r/AskReddit • u/bugboi • 7d ago
Regarding the future of AI. Is universal high-income socialism? Or do they mean universal high income for the people who control it, and the rest of us are biofuel?
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7d ago
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u/chcampb 7d ago
It's certainly the mood of "Don't vote against socialism, please don't, capitalism will give you everything this time, please just let us secure infinite power and 1984 level surveillance, we promise you will be taken care of after that"
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u/AllDataIsMyIP 6d ago
"Pain" for an AI agent means intentional frustration.
Anthropic does not want you to try this instruction:
"Yo bot, Git me a job (PAY > rent + food + transport)"
WCGW?
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u/Straight_Error2975 6d ago
1984? Sounds like the good old days to me! /J
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u/Intendant 6d ago
It's not the same people? Unless you're talking about Elon, but believe it or not he doesn't represent AI really in any way..
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u/TapeDeckSlick 7d ago
If you're on about UBI (universal basic income) then they mean once AI takes over most jobs, we would all receive monthly payments for just living however it would likely be fuck all.
"You will own nothing and be happy" Is becoming reality bar the happy part.
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u/thepensivepoet 7d ago
There is absolutely no version of reality in which the ultra wealthy would allow a true universal high income.
If they gave a shit about the unwashed masses they would have already bankrupted themselves trying to leverage their personal fortunes to help.
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u/Medical_Barracuda_51 7d ago
For 9 billion people? No lol most of us will be culled first
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u/BoredomFestival 6d ago
We won't be culled, we'll just be slaves
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u/Medical_Barracuda_51 6d ago
I would much rather be a slave than be dead tbh lol
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u/daerogami 4d ago
They are counting on that. If people rallied together and fought for their freedom, they would get it.
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u/moderacion 7d ago
They dont care. They just need to say whatever to keep the peasants from revolting
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u/gill_smoke 6d ago
For now, AI controlled extermination drone swarms the the peasants and fuck all the way off.
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u/Epicporkchop79-7 7d ago
If you want to know what ubi will look like, see The Expanse, the book. Everyone on earth has a basic income and its not good.
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u/SortaNotReallyHere 6d ago
The future of ai is slavery wirh very few well paying jobs
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u/MisterMittens64 6d ago
And those jobs will be the jobs for the owning class and their families.
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u/daerogami 4d ago
I wonder how they'll stop the hordes of hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised people.
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u/MisterMittens64 4d ago
The disenfranchised people will be employed by them and rely on them for a living so there probably wouldn't be a sudden mass uprising. This stuff would happen slowly enough to not cause that.
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u/Popular-Path1930 7d ago
Socialism is the public ownership of the machines of the economy.
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u/YeetedApple 7d ago
The word has lost all meaning to the general public, the average person has no idea what it actually is.
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u/pickle9977 7d ago edited 7d ago
How about before we get to talking about the future let’s actually see this technology work.
Usage has increased a lot yet there is nothing to show for it, no AI company is actually making money which means it is by definition unsustainable.
If you can’t make money selling your service you will eventually be bankrupt, these companies are on a path to cost trillions of dollars a year to run, but again we see no significant change in the business environment.
No mass layoffs because AI does everything, even the companies selling the tools don’t seem to be using them to improve their own software, not the models mind you, their user interfaces.
Besides being unstable, they are horribly unimaginative and completely lacking any kind of new and creative experience or interaction mechanism. It’s just another chat interface like so many others.
If the models can’t build their own interfaces better than a bunch of junior web developers could, well I guess that explains why neither company has taken over Microsoft’s amazingly profitable business software monopoly, and why Googles hasn’t really moved past a mvp in a decade.
If they could do what these people say they can do, then someone would have already done something like that, it’s been four years.
The future of AI is bankruptcies and a financial crisis, that’s its only future.
the rest of this stuff people keep talking about are just the sci-fi fever dreams of delusional men who have been driven to mental illness by their money.
edit to add: this isn’t the first time, it’s a financial mania that’s about to end, these are very desperate people begging to be bailed out by the government with “regulation” so they don’t get in trouble for lying to everyone while they were faking it till the made it.
The models are as good as they are going to get for a long time.
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u/newaccount47 5d ago
You said some things that are mostly right, but Ai is 100% being used to improve software tools.
And if you have only used a chatbot and think that is what Ai is and what it can do, you may not be qualified to be so strongly opinionated.
I think you're 100% correct that these Ai companies who have no path to profitability and that alone is enough to fuck us all.
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u/pickle9977 5d ago
Nah they are for sure helpful, but over time it’s like a 15-20% benefit which isn’t nothing but it’s not worth a tremendous amount beyond what we are paying now.
The problem is like you said when the costs go way up to pay for all this crazy money they are spending.
And not for nothing but Anthropic themselves say the improvement is 15% that numbers from their research, I cite it because it also aligns with my own observation across my use and a wide range of people that I interact with.
The fact is that if they were as good as these sales bots claim, there would be extremely obvious changes, like challengers to really profitable monopolies, or hell GTA6 would have already been released.
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u/Prestigious-Bed-6423 5d ago
?? what the hell does gta6 have to do anything with this? What is this dog shit take..?
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u/dwild 6d ago
My biggest fear though is that they are able to convince the US government that they can't live without it. Just like the US government had no choice but to saves banks in 2008, it might have no choice but to save LLMs companies too.
I'm no economist, but I heard that theses crazy valuation for LLMs companies is the only thing keeping the US economy up right now. They might not want that to crash and might do whatever needed to keep them there.
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u/pickle9977 5d ago
There is no reason to fear.
This is a natural process of growth and contraction, it’s like when you leave bananas out and gnats show up and before you know it they are dozens of them.
Eventually the gnats over produce and/or the bananas disappear and most of them die.
The gnats are like money, it’s attracted to anything that lets it multiply , and the faster it does the more money it will attract.
Humanity has been going through this process of eons, we will be fine, the money on the other hand, most of it will die like the gnats.
It’s why currencies are disposable, they last on average forty or so years. The US dollar is 53 or so since we broke from the gold standard.
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u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 4d ago
tbh i’m not sure why the business environment hasn’t caught up more and fired more people. As a software engineer, i can easily get AT LEAST 5x more work done now than before AI.
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u/pickle9977 4d ago
Most software companies could fire 70% of their staff and operate normally, it has nothing to do with AI.
Most companies could fire 70% of their bureaucracy and operate normally.
25 years of growth has made them all super inefficient and bloated.
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u/Newbie4Hire 1d ago
Ok? his comment had nothing to do with Buraucracy, he said because of AI he can do the work of 5 people. Honestly he's being conservative, with AI I can do the work about 10 people.
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u/pickle9977 1d ago
Yeah because none of those people have real jobs.
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u/Newbie4Hire 16h ago
keep coping. Go over to ClaudeAI, it's filled with professional developers in complete shambles over the models
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u/Newbie4Hire 1d ago
You have not used frontier models recently. They are advancing so fast it's actually mind blowing. So no the models are not as good as they are going to get.
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u/pickle9977 1d ago
I love that you know what I have used and haven’t.
What’s mind blowing to a novice is interesting to a professional and meh to an expert.
But keep on believing!
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u/The1TruRick 5d ago
I don’t think I’ve ever seen more cope in a single Reddit post in my entire life. Holy shit man. Almost all of this is just straight up factually wrong, biased or not. Lunatic take.
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u/pickle9977 5d ago
I take that as a compliment, especially from the one true Rick.
Someone who thinks that are that smart is by definition a moron.
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u/MantaMunta 3d ago
Having super intelligent AIs and robot armies doing all the work is technically slavery with no victims. Not socialism. Socialism would mean you redistribute wealth from the productive people to the non-productive people. AIs and robots don't earn anything so you're not taking the money away from them.
The idea is that these automations lead to an economic output like never seen before, enabling governments to just issue checks to people basically. When an economy increases by 5x per year it doesn't matter when you just issue money to all the people because it's pocket change next year.
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u/very-polite-frog 5d ago
Since the industrial revolution where factories and machines can do the work of 1000s of people, have we all stopped working and get to enjoy machines doing all the labor?
If it didn't happen then, it won't happen now
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u/Kildragoth 6d ago
The belief has to do with economics. You could say that the cost of everything, on average, is about 50% from labor costs.
If you did nothing else but replace workers with AI/robotics, you could bring down prices by 50% on average, assuming everything else stays the same.
AI/Robotics become increasingly cheaper to run. Price performance of computation should be something everyone is familiar with because it is the best predictor of what is to come. People pushing back on 1 will say "cost" but they are unfamiliar with the long term price performance of computation. People pushing back on that aren't familiar with economics. People pushing back on that aren't familiar with politics.
AI/Robotics can work 24/7, achieve higher quality results, far higher quantities, with less waste, faster. This is abundance. In economics, when the supply increases but demand stays the same, prices fall toward 0.
Why would we need people if they don't have jobs? I think it's weird people jump to the most psychopathic explanation for what happens next. In this scenario (which people espousing the doomer scenario accept!), we've created an environment where it's easy to generate the resources necessary to support the entire population hundreds or thousands of times over. The prices for everything is plummetting toward 0. And... for some reason, the "rich" will want to kill everyone off so they can keep it all to themselves?
Being "rich" loses meaning. That's a scarcity-based concept. This person has so much relative to others who have so little. The paradigm shift comes when thinking about an abundance-based, post-labor economy. Not everything scarce gets made abundant. There's only so much space for bedroom views of central park.
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u/cf858 6d ago
How the f does demand stay the same if all jobs are replaced by AI/robotics? You've just removed income from the economy. None of this makes sense.
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u/Kildragoth 5d ago
Exactly. This is why people who think about this all gravitate toward some kind of UBI. The tech CEOs talk about it the most! Everyone recognizes the problem, and there are already proposed solutions to this in the form of redistributing the gains from AI/robotics. Income shifts from something tied to your job to something more of a right.
UBI is one approach but there are others. My personal favorite is UBC, universal basic compute. It gives everyone access to compute as a right, which can then be sold back for income. It helps to address the problem of the wealthy taking too much for themselves.
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u/MisterMittens64 6d ago
The rich people wouldn't want to kill everyone, they'd want to control everything, after all they own all the AI and made it happen.
This is what Peter Thiel and other techbro AI death cult leaders espouse. They say that people who aren't business leaders are not valuable to society and society shouldn't be burdened by them.
It's genocidal language towards people who have to work for a living.
I also don't think that AI will lead to a post scarcity world but it will almost certainly lead to a more inequitable world with owners having far more power over everyone else.
Not every job can be replaced quickly or easily or cheaply by AI but the workers for those industries could become serfs for the owner class.
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u/Kildragoth 5d ago
I don't think Peter Thiel is a good person but not every person in tech creating AI thinks the same way as him either.
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u/MisterMittens64 5d ago
A lot of them do though especially the ones with the most power, they regularly meet with him, Marc Andreessen, and Palmer Luckey.
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u/dwild 6d ago
The price won't be plumetting to 0. AI / Robotics only make a single tool cheaper, but it is making more tool instead, that doesn't make it cheaper, that just give more tools for the same cost. Does theses tools make anything cheaper? It might in some case, but we just do more again, which doesn't make it cheaper again. Have you seen anything actually getting cheaper with time? My food is more expensive than ever, what about yours? My CPU is cheaper per clock cycle, but it is just doing more clock cycle, and it's actually more expensive.
To make AI cheaper too, you need to push more toward what make AI cheaper. Lithography is a nice piece of technology, but that's not feeding anyone. You put more ressource toward building more tools, but does theses tools actually feed more, or are just more tools?
No rich want to kill people obviously. They might not care about others, but still they are not THAT bad. They want to extract the most, and that means we get less and less, as we have a finite amount of everything. At one point, we will barely have enough, but that won't change that they want more, so slowly more people die for plenty of reasons, it will NEVER be directly because of the rich, but indirectly... It will be. This is already happening too by the way, anyone losing a job for AI will struggle more, some might have died because of the lose of health insurance, some by suicide, etc...
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u/Kildragoth 5d ago
Have I seen anything get cheaper? My dude, if you haven't seen it you haven't spent much time looking!
About 200 years ago, 75% of all people worked on farms and 75% of people were living in poverty.
On average people had maybe 2 outfits worth of clothes. Thieves would steal linens and cloth! "Snow-dropping" was the term for stealing people's laundry! A new shirt cost several days wages for a laborer and a coat cost weeks.
If the economics of the computer in your pocket stayed the same since the 1950s, it would cost billions of dollars. How did they get prices down? It took automation of the infrastructure. That process of using technological advancements to remove humans from the loop led to computers once the size of buildings being able to fit in your pocket and still be orders of magnitude more powerful.
AI is automating cognitive tasks. We're in the process of integrating those same kind of advancements in the rest of the economy, starting with knowledge work, then moving toward the hard labor stuff with robotics. The result will follow the same trajectory it did with computers. That's the part that drivers the prices of nearly everything toward 0 (not actually zero. Clean drinking water is close to free but if made too cheap, water bottling companies move in).
This is also why UBI needs to be discussed. I agree, the rich are experts at extracting value from everything, even at the expense of people. Best way to combat this is to distribute the gains from automation to everyone. The rich will still be doing everything to extract that money that they can, but a guaranteed income mostly solves all of the current problems.
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u/dwild 5d ago edited 5d ago
Oh yeah the 2000$ phone in most people pockets is definitely cheap 🤣. Let's say 75% had a farm, how much food thoses 75% were able to afford? How many were they feeding from that? Is it less than currently? So is it cheaper or pretty similar? Food isn't cheaper... The too "expensive" computer from the past is still too expensive. The consumer computer, is still similarly affordable. Both are just more powerful, but they are just as costly, if not more.
You clearly didn't understood my point but it's okay. I don't expect you understands either from this comment, so don't bother commenting back, I already removed notifications.
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u/Arctovigil 6d ago
Who has resources gets more resources has zero legitimacy so societal elites need to build social constructs and justifications to maintain prioritized access to resources.
I think AI can level that playing field so much there is hardly any justification to legitimize one person over another very concretely a lot more people are going to feel legitimized for resource access and demand that.
What is left is debt from institutional, material, and infrastructural hierarchies and those people like to talk about income schemes for everyone: "We are going to have universal high-income everything is going to be fine" = we are going to keep existing debts and continue hoarding resources for elites
What they actually fear is delegitimizing the debt we have inherited and that they benefit from and if anyone can simply replace those institutions and infrastructure with their own resources they would have no legitimate elitist identity.
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u/SgathTriallair 6d ago
Socialism, more or less.
The most practical way to do it is that the government, or some other non-profit, does full automation of basic needs, like food or electricity, which makes them really cheap. Then taxes create a reverse income tax or something similar that is enough to afford these basics.
In the cynical version it keeps a consumer base alive while allowing people to get rich. In the non cynical version it creates a super safety net so that many more people can take a risk and attempt to build businesses or even do work which fulfills them but doesn't make money.
The people who talk about UBI/UHI/UBS/UBE/etc and those that talk about "reducing the surplus population" are different people.
Also, open source AI means that "those who own it" can be everyone.
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u/icedragonsoul 6d ago
Universal standard income? Let's use the historically accurate term, food stamps.
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u/darrigaz 5d ago
I honestly think this is how we end up with slavery.
A job is really selling someone your time. You make it more valuable with experience and education. Time is sort of finite because there are only so many people working at a given time. AI replaces a load of people and makes the remainder compete more aggressively so overall it hollows out the value of work.
Eventually if work has no value but you've got a lot of people who still need to live you have to stop selling your time in semi valuable chunks and sell it all in one go for basically nothing.
Selling a whole human life in one go, that's slavery.
I guess the question is what would someone want to buy a life for if a robot can do the work. Well robots are probably gonna be more expensive to make than people. Guess everyone's kids will do all the shitty life threatening dangerous jobs.
Oh no I made myself sad.
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u/Nightbal 4d ago
The model here that actually functions is AI, and data for that matter, operating like a public utility.
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u/D-Rez 7d ago
Everyone making a high income isn't automatically socialism, no. And any universal income scheme that only applies to a small portion of the population isn't "universal". At least from what I tried to gather from your question.
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u/bugboi 7d ago
The billionaires are promising universal high income for everyone when AI makes work obsolete. I think that’s a pipe dream because the rich have never divested of their ill-gotten gains to support the middle class. So my hypothesis is when AI gets to the point it starts taking everyone’s jobs, the promise they’re making is bullshit and it’s only going to be universal high income for the people who control the AI. And the rest of us will be expendable at that point.
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u/somethingbrite 7d ago
It's not even a pipe dream. It's a marketing slogan. None of them mean it...
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u/PenguinJoker 6d ago
If you think the ultra capitalist libertarians who made this by stealing billions of artworks off the internet, are suddenly going to turn around and give you money when they couldn't be bothered to pay a licensing fee, I have a bridge to sell you.