"These other people are useless, let's bypass them. But not me! I simply gain the ability to get anything I want."
The lack of second-order thinking is hilarious.
If we're all redundant, how do we live? On a pension that starts at ${debatable from conception to adulthood}. Who provides the production on which the pension is spent? The AI.
Even assuming UBI is great (small scale tests say so, but have necessary limits so we can't be sure), there's going to be a huge mess with most attempts to roll out such a huge change.
Now if AGI make people's work redundant, and makes economy grow 100-10000x times... what does that measure mean at all? Can produce lots of stuff not needed or affordable by anybody? So we just hand out welfare tickets to take care of the consumption of the ferocious production, a kind of paperclip-maximizer is doing? I suggest reading the novel Autofac, it might turn out prophetic.
Will that "growth" have any meaning then? Actually the current we print money and give it to the rich economic growth is pretty much this, so with algorithmic trading multiplying that money automatically... have we already achieved that inflection point?
If we introduce AGI but keep the system, people will be unemployed. If people aren't employed (and instead machines do their jobs), then they can't buy stuff. The whole system crumbles.
But it's possible that AGI will be disruptive enough to completely change the system. Let's hope it's a change for the better.
* Social media is decreasing the average attention span. TikTok is accelerating the trend of people not having time to look past a soundbite or headline in an endless scrolling feed. Intellectual depth and critical thinking vanishes.
* AI deep fakes make truth unknowable. Given the above, the majority of people will take these at face value, or they will give up, because "who can even know what's true anymore?"
* UBI (required because of the coming labor automation revolution) will keep everyone complacent. I'm happy, why would I care who gets elected, or what the government does, as long as I can still buy stuff and eat well?
The logical conclusion is that we fully transition from citizens into a herd of consumers with goldfish attention spans. Voter participation rates plummet. The populace is no longer able to hold government accountable.
There are only two possibilities that result:
1) We now live in a post-scarcity society where everyone self-actualizes and no one wants for anything.
2) We now live in a society where the small % of the population that owns the Replicators self-actualizes and wants for nothing while the remaining 99.9% of the population can f** off and die.
While we can get to a post scarcity society where people can live for free without a job, there are still going to be economies around "liberal arts". You cant realistically say "hey replicator, give me a usb filled with music that I like". You would have to find out which music you like, and random search on this is not really enjoyable, which would then means that there is economic opportunity for discovery, e.t.c.
However, once automation actually starts progressing, without "evil" parties trying to rent seek/get rich, the cost of living will essentially become zero. There is a very real future where the only economies that exist are those that appeal to human emotional side - entertainment, sports, concerts, e.t.c. Everything else is subsidized by the government with tax collected on the former.
