Everybody’s rushing right now.
Quick! Work harder! Work faster! Work now, and get rich quick, or you will never escape the permanent underclass!
People expect, and I think rightly, that the private property rights of today will be respected in the future. So the idea is, if you collect many money-tokens now, property deeds, various ownership documents, etc, they will all continue to have value in the future.
That if you own shares in a company that ends up capturing all labor value, you will benefit from the value captured by this company. I don’t think they’re wrong.
But the point is that everybody I know is rushing to catch the end of this wave, perhaps the final wave of opportunity in history: your last chance to make generational wealth to keep you and your descendants floating well above the sweaty masses.
And I get it, I do. But I also think this is a distinctly Murican feeling. As a proud European, I can tell you this:
AI taking all jobs is not a tragedy. It’s liberation.
It’s freeing us from indentured servitude, from the daily toil. From being a cogwheel in an old rusty machine. From loneliness, sickness, anxiety and depression.
But how will we earn a living! — I hear you cry — Will 99% of us join the dreadful permanent underclass?
Well, you have identified, quite correctly, that Artificial General/Super Intelligence will make the value of your labor trend to zero. But you might be forgetting the flip side of this:
Labor is one of the scarcest and priciest inputs. Near-zero labor costs, combined with scientific advances will bring us algorithmic abundance.
The price of everything will trend to zero.
And I honestly struggle to see how in a world where goods and services provide themselves, AI recursively improves itself and science automatically and exponentially, there wouldn’t be enough wealth to keep a large majority of all people perfectly content.
And to those fearing a society split between the ultra rich with all the power and the ultra poor with none, I say: it will make sense to keep the permanent underclass perfectly content and entertained. Panem et circensis for everyone. The cost of it will be so small it simply wouldn’t be worth the alternative.
I believe we can very easily tick off most boxes in the Maslow hierarchy: housing, nutrition, health care, safety, transport, education, leisure, community, love.
And with just enough time and enough enablement from technology and culture, we might all find something to fill those last two boxes at the top: self-esteem and self-actualization.
I think it’s pretty likely that the permanent underclass will benefit from the end of all jobs even more than the 1%.
And I will be happy to be a part of it.
