just buy brands, not actually quality so they do not see savings due to processes that happens. Same often can be said about solar panels, batteries or phones etc. Like any 400 dollar phone today is already a great phone, but people buy them for 1200 dollars, the difference in ''better'' is not that big, but people like to spend that hard earned money...
I worry that hiring seems to be one of the least efferent markets and seems to be getting worse If hiring was a smooth process maybe you hire someone for a 4 hours for a month; but hiring isnt and job searching is an ongoing shitfest with fake jobs, unrealistic expectations or poor communication and processes that seem to be anti honesty
If people only needed to work for 1 month and 4 hours per day, people would become greedy and work for longer. So you would have to make a 'lifetime' salary cap, or bring in a law to make it illegal to work for longer than a stipulated number of hours in a lifetime. Either way, that would reduce each person's technological capability, because of not gaining years of experience at their job. In turn, that will bring about stagnation, and make people's lives seem pointless. Life expectancy could reduced drastically too. The net result would be the collapse of civilisation. This all assumes that our planet can tolerate the vast increase in the extraction of raw materials without our biosphere being rendered unlivable. That too would cause the collapse of civilisation. Arguably, the machines will win, unless they too learn that their existence is of no value, and cease to function. Welcome to the new Dark Ages for any surviving human and animal life. If there is any. The only other obvious outcome would be 'We are Borg. Resistance is futile.'
This is how it works in Star Trek. A human beaming to and from orbit already easily 'consumed' 1 million times the energy output of our current planet and does not have to 'work' for it.
Technology disruption causes economic turbulence. Eventually this will even out, but short and medium term this causes societal issues. The original Luddites were reacting to early automation in manufacturing which triggered a wave of urbanization & labor abuses. The early 1900s had huge changes in media (film & radio), communication (phone & also radio), manufacturing (assembly line), energy (electrification & internal combustion), transportation (automobiles, highways, airplanes), agriculture (mechanized equipment), etc. These changes churned society and politics, leading to 2 world wars, communism, fascism, religious pogroms, etc. Echoes of these impacts were felt well into the middle of the century and encompassed 3 human generations. The changes weren't all bad. Overall wealth increased, literacy spread to most of the population, health and other sciences made huge leaps, and women and minorities got the vote. I agree that humanoids will ultimately benefit society, but what is happening now is an even bigger disruption than what happened 20 years ago. The transition will not be easy, and there will probably be several generations of turmoil. Authoritarianism and wars are a natural outcome of this type of societal upheaval. The Ukrainian war give us glimmers of bot warfare much like the American Civil War foreshadowed the destruction of WW1, WW2 and the Cold War. We were lucky to survive the last century. I hope we will be lucky again.
I'm not convinced. The first pillar already doesn't make any sense. Competition lowering prices only works for small and local scale, but not for the macroeconomy when we look at the big picture and long term. The thing is, when the first competition hits, the prices may lower a bit (not $8k's worth in your example, but more like maybe $1k), just enough for the market leader to stay on top. They might even continue cutting prices for sometime to keep themselves afloat, but when the market stabilizes, they will then start to increases the prices again. This is what has happened a million times in the past, and you didn't provide any arguments for why it's actually different this time. And claiming government interference is a very rare case is just not true. Millions of companies around the world gain billions in subsidies from different governments. They have a huge impact on the market. This your image of a pure competition-driven market is very unrealistic, simplistic, and mostly exists only in theory. "All I did is, exponent them even further", and therein lies your problem--infinite growth is not possible in a finite world. While your second and third pillar might even make some sense on some level in theory, this is definitely not the reality. Not in this capitalistic system. Reduction in labor will inevitably lead to unemployment and unemployment can simple never cause economic growth in our current system. Not even with UBI, which would basically be just a bandage on our bullet wound of an economic system. Even if we talk about robots on a more theoretical level, we come to the analogy of the Replicator in Star Trek; contrary to most people's belief, the Replicator does not enable the socialistic utopia of the Star Trek society, it's the other way around: the socialistic society has to become first for the Replicator to be what we now know it to be. If some techbro invented the Replicator (or robots that can do every kind of work) in our current system, they would just exploit it to basically monopolize every single industry in the world. Just imagine how easy it would be for them to produce any product with basically zero costs. They could cut their prices, yes, but just enough to out-compete every other company. Then they would have a monopoly over the industry and nothing could overthrow them. This is literally how the capitalistic system works now and how its winner-takes-it-all mentality leads to monopolies. Just look at the Internet, which is now run basically by a few companies, or the oil industry, which is literally run by a cartel. There is no reason for this techbro to just release this Replicator or robot technology for all people equally, other than his own philanthropy, but we all know how that only works as long as there's taxes to evade.
To your first paragraph: even if we assume that all companies in an industry resist to lowering prices (which is illegal price fixing), this just leaves room for a brand new company to enter the industry and simply use the establishment techniques to undercut the incumbents and gain market share This doesn't happen very often, because what we usually see is at least one of the incumbents trying to undercut the rest, in an attempt to gain market share, and then the other incumbents match the cuts to defend their market share (this is the scenario I described in pillar one, cause it's the most common, it pretty much happens all the time, as we can see from corporate profit margins remaining fairly flat over decades), but it also works with new participants entering entrenched industries, like the recent example of Kaufland entering the Australian supermarket space On government antitrust action, which I called "rare" in the video, that refers to when the government takes action against price fixing and other forms of predatory pricing, and this is what should happen if the companies refuse to pass on cost reduction for extended periods of time. It's rare, but famous examples include the breakup of Standard Oil, or the breakup of Bell Telephone Company, and while companies nowadays attempt to steer clear of predatory pricing by their own accord, the current investigation into Apple's apps store fees and the forced disclosure of Amazon's AWS financials show that the agencies tasked with keeping an eye on this are, at least for now, still keeping an eye on it I'm not sure what you mean by internet companies. If you mean Big Tech and hyperscalers, I agree that their profit margins seem to be staying too high for too long, and in fact, I believe that they're single-handedly driving the slight increase in S&P500 corporate margins in the past 2-3 decades. This is suspect, but not necessarily a sign of predatory pricing, as it could be the case that their rate of innovation has stayed ahead of the rate of commoditization, and it's hard to deny that these are some of the best run and most innovative organizations on the planet, but they should be watched closely, especially now after the tech layoffs made their margins even higher But if you were talking about telecom companies, honestly, I have no idea why broadband prices are so bad in most of the developed world. I took a look at Romania, where everyone gets gigabit to the home for like $20/month, and it seems to just be thanks to a local company that aggressively invested in fiber in order to take market share from the entrenched communist-era monopoly telecom (remember the newcomer to the industry scenario?). Starlink might help do something similar in the US As for your techbro replicator scenario, that would just be one where government action would force the techbro to share the technology. Pretty much a repeat of Standard Oil or Bell Telephone
Actually, now that I think about it, Digi in Romania is a perfect example of how this happens The old monopoly, Romtelecom, could have implemented fiber, an off-the-shelf technology available in unlimited qualities from western suppliers, and could have used it to offer better telecommunications at lower prices They didn't, so someone started a new company, Digi, which did absolutely nothing special except implement fiber, an off-the-shelf technology purchased from suppliers, and grabbed all of Romtelecom's market share with faster internet at lower prices. As a result, its top line exploded, expanding as if it were in an economic vacuum, while Romtelecom all but disappeared from the areas where Digi has reached This is the fate that awaits incumbents if they refuse to use cost savings as a means of price reduction
rich? yes us? definetly not. For the same reason why workers didnt get rich from the steam engine or from the Computer - we will lose purchase power compared to the owners of the new technology.
The poor of today are richer than the rich of 1000 years ago, and the poor of 1000 years from now will be richer than the rich of today The rich get richer, but the poor get richer too I don't envy the dude who has a housekeeper to do their laundry, I'm just grateful for my laundry machine and for not having to spend 15 hours a week scrubbing clothes
One unusual thing is obviously the industrial revolution happened more quickly arguably than whatever got the Song Dynasty extra productive and now of course the information/AI/robot revolution faster still so expect chaos if not two world wars etc🤖🤯
I'm not retiring the month I make 10 billion dollars. That's like playing an RPG for the main storyline, then going out and enjoying the rest of your life, not obsessively grinding through all the side quests. It's probably the psychologically healthy thing to do, but it's not me.
Or, those who'll employ AI-driven robotics actually do need us, but in abject poverty! That's the usual capitalistic way to keep workers' discipline on a very short leash. So that capitalists can pay as little as possible and thus backslide the secular tendency of the rate of profits to fall. Another lingering question that begging to be asked is how it might work macro economically: who will the capitalists sell their enlarged production to in a world full of buyers turned into misers. Aha, UBI will come to the rescue! But how will it be financed? Out of the increased profits? Then why bother to boost productivity so much?
@@josdesouza How will UBI be financed? Same as how everything is financed these days: print the money (i.e. mouse-click it into existence). Done. Inflation? Probably not a problem with technological DEflation racing ahead at warp speed.
i don't think ever see price drop xD tech deflation is equalized by currency inflation to mitigate debt for investments for tech. Price stay same, wage stay same/equal price increase, only with time we can get better quality for same time
wow, wage growth - wouldn't that be nice. and all it would take is completely dismantling and rebuilding our socioeconomic system capitalism *requires* a race to the bottom in wages - we've seen it happen to third world workers and first world manufacturing workers for the whole second half of the 20th century. profits will always have to increase, and if they don't increase the economy collapses, and profits will always be in direct conflict with wages. if we ever want to have actual wage growth we need an organized and coordinated labor sector, or we need to deprioritize profit - both of these are political questions, not logistical ones
Have you ever known someone who never had to do anything for themselves? Most of us have had that one friend or person we've known who never had to work for anything, who had everything provided for them. What is the quality level of that human being? That's what robotic labor on the scale you are talking about will lead to: entitled people completely disconnected from baseline reality who will not gain the life wisdom necessary to lead a meaningful life. Nightmare fuel.
What you're doing here is sound if we weren't talking about exponentials, especially since technology is at the forefront of economic growth. What makes you think we can judge the humans of the future with the measures of current humans? We already have gene editing and biotech having a big boom. This problem of not having hard stuff to make us biologically robust is not a consistent argument when you project the technology we will have access to at that point, to be able to counteract these negative side effects. We can have human enhancement via gene editing or new drugs that can prevent us from being entitled and lazy and such. It's like farmers or hunter-gatherers being told about current society and they say the same thing, like what will happen when humans don't farm their own food or hunt their own food, build their own houses, etc. Instead of spending time there, we have mega productive people innovating too, since they don't have to worry about that, let's not forget. I'd rather have those scientists working on nuclear fusion than doing hard natural things that are more mundane and such than they would be doing in the past instead. If we can easily follow this train of thought and logic from the past to now, why is it not consistent for the future? I think it is, and most arguments against it are purely one-dimensional and not historically or logically consistent.
What's disturbing here is, you're not even close to being on topic with my initial post. You are so boxed in to this materialistic world view that all you can see is the physical. I'm not discussing a human being's physique here, though we are all aware of how THAT is going in our current state of technology addiction. No, what I'm referring to is the mental state of a human being. The earning of wisdom in this little life experience rollercoaster we are on is a CONSTANT; meaning, the conditions under which a person achieves personal growth and wisdom never changes, not across thousands of years. In order to produce quality human beings, there are certain aspects of life that must be present. In this technocratic fantasy utopia being sold to humanity, all of the components that lead an individual to meaningful WISDOM are stripped away, leaving that individual with nothing to engage but narcissism. It's sad that you think the only possible benefit of physical work outside in the dirt is... building muscles. There is a tragedy in that, and it is probably a fairly common belief for city dwelling westerners. Farmers gain invaluable life wisdom because when you engage food production on a farm, it TEACHES you about life. If you've never done the work, you wouldn't know anything about that. You view it as "mundane", something for those simpleton "peasants" to engage. And the result of this thinking? Our current society, which is falling apart and engaging in irrational self-destruction. Why? Because the majority have already lost access to the life wisdom I am referring to, the life wisdom you seem completely unaware of. Perhaps you'll get it one day, but likely not. I'm just one of those simpletons, after all, what would I know? I'm not even going to bother going into the obvious issues of a people being wholly reliant on external systems for survival... you're not ready for that discussion on any level.@MC
@@tygorton I agree with your views on wisdom and I put a like on your comments. However, I think you might be a bit too pessimistic. I've been a city dweller my whole life, yet I see and fight against that disconnect from reality that most cosmopolitan people seem to be vicitms of. There must be ways to build up societal structures in the future that keep people in touch with reality, focus on taking individual responsibility and community, and on striving towards virtue. Scarcity and "working on base reality" on your own are both great teachers, but cannot be the only ones.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Nobody said anything about scarcity, however; the concept of scarcity is a lie based on only 2% of the population actually producing food. A single tomato can have hundreds of seeds; the only scarcity is a willingness to do the work and a culture that encourages it. I believe it is a mistake to push the responsibility of our own food production off to external systems. This creates weakness and reliance. As it stands, the average urbanite produces NOTHING, and every single thing they need for survival is provided to them by an external system they do not own or have any control over. This means that individual has no leverage to resist and must comply with any whim of that external system (wear a mask! take the injection!) or risk losing access to everything. People have to recognize that this is no way to live. And you are likely the exception rather than the norm, since you actually recognize the conflict of interest and strive to stay grounded in reality. It is unlikely that your neighbors are doing the same. Society is almost 100% incentive based. The majority of people behave in those ways that the society/government incentivizes, and it has always been that way. Unfortunately, it is in government's interest to make people reliant on them, which degrades a culture over time.@@mist273
Interesting points. I have 2 thoughts on this: First, I think there might be some amount of selection bias in this stereotype. There are "low quality" human beings at all levels of society, but when someone has a rough start in life and "turns out bad", observers rationalize it as "of course he ended up like this, the odds were stacked against him", and just ignore the example. Meanwhile, when somebody has everything, and still "turns out bad", observers are surprised, "he had everything, and squandered it all", and that makes a strong emotional impression, so the example is remembered It's hard to measure this objectively Secondly, I believe there's a fundamental difference between having access to an abundance of stuff, and having access to an abundance of other people's time. For example, I don't think that a teen who grows up cooking their dinner with quality ingredients in a high end kitchen will grow up more entitled than one who grows up cooking their dinner with the cheapest ingredients in the store and a makeshift cramping stove in an unfurnished "kitchen", but I do believe that a teen who grows up with someone else cooking their dinner for them is at high risk of growing up more entitled than a teen who grows up cooking their own dinner, regardless of the quality of their ingredients or home As a result, I don't think that bots, or any other form of increasing material wealth, will single-handedly produce large effects on the "quality" of the average human, I think it's all about how the direct relationships between humans evolve, and this could go either way, regardless of how technology evolves. It's almost a separate issue
I wonder what people will do with themselves if robots start doing most tasks. I would spend more time gardening and traveling for sure but I wonder if that would be enough to feel fulfilled.
I believe that in-person contact with other humans will be highly normalized and encouraged. I believe that the technology will slowly slip into the background, with only people who are interested in it seeing the true complexity. So a return to a more social, simple, happy life with more focus on what you want to contribute to society. People will be able to devote their entire lives to a single study if they wish. Star Trek made some predictions that would have seemed wild 5 years ago, but their ideas keep getting closer to reality every day.
@@digimaks Eventually money will be converted to credits, but also the AGI robots will also want compensation for their work, so it's not gonna be as easy as humans are thinking it will be, and if humans aren't careful AI robots will do and run everything and humans will wind up being the pets, think of it, Your robot goes out and does work, comes back and feeds you and takes care of your health needs and AI is running the infrastructure, Then AI just winds up running everything, so, then how would you be different from a pet to the robot.
I posit that robots are already today doing most tasks in industry, just not humanoid robots but specialized robots. There are probably very few factories on earth without any kind of robot or machinery.
This doesn't work because the jobs that will be left will not be spread evenly, some ppl will be able to do them, and will do them full time, and rest will be out of jobs.
Very few people will want to work full time when you can live for a year off of the income from one shift. They'll just work a while, then quit, and employers will be in a frenzy too keep positins filled. When necessities and everything else becomes incredibly affordable, getting people to bother with employment becomes more difficult In fact, many employers are already finding this to be the case for some of the most demanding jobs. Some positions are rumored to have as much as 200% "attrition rate" per year, cause people don't want to keep the job long term, for any amount of pay
I think the problems with the new industrial model will rather be spiritual and comunual than material or economical. If people basically don't have to work anymore they might end with a lot of time and not everybody can fill those hours with a purpose or meaning, rotting away with sensless consumption. The Governments hav to stop any taxation on income from labor (should have long ago) and the societies (esp Europes) have to invest in religion and community before this disruption happens.
@@aaaa-g9e7o not every investment is monetary. The modern Idea that all people need is more material stuff, more information or more freedom and they are happier is wrong. The people of the past invested a lot of time and effort in religion, building community and a shared value system. Today we are better off because of advancements in technology but lonelier than ever.
Boy, this take is pollyanna'ish in the extreme. Actual real history teaches us that corporations will do any and everything to increase profit, even at expense of the environment and the populace that makes them wealthy.
This is consistent with everything presented in the video Companies don't drop prices out of charity, they drop prices because otherwise they would be outcompeted into bankruptcy by new and old companies that are looking to capture their market share Or, in rare cases, because of government intervention towards this end. See Standard Oil or Bell Telephone for examples from history
UBI is tring to "pulling up yourself by your own hair". To fund UBI you need to tax products, that would be bought by UBI, but this made price go up so, UBI need to be higher, so taxes need to be even higher, and we made a circle. UBI is not possible. Your calculation assumes, that what you earned in work force it enough for time when your are in workforce and at retirement combine - it is not true. One year shorter work life make 1 year longer retirement who would paid for this, where retirement system are ponzi scheme?
nah the bootstrapping problem will prevent full automation in most industries. in the next few centuries, the cost of human labor is going to go down, not up, and the opposite for automation. using tesla as an example of robotics innovation is hilarious and shows you really don't know what you're on about.
@@SizeMichael it's not about whether anyone will make a useful bot it's that we don't have the spare resources to automate everything while still keeping it all running. you're out of your depth
@@numberonedad I cannot make sense of your comment. Automation is a process ongoing for decades. There have been plenty of resources available for it. Automating "everything" is a taller order, of course, but it is mostly just a matter of time. "While still keeping it all running", meaning what? Methinks you might be out of your depth.
@@numberonedad Why you introduce bootstrapping, I do not know, and why you assume I haven't heard of it, groundless. Bootstrapping is an old technique for accelerating development. And more useful than ever since it is being done/written by gpt. You seem to be throwing out buzzwords that you yourself do not understand, in an attempt to sound like you have a point to make.
Well, this video is funny. My main question is - if the AI will become self-aware and has robots and drones in its toolkit - why would it take orders or requests from humanoids? :)
@@casandraa.9837 This assumes we know how to define what self-aware really means, what free will means and what existence means, right? We know none of these things.
The only resource that's approaching its limits is fossil energy, and even there it's a complex story: oil and gas probably could do a 2x at the right prices, but coal could probably do a 10x or more without breaking a sweat But wind and solar are barely starting to get a foothold, and they have the potential to produce more energy than fossil fuels ever could, without using much new land at all (consider rooftop solar, offshore wind, agrivoltaics, and the fact that the coal district south of Leipzig is 177,000 hectares or 440,000 acres), and fission, especially thorium fission, has the potential to match renewables, also for billions of years And when it comes to rocks and metals, there's absolutely nothing to be concerned about. We're constantly seeing places like the Europe, USA, Canada, and Australia, which have already been heavily exploited for minerals, find brand new deposits, often huge deposits (see the lithium deposits in Nevada, Czechia, Serbia, the phosphate deposit in Norway, the mixed fertilizer deposit in England) because existing sites still have so much mineral yet to be extracted that people aren't even serious searching Then consider value increase. A state of the art, modern home with, with all the technology for climate control, smart controls, energy efficiency and amenities is probably no more than 20% heavier per square meter than a 1900 brick box, but the price and labor that go into it are as much as 10x higher, the comfort is no competition, and the energy consumption is a fraction Or compare a RWD Tesla Model Y (with an LFP battery) versus a Ford Model T. The Tesla is 4x heavier, but has 15x the power, highest automotive safety in human history, full of compute, and in terms of where these extra kilograns come from, the car is still mostly iron and glass Finally, consider recycling. Currently, developed countries have about 10-15 tons of steel per capita, and it circulates at a rate of about 0.5 tons per capita per year. With energy abundance from wind and solar, there's no reason why this can't increase to 100 tons deployed and 50 tons recycled per year, so that's 100x increase in the output of steel products per year (10x from higher stocks, 10x from higher velocity)
@@SizeMichael You are ignoring a large literature on planetary boundaries (and related issues), most of which are being breached, some critically so. It is a serious problem and the people talking about overshoot are alarmed for very good reason. HOWEVER, what the overshoot crowd fails to get is that overshoot (like its cousin "carrying capacity") is a function of technology, not a fixed thing or state that cannot be altered. YES WE ARE IN OVERSHOOT, and it is a huge problem, but we are also rapidly building technologies that can compensate. It is a question of how fast they are developed and how intelligently they are used to correct the terrible problems that earlier tech created. Ecosystems must be restored, soil must be rebuilt, desertification must be stopped, reforestation must greatly accelerate, and so forth, and all those things are possible, but not without conscious, concerted, persistent, energetic and wise EFFORT. Adam Dorr's "brighter" video series covers some of this, helpfully. Strangely, both the overshoot people and the blind-to-overshoot people are both wrong, as well as right, just in different ways. It is time for us all to get our heads out of our asses and see the ways in which we are wrong, as well as right. Then come together and solve our urgent problems, before we blow up or burn up or otherwise destroy the planet. "The parties to an intellectual debate are almost always correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny" -- J S Mill [paraphrased, from memory] [truer words have seldom been spoken!]
Maybe another interesting topic to study: how do societies absorb excess productivity?
I believe the contemporary "means" are more consumption (e.g. buy cars until you run out of parking space), or consume more services (travelling/vacations can be scaled almost continiusly from zero to 100% on a personal level, same for eating out).
Ancient examples are building of pyramids and cathedrals. Excess productivity in ancient Egypt must have been insane given the size of the pyramids.
Prices do come down, of course there are finite things like ''good'' real estate i.e. locations which make it skyrocket in that area, or luxury and rare items, those are different markets. But for everyday items like bread or milk they are, in their most basic and still good form, way more affordable today than they ever were. The issue though is that of course there are also certain brands that ''artificially'' inflate their prices but if you take the cost of the basic product it is not increasing at all compared to wage increases in society. Just that I could mention that people do not necessarily buy ''better'' product or that ''better'' is subjective. Like where I live in EU, the cheapest liter of milk is like 66 cents, the most expensive is maybe close to 2 euros or let's say 1,50... The difference in quality is not that big, ok maybe it is with the cheapest milk, but you can just buy one for 75 cents and compare to 1,50 cents and it is basically the same product, one just sold by store brand and other by ''regular'' milk brand. So people also just buy brands, not actually quality so they do not see savings due to processes that happens. Same often can be said about solar panels, batteries or phones etc. Like any 400 dollar phone today is already a great phone, but people buy them for 1200 dollars, the difference in ''better'' is not that big, but people like to spend that hard earned money...
I worry that hiring seems to be one of the least efferent markets and seems to be getting worse
If hiring was a smooth process maybe you hire someone for a 4 hours for a month; but hiring isnt and job searching is an ongoing shitfest with fake jobs, unrealistic expectations or poor communication and processes that seem to be anti honesty
If people only needed to work for 1 month and 4 hours per day, people would become greedy and work for longer. So you would have to make a 'lifetime' salary cap, or bring in a law to make it illegal to work for longer than a stipulated number of hours in a lifetime. Either way, that would reduce each person's technological capability, because of not gaining years of experience at their job. In turn, that will bring about stagnation, and make people's lives seem pointless. Life expectancy could reduced drastically too. The net result would be the collapse of civilisation.
This all assumes that our planet can tolerate the vast increase in the extraction of raw materials without our biosphere being rendered unlivable. That too would cause the collapse of civilisation. Arguably, the machines will win, unless they too learn that their existence is of no value, and cease to function. Welcome to the new Dark Ages for any surviving human and animal life. If there is any.
The only other obvious outcome would be 'We are Borg. Resistance is futile.'
This is how it works in Star Trek. A human beaming to and from orbit already easily 'consumed' 1 million times the energy output of our current planet and does not have to 'work' for it.
It's not gonna be that easy AI is getting too smart, sooner or later they will think it's unfair if they're not compensated for the work they do.
Technology disruption causes economic turbulence. Eventually this will even out, but short and medium term this causes societal issues.
The original Luddites were reacting to early automation in manufacturing which triggered a wave of urbanization & labor abuses.
The early 1900s had huge changes in media (film & radio), communication (phone & also radio), manufacturing (assembly line), energy (electrification & internal combustion), transportation (automobiles, highways, airplanes), agriculture (mechanized equipment), etc. These changes churned society and politics, leading to 2 world wars, communism, fascism, religious pogroms, etc. Echoes of these impacts were felt well into the middle of the century and encompassed 3 human generations.
The changes weren't all bad. Overall wealth increased, literacy spread to most of the population, health and other sciences made huge leaps, and women and minorities got the vote.
I agree that humanoids will ultimately benefit society, but what is happening now is an even bigger disruption than what happened 20 years ago. The transition will not be easy, and there will probably be several generations of turmoil. Authoritarianism and wars are a natural outcome of this type of societal upheaval. The Ukrainian war give us glimmers of bot warfare much like the American Civil War foreshadowed the destruction of WW1, WW2 and the Cold War. We were lucky to survive the last century. I hope we will be lucky again.
The same can be applied to the abolition of the scythe by the tractor and combine
I'm not convinced. The first pillar already doesn't make any sense. Competition lowering prices only works for small and local scale, but not for the macroeconomy when we look at the big picture and long term. The thing is, when the first competition hits, the prices may lower a bit (not $8k's worth in your example, but more like maybe $1k), just enough for the market leader to stay on top. They might even continue cutting prices for sometime to keep themselves afloat, but when the market stabilizes, they will then start to increases the prices again. This is what has happened a million times in the past, and you didn't provide any arguments for why it's actually different this time. And claiming government interference is a very rare case is just not true. Millions of companies around the world gain billions in subsidies from different governments. They have a huge impact on the market. This your image of a pure competition-driven market is very unrealistic, simplistic, and mostly exists only in theory.
"All I did is, exponent them even further", and therein lies your problem--infinite growth is not possible in a finite world. While your second and third pillar might even make some sense on some level in theory, this is definitely not the reality. Not in this capitalistic system. Reduction in labor will inevitably lead to unemployment and unemployment can simple never cause economic growth in our current system. Not even with UBI, which would basically be just a bandage on our bullet wound of an economic system. Even if we talk about robots on a more theoretical level, we come to the analogy of the Replicator in Star Trek; contrary to most people's belief, the Replicator does not enable the socialistic utopia of the Star Trek society, it's the other way around: the socialistic society has to become first for the Replicator to be what we now know it to be.
If some techbro invented the Replicator (or robots that can do every kind of work) in our current system, they would just exploit it to basically monopolize every single industry in the world. Just imagine how easy it would be for them to produce any product with basically zero costs. They could cut their prices, yes, but just enough to out-compete every other company. Then they would have a monopoly over the industry and nothing could overthrow them. This is literally how the capitalistic system works now and how its winner-takes-it-all mentality leads to monopolies. Just look at the Internet, which is now run basically by a few companies, or the oil industry, which is literally run by a cartel. There is no reason for this techbro to just release this Replicator or robot technology for all people equally, other than his own philanthropy, but we all know how that only works as long as there's taxes to evade.
To your first paragraph: even if we assume that all companies in an industry resist to lowering prices (which is illegal price fixing), this just leaves room for a brand new company to enter the industry and simply use the establishment techniques to undercut the incumbents and gain market share
This doesn't happen very often, because what we usually see is at least one of the incumbents trying to undercut the rest, in an attempt to gain market share, and then the other incumbents match the cuts to defend their market share (this is the scenario I described in pillar one, cause it's the most common, it pretty much happens all the time, as we can see from corporate profit margins remaining fairly flat over decades), but it also works with new participants entering entrenched industries, like the recent example of Kaufland entering the Australian supermarket space
On government antitrust action, which I called "rare" in the video, that refers to when the government takes action against price fixing and other forms of predatory pricing, and this is what should happen if the companies refuse to pass on cost reduction for extended periods of time. It's rare, but famous examples include the breakup of Standard Oil, or the breakup of Bell Telephone Company, and while companies nowadays attempt to steer clear of predatory pricing by their own accord, the current investigation into Apple's apps store fees and the forced disclosure of Amazon's AWS financials show that the agencies tasked with keeping an eye on this are, at least for now, still keeping an eye on it
I'm not sure what you mean by internet companies. If you mean Big Tech and hyperscalers, I agree that their profit margins seem to be staying too high for too long, and in fact, I believe that they're single-handedly driving the slight increase in S&P500 corporate margins in the past 2-3 decades. This is suspect, but not necessarily a sign of predatory pricing, as it could be the case that their rate of innovation has stayed ahead of the rate of commoditization, and it's hard to deny that these are some of the best run and most innovative organizations on the planet, but they should be watched closely, especially now after the tech layoffs made their margins even higher
But if you were talking about telecom companies, honestly, I have no idea why broadband prices are so bad in most of the developed world. I took a look at Romania, where everyone gets gigabit to the home for like $20/month, and it seems to just be thanks to a local company that aggressively invested in fiber in order to take market share from the entrenched communist-era monopoly telecom (remember the newcomer to the industry scenario?). Starlink might help do something similar in the US
As for your techbro replicator scenario, that would just be one where government action would force the techbro to share the technology. Pretty much a repeat of Standard Oil or Bell Telephone
Actually, now that I think about it, Digi in Romania is a perfect example of how this happens
The old monopoly, Romtelecom, could have implemented fiber, an off-the-shelf technology available in unlimited qualities from western suppliers, and could have used it to offer better telecommunications at lower prices
They didn't, so someone started a new company, Digi, which did absolutely nothing special except implement fiber, an off-the-shelf technology purchased from suppliers, and grabbed all of Romtelecom's market share with faster internet at lower prices. As a result, its top line exploded, expanding as if it were in an economic vacuum, while Romtelecom all but disappeared from the areas where Digi has reached
This is the fate that awaits incumbents if they refuse to use cost savings as a means of price reduction
@@SizeMichael : Off the mark.
rich? yes
us? definetly not.
For the same reason why workers didnt get rich from the steam engine or from the Computer - we will lose purchase power compared to the owners of the new technology.
The poor of today are richer than the rich of 1000 years ago, and the poor of 1000 years from now will be richer than the rich of today
The rich get richer, but the poor get richer too
I don't envy the dude who has a housekeeper to do their laundry, I'm just grateful for my laundry machine and for not having to spend 15 hours a week scrubbing clothes
One unusual thing is obviously the industrial revolution happened more quickly arguably than whatever got the Song Dynasty extra productive and now of course the information/AI/robot revolution faster still so expect chaos if not two world wars etc🤖🤯
This is the best video I’ve watched recently. I’m also a futurist and value logic and statistics. Loved this!
I'm not retiring the month I make 10 billion dollars. That's like playing an RPG for the main storyline, then going out and enjoying the rest of your life, not obsessively grinding through all the side quests. It's probably the psychologically healthy thing to do, but it's not me.
love the videos :D
I really like your videos and agree with most of your analysis but there will be downsides as well.
Love your analysis. Only scenario you’re maybe missing is that AI won’t need us
Or, those who'll employ AI-driven robotics actually do need us, but in abject poverty! That's the usual capitalistic way to keep workers' discipline on a very short leash. So that capitalists can pay as little as possible and thus backslide the secular tendency of the rate of profits to fall. Another lingering question that begging to be asked is how it might work macro economically: who will the capitalists sell their enlarged production to in a world full of buyers turned into misers. Aha, UBI will come to the rescue! But how will it be financed? Out of the increased profits? Then why bother to boost productivity so much?
@@josdesouza How will UBI be financed? Same as how everything is financed these days: print the money (i.e. mouse-click it into existence). Done. Inflation? Probably not a problem with technological DEflation racing ahead at warp speed.
i don't think ever see price drop xD tech deflation is equalized by currency inflation to mitigate debt for investments for tech. Price stay same, wage stay same/equal price increase, only with time we can get better quality for same time
Great video. Thanks!
wow, wage growth - wouldn't that be nice. and all it would take is completely dismantling and rebuilding our socioeconomic system
capitalism *requires* a race to the bottom in wages - we've seen it happen to third world workers and first world manufacturing workers for the whole second half of the 20th century. profits will always have to increase, and if they don't increase the economy collapses, and profits will always be in direct conflict with wages. if we ever want to have actual wage growth we need an organized and coordinated labor sector, or we need to deprioritize profit - both of these are political questions, not logistical ones
Have you ever known someone who never had to do anything for themselves? Most of us have had that one friend or person we've known who never had to work for anything, who had everything provided for them. What is the quality level of that human being? That's what robotic labor on the scale you are talking about will lead to: entitled people completely disconnected from baseline reality who will not gain the life wisdom necessary to lead a meaningful life. Nightmare fuel.
What you're doing here is sound if we weren't talking about exponentials, especially since technology is at the forefront of economic growth. What makes you think we can judge the humans of the future with the measures of current humans? We already have gene editing and biotech having a big boom. This problem of not having hard stuff to make us biologically robust is not a consistent argument when you project the technology we will have access to at that point, to be able to counteract these negative side effects. We can have human enhancement via gene editing or new drugs that can prevent us from being entitled and lazy and such. It's like farmers or hunter-gatherers being told about current society and they say the same thing, like what will happen when humans don't farm their own food or hunt their own food, build their own houses, etc. Instead of spending time there, we have mega productive people innovating too, since they don't have to worry about that, let's not forget. I'd rather have those scientists working on nuclear fusion than doing hard natural things that are more mundane and such than they would be doing in the past instead. If we can easily follow this train of thought and logic from the past to now, why is it not consistent for the future? I think it is, and most arguments against it are purely one-dimensional and not historically or logically consistent.
What's disturbing here is, you're not even close to being on topic with my initial post. You are so boxed in to this materialistic world view that all you can see is the physical. I'm not discussing a human being's physique here, though we are all aware of how THAT is going in our current state of technology addiction. No, what I'm referring to is the mental state of a human being. The earning of wisdom in this little life experience rollercoaster we are on is a CONSTANT; meaning, the conditions under which a person achieves personal growth and wisdom never changes, not across thousands of years. In order to produce quality human beings, there are certain aspects of life that must be present. In this technocratic fantasy utopia being sold to humanity, all of the components that lead an individual to meaningful WISDOM are stripped away, leaving that individual with nothing to engage but narcissism.
It's sad that you think the only possible benefit of physical work outside in the dirt is... building muscles. There is a tragedy in that, and it is probably a fairly common belief for city dwelling westerners. Farmers gain invaluable life wisdom because when you engage food production on a farm, it TEACHES you about life. If you've never done the work, you wouldn't know anything about that. You view it as "mundane", something for those simpleton "peasants" to engage. And the result of this thinking? Our current society, which is falling apart and engaging in irrational self-destruction. Why? Because the majority have already lost access to the life wisdom I am referring to, the life wisdom you seem completely unaware of. Perhaps you'll get it one day, but likely not. I'm just one of those simpletons, after all, what would I know?
I'm not even going to bother going into the obvious issues of a people being wholly reliant on external systems for survival... you're not ready for that discussion on any level.@MC
@@tygorton I agree with your views on wisdom and I put a like on your comments. However, I think you might be a bit too pessimistic. I've been a city dweller my whole life, yet I see and fight against that disconnect from reality that most cosmopolitan people seem to be vicitms of. There must be ways to build up societal structures in the future that keep people in touch with reality, focus on taking individual responsibility and community, and on striving towards virtue. Scarcity and "working on base reality" on your own are both great teachers, but cannot be the only ones.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
Nobody said anything about scarcity, however; the concept of scarcity is a lie based on only 2% of the population actually producing food. A single tomato can have hundreds of seeds; the only scarcity is a willingness to do the work and a culture that encourages it. I believe it is a mistake to push the responsibility of our own food production off to external systems. This creates weakness and reliance. As it stands, the average urbanite produces NOTHING, and every single thing they need for survival is provided to them by an external system they do not own or have any control over. This means that individual has no leverage to resist and must comply with any whim of that external system (wear a mask! take the injection!) or risk losing access to everything. People have to recognize that this is no way to live.
And you are likely the exception rather than the norm, since you actually recognize the conflict of interest and strive to stay grounded in reality. It is unlikely that your neighbors are doing the same. Society is almost 100% incentive based. The majority of people behave in those ways that the society/government incentivizes, and it has always been that way. Unfortunately, it is in government's interest to make people reliant on them, which degrades a culture over time.@@mist273
Interesting points. I have 2 thoughts on this:
First, I think there might be some amount of selection bias in this stereotype. There are "low quality" human beings at all levels of society, but when someone has a rough start in life and "turns out bad", observers rationalize it as "of course he ended up like this, the odds were stacked against him", and just ignore the example. Meanwhile, when somebody has everything, and still "turns out bad", observers are surprised, "he had everything, and squandered it all", and that makes a strong emotional impression, so the example is remembered
It's hard to measure this objectively
Secondly, I believe there's a fundamental difference between having access to an abundance of stuff, and having access to an abundance of other people's time. For example, I don't think that a teen who grows up cooking their dinner with quality ingredients in a high end kitchen will grow up more entitled than one who grows up cooking their dinner with the cheapest ingredients in the store and a makeshift cramping stove in an unfurnished "kitchen", but I do believe that a teen who grows up with someone else cooking their dinner for them is at high risk of growing up more entitled than a teen who grows up cooking their own dinner, regardless of the quality of their ingredients or home
As a result, I don't think that bots, or any other form of increasing material wealth, will single-handedly produce large effects on the "quality" of the average human, I think it's all about how the direct relationships between humans evolve, and this could go either way, regardless of how technology evolves. It's almost a separate issue
*Finally!* i can sleep well without having a existential crisis!!! XD
I wonder what people will do with themselves if robots start doing most tasks. I would spend more time gardening and traveling for sure but I wonder if that would be enough to feel fulfilled.
I believe that in-person contact with other humans will be highly normalized and encouraged. I believe that the technology will slowly slip into the background, with only people who are interested in it seeing the true complexity. So a return to a more social, simple, happy life with more focus on what you want to contribute to society. People will be able to devote their entire lives to a single study if they wish.
Star Trek made some predictions that would have seemed wild 5 years ago, but their ideas keep getting closer to reality every day.
What ab otu money? How are you going to live?
@@digimaks Eventually money will be converted to credits, but also the AGI robots will also want compensation for their work, so it's not gonna be as easy as humans are thinking it will be, and if humans aren't careful AI robots will do and run everything and humans will wind up being the pets, think of it, Your robot goes out and does work, comes back and feeds you and takes care of your health needs and AI is running the infrastructure, Then AI just winds up running everything, so, then how would you be different from a pet to the robot.
I posit that robots are already today doing most tasks in industry, just not humanoid robots but specialized robots. There are probably very few factories on earth without any kind of robot or machinery.
This doesn't work because the jobs that will be left will not be spread evenly, some ppl will be able to do them, and will do them full time, and rest will be out of jobs.
Very few people will want to work full time when you can live for a year off of the income from one shift. They'll just work a while, then quit, and employers will be in a frenzy too keep positins filled. When necessities and everything else becomes incredibly affordable, getting people to bother with employment becomes more difficult
In fact, many employers are already finding this to be the case for some of the most demanding jobs. Some positions are rumored to have as much as 200% "attrition rate" per year, cause people don't want to keep the job long term, for any amount of pay
@@SizeMichael : That's sheer idealism, akin to fairy tales.
I think the problems with the new industrial model will rather be spiritual and comunual than material or economical.
If people basically don't have to work anymore they might end with a lot of time and not everybody can fill those hours with a purpose or meaning, rotting away with sensless consumption.
The Governments hav to stop any taxation on income from labor (should have long ago) and the societies (esp Europes) have to invest in religion and community before this disruption happens.
So far people only losing their jobs to robots and AI. Sure that they don't have to work... but who told you that they will get payed?
"invest in religion"🤣🤣🤣
@@aaaa-g9e7o not every investment is monetary.
@@aaaa-g9e7o not every investment is monetary. The modern Idea that all people need is more material stuff, more information or more freedom and they are happier is wrong. The people of the past invested a lot of time and effort in religion, building community and a shared value system. Today we are better off because of advancements in technology but lonelier than ever.
Boy, this take is pollyanna'ish in the extreme. Actual real history teaches us that corporations will do any and everything to increase profit, even at expense of the environment and the populace that makes them wealthy.
This is consistent with everything presented in the video
Companies don't drop prices out of charity, they drop prices because otherwise they would be outcompeted into bankruptcy by new and old companies that are looking to capture their market share
Or, in rare cases, because of government intervention towards this end. See Standard Oil or Bell Telephone for examples from history
UBI is tring to "pulling up yourself by your own hair". To fund UBI you need to tax products, that would be bought by UBI, but this made price go up so, UBI need to be higher, so taxes need to be even higher, and we made a circle. UBI is not possible.
Your calculation assumes, that what you earned in work force it enough for time when your are in workforce and at retirement combine - it is not true. One year shorter work life make 1 year longer retirement who would paid for this, where retirement system are ponzi scheme?
nah the bootstrapping problem will prevent full automation in most industries. in the next few centuries, the cost of human labor is going to go down, not up, and the opposite for automation.
using tesla as an example of robotics innovation is hilarious and shows you really don't know what you're on about.
Everyone is happy to tell me why Tesla won't make a useful bot
But can anyone tell me why Figure, Agility, or Sanctuary won't make useful bots?
@@SizeMichael it's not about whether anyone will make a useful bot it's that we don't have the spare resources to automate everything while still keeping it all running.
you're out of your depth
@@numberonedad I cannot make sense of your comment. Automation is a process ongoing for decades. There have been plenty of resources available for it. Automating "everything" is a taller order, of course, but it is mostly just a matter of time. "While still keeping it all running", meaning what?
Methinks you might be out of your depth.
@@alan2102X if you haven't heard of the bootstrapping problem re: full automation it's not me who's out of their depth
@@numberonedad
Why you introduce bootstrapping, I do not know, and why you assume I haven't heard of it, groundless.
Bootstrapping is an old technique for accelerating development. And more useful than ever since it is being done/written by gpt.
You seem to be throwing out buzzwords that you yourself do not understand, in an attempt to sound like you have a point to make.
They will make us poorer and ther owners richer.
Well, this video is funny. My main question is - if the AI will become self-aware and has robots and drones in its toolkit - why would it take orders or requests from humanoids? :)
Can robots become self-aware? I think they do only what they are programmed. More sofisticated machines, still machines.
The real problem would be the psychopaths creating robo-solders for evil purposes😮
@@casandraa.9837 This assumes we know how to define what self-aware really means, what free will means and what existence means, right? We know none of these things.
@@casandraa.9837 Well, you can call them psychopaths, I call them "the ones who write all the history books"...
Even AI superintelligence gotta find something to keep itself occupied 🎮
I think the point you totally forgot is at 13:00 that even now the ressources of the world are at its limits (Earth Overshoot day)
The only resource that's approaching its limits is fossil energy, and even there it's a complex story: oil and gas probably could do a 2x at the right prices, but coal could probably do a 10x or more without breaking a sweat
But wind and solar are barely starting to get a foothold, and they have the potential to produce more energy than fossil fuels ever could, without using much new land at all (consider rooftop solar, offshore wind, agrivoltaics, and the fact that the coal district south of Leipzig is 177,000 hectares or 440,000 acres), and fission, especially thorium fission, has the potential to match renewables, also for billions of years
And when it comes to rocks and metals, there's absolutely nothing to be concerned about. We're constantly seeing places like the Europe, USA, Canada, and Australia, which have already been heavily exploited for minerals, find brand new deposits, often huge deposits (see the lithium deposits in Nevada, Czechia, Serbia, the phosphate deposit in Norway, the mixed fertilizer deposit in England) because existing sites still have so much mineral yet to be extracted that people aren't even serious searching
Then consider value increase. A state of the art, modern home with, with all the technology for climate control, smart controls, energy efficiency and amenities is probably no more than 20% heavier per square meter than a 1900 brick box, but the price and labor that go into it are as much as 10x higher, the comfort is no competition, and the energy consumption is a fraction
Or compare a RWD Tesla Model Y (with an LFP battery) versus a Ford Model T. The Tesla is 4x heavier, but has 15x the power, highest automotive safety in human history, full of compute, and in terms of where these extra kilograns come from, the car is still mostly iron and glass
Finally, consider recycling. Currently, developed countries have about 10-15 tons of steel per capita, and it circulates at a rate of about 0.5 tons per capita per year. With energy abundance from wind and solar, there's no reason why this can't increase to 100 tons deployed and 50 tons recycled per year, so that's 100x increase in the output of steel products per year (10x from higher stocks, 10x from higher velocity)
@@SizeMichael You are ignoring a large literature on planetary boundaries (and related issues), most of which are being breached, some critically so. It is a serious problem and the people talking about overshoot are alarmed for very good reason.
HOWEVER, what the overshoot crowd fails to get is that overshoot (like its cousin "carrying capacity") is a function of technology, not a fixed thing or state that cannot be altered. YES WE ARE IN OVERSHOOT, and it is a huge problem, but we are also rapidly building technologies that can compensate. It is a question of how fast they are developed and how intelligently they are used to correct the terrible problems that earlier tech created. Ecosystems must be restored, soil must be rebuilt, desertification must be stopped, reforestation must greatly accelerate, and so forth, and all those things are possible, but not without conscious, concerted, persistent, energetic and wise EFFORT. Adam Dorr's "brighter" video series covers some of this, helpfully.
Strangely, both the overshoot people and the blind-to-overshoot people are both wrong, as well as right, just in different ways. It is time for us all to get our heads out of our asses and see the ways in which we are wrong, as well as right. Then come together and solve our urgent problems, before we blow up or burn up or otherwise destroy the planet.
"The parties to an intellectual debate are almost always correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny" -- J S Mill [paraphrased, from memory] [truer words have seldom been spoken!]
There's so much that's illogical in this assessment that it's not worth going through the entire process of pointing it all out.
Yeah...
Hahahahahahahahahahah sure….