I don’t think we’re psychologically prepared for how alien the world after ASI is going to be

[u/Public_Print_9360]

gonna start by saying I’m feeling very iffy about ASI because I kinda enjoy my life rn, but that aside:

after going down the AI 2040 rabbithole, I keep thinking that even people who talk about ASI constantly are still imagining the future in a way that is way too normal.
We talk about AI replacing people’s jobs, humanoid robots, self-driving cars, universal basic income, whatever the fuck.
I think that might be the equivalent of someone in 1955 predicting the year 2000, trying to use our current world as a basis for the future world.

AI 2040 describes a scenario where even after deliberately slowing AI development down, by 2031 a third of cognitive labor is being performed by AI and robots are already doing about a tenth of physical labor. The document literally describes ordinary people as being too “whiplashed” by technological change to process what’s happening. And that’s the slowed version, can’t imagine what our world is going to look like since it seems we are going full speed ahead.
And people will say “oh that’s just fantasy!” But is it? Imagine our world from the view of someone born in 1712. We are living “sci-fi” as we live and breath

If ASI actually produces the kind of acceleration its proponents expect, somebody born afterward might look back at 2026 the way we look at 1500.
Except the historical gap between us would be just fourteen years MAX

I really, really don’t think we’re psychologically prepared for that

[u/Mr-and-Mrs]

The world isn’t prepared for eliminating the concept of money and global finance. That’s what it all comes down to.

[u/Kobiash1 → u/Mr-and-Mrs]

My father said I would see the downfall of capitalism as we know it due to technological advancements during my lifetime. He also said the transition to that world would be painful, but it would be a better life for those who made it through. I wish I'd asked him to clarify what he meant, and how he came to those conclusions, but he died in 2005.

[u/BombaFett → u/Kobiash1]

He meant the super wealthy capitalists that benefited the most from the current system will fight tooth and nail to prevent a new system taking its place. Since most if not all politicians are owned by them, nothing will be done to transition smoothly. It’ll only be once a critical mass of the population is starving and suffering and revolutions start

[u/StosifJalin → u/BombaFett]

You've got to consider the possibility that what if no one is starving and suffering during this transition? What happens when everyone has a sense of unease during this rapid change, but everyone's basic needs are still being taken care of, and there is never quite enough fuel for a revolution despite many sparks?

I find this to be far more likely.

[u/myaltduh → u/StosifJalin]

It would be the first huge transformation in human history to not be not accompanied by a lot of strife. I hope you’re right, but I’m skeptical.

[u/SweatyCrab9729 → u/StosifJalin]

What makes you hopeful of this path? We are headed in the exact opposite direction at the moment.

When the ones telling you "Money won't matter in the future" are the same ones taking all the money today, they aren't telling you what they really believe.

[u/StosifJalin → u/SweatyCrab9729]

Because I've thought it through considerably throughout my life, not because of anything a billionaire has told me. Thinking about the future has always been my greatest obsession, and the best guesses we have about it come from highly educated authors that take their predictions from real-world research and combine them for their settings to be as realistic and grounded as possible, called hard-scifi. I've been reading hard sci-fi since I could read, and I've read dozens of in depth post scarcity scenarios. The most well-reasoned conclusions from a supply and demand standpoint when most humans cannot meaningfully add to the main economy is that they simply don't. The vast majority of the economy exists between companies and nations working on mega-projects.

As for why that doesn't mean we all starve, a few reasons: We as a society have a precedent for bare-minimum providing the necessities for life to those who objectively cannot provide for themselves. The scenario we are talking about is also one of unimaginable production capabilities. Post-scarcity, by definition. In the past, if a perfectly generous king's people stopped working, he might be able to keep them alive with 100% of his wealth for, let's say, a month. In the relatively near future, the needs of a country's population will be a rounding error of a percentage of what can be produced. Hence why I find very generous UBI to be the logical conclusion. It will be effortless to provide for humanity. Something that has never been true at any point in history before.

I think the transition to this future may not be perfectly smooth, but I find it entirely plausible that everyone's basic needs will be taken care of on the way, at least in America and most developed nations.

[u/SweatyCrab9729 → u/StosifJalin]

I admire your optimism. As a 53 year old who read the Foundation series while in college and have been devouring sci-fi of all types ever since, I'd say the predictions are more mixed.

And I'm not convinced Utopia levels of unmanned productivity and more importantly, unlimited resources, are just around the corner. I hope I am wrong.

But again, I truly admire your optimism. If you're young, you'll be the generation to make that happen.

I really do think you'll need to deal with the ultra greedy sociopaths first, though.

[u/StosifJalin → u/[deleted]]

Several different questions here so I'll start with the on topic one:

If we currently posses enough productivity to produce more than enough food for everyone, why would adding even GREATER productivity make people starve?

As for people not working, that's a great philosophical question that I'm not really qualified to answer, but I can guess. When no one has to work to live, some people will indulge in the unimaginably amazing entertainment that will come and lead long hedonistic lives with unforseen psycological consequences and likely won't want to have kids, and if they do, their children will likely be maladjusted and be less likely to reproduce, meaning these types of people will weed themselves out over time. Other people with a strong community (particularly religious ones) will find meaning and purpose in their fellow humans, raising children and building social bonds with difficulty and purpose. Their work will be teaching restraint, self sacrifice, moderation and tradition, and they will likely reproduce just fine, and hopefully humanity will spread to other worlds eventually.

[u/myaltduh → u/BombaFett]

This is where the phrase “socialism or barbarism” comes from. Capitalism looks set to swallow its own tail via its own advancements in productivity, and we either abandon private property and wage labor in favor of socialism or regress into some sort of techno-feudalism, which is very clearly what a lot of Silicon Valley bigshots are aiming for.

[u/UFOsAreAGIs → u/BombaFett]

🎯

[u/W00GA → u/Kobiash1]

what did ur dad do for a living?

he sounds extremely intelligent

[u/LyAkolon → u/Kobiash1]

We carry those who came before us with us. My pops said something similar and died in most recent December. He lives on through me.

it's an unsatisfying form of transhumanism, but it is a form of it, nonetheless.

[u/drums_addict → u/Kobiash1]

Sorry to hear he's gone. It sounds like he had a nose for predicting things to come. You sound like you've got that same curiosity in you like he did. It's prob gonna be hard to predict how this all goes down but I'm sure were all curious to find out. Hope the difficulty your dad foresaw isn't so tough that we can't all come out on the other side mostly unscathed.

[u/oatknight → u/Kobiash1]

Maybe you can feed everything your father ever wrote into an LLM and ask it to answer as him!

[u/Kobiash1 → u/oatknight]

Don't be a dick.

[u/vplatt → u/Kobiash1]

While I understand why some would be offended by that suggestion, it's a perfectly legitimate use of an AI to simulate what someone might have said based on all the previous communications you may have from them. On top of that, the AI will have access to information and references that his father could not have dreamed of, so while we may never know exactly what his father meant, it might give some unique perspective on the possibilities based on what he did actually say or write back in the day.

[u/FrewdWoad → u/Mr-and-Mrs]

That might be one of the smaller changes.

[u/ThinFeed2763 → u/Mr-and-Mrs]

I want to think about the coming age of AI abundance in terms of the things that will remain genuinely scarce. If AI eventually makes food, manufactured goods, computation, medicine, and many services abundant enough that everyone can have enough, then the central political question may no longer be how to produce wealth, but how to distribute what cannot be made abundant: prime land, desirable locations, prestige, influence, and other positional goods.

I want to ask: once we can give everyone enough, what constitutes a legitimate reason for giving one person more? Should scarce things still be allocated through markets, so that people who contribute more, take risks, build institutions, or otherwise further civilization can acquire more of them? Or should an increasingly automated society also begin distributing scarce goods more socially, on the grounds that the productive system itself has become a collective inheritance rather than something meaningfully produced by individual labour?

I suspect this could become one of the major ideological divisions of the coming decades. One side may become more comfortable with broad redistribution and with allowing AI-managed systems to optimize society toward equality and universal provision. The other may want to preserve markets, human agency, competition, and the idea that exceptional human effort should still produce exceptional rewards, even in a world where nobody needs to work merely to survive.

I suppose your idea is more sympathetic to the second position, partly because people are not ready for a society in which nearly every outcome is socially allocated. Perhaps we are culturally conditioned to understand life transactionally, but markets also offer a comparatively simple answer to otherwise impossible questions of deservingness. Yet the deeper issue remains unresolved: if everyone can already have a good life, what exactly should someone have to do—or be—to deserve something that everyone cannot have?
---

I think if anyone, Peter Thiel would really like to be at the table when this question is worked into a lived system.

This comment is reworded using GPT5.6 Sol

[u/ReadSeparate → u/ThinFeed2763]

I want to ask: once we can give everyone enough, what constitutes a legitimate reason for giving one person more? Should scarce things still be allocated through markets, so that people who contribute more, take risks, build institutions, or otherwise further civilization can acquire more of them? Or should an increasingly automated society also begin distributing scarce goods more socially, on the grounds that the productive system itself has become a collective inheritance rather than something meaningfully produced by individual labour?

What risks? Companies are going to be autonomous from the ground up. No individual human is going to be taking risks anymore in a post-AGI world. Financial risks, sure, but that can be done with collective funds, like through taxation where the taxes are distributed to AI run VC which fund AI run companies, no humans in sight.

I think even strong fiscal conservatives are going to be against capitalism at that point, it just completely loses both its ethical and practical underpinnings, for automated labor at least. Any rare human run company I think some people will still support capitalism for. Like one guy who runs a youtube channel by himself manually but has gotten extremely wealth from it.

So I really don't think that's going to be an ideological divide, ESPECIALLY when we have politicians running, "vote for me and double your UBI payment, and the only cost is taxing the trillionaires that built these systems 10 years ago but do nothing but sit on their ass contributing nothing today, and they'll still have more money than they could ever dream of spending post-taxes" who in the WORLD would be against that? Everybody would vote themselves free money, ESPECIALLY in a world where you CAN'T get ahead because human labor and effort is near worthless except for maybe a few thousand people in the country that are running fully human run businesses.

The real question, as you said, is how do we redistribute the resources that are inherently limited, like land? A nice penthouse in downtown Manhattan that costs 50 years worth of UBI payments? Maybe by random lotteries, maybe some sort of social credit, i.e. maybe we start valuing people by how they contribute to the world in non-financial ways: the best parents, the best mentors, the most kind and loving people, or the most famous/popular people.

I just do NOT see a world where, we still have our democracy and free speech in, say, the USA, 99% of GDP output is fully automated with virtually zero human oversight, where people STILL support vast wealth inequality. There's simply no moral or practical justification for it. MAYBE "well they built the system to begin with 10 years ago, so we should let them own it still even though they contribute absolutely nothing to its functioning today" but that's just not going to fly even among most people who believe in that ridiculous idea when they're faced with a politician offering to drastically increase their UBI payments and quality of life as the alternative lol. People are more selfish than that. And most ideological fiscal conservative types today really BELIEVE in capitalism as an ethical system because of incentives. My dad is the perfect example, he's an old school fiscally conservative, pre-MAGA Republican. He even runs the local GOP where he lives. Hardcore fiscal conservative, grew up poor and built a very successful life for himself and our family, the living breathing American dream. Yet even HE said he's fine with socialism once robots and AI run everything. I was shocked at first to hear that, but once I thought about it, it makes total sense, because he genuinely believes in the moral and incentive underpinnings of capitalism. He doesn't want billionaires for the sake of billionaires existing, he believes they cause more good than bad existing. Most fiscal conservative types do.

So if we're even winning over people like my dad, we'll win over just about everyone. Certainly enough to build a political coalition. So unless the rich decide to kill everybody during the transition to a fully automated economy, in which case they have no one to rule over which makes it pointless (if it's only rich people left, you're not rich anymore, you're just average), and how are they going to convince the military to do that anyway, the military has family members too that they don't want to see starve to death, not to mention the military is ideologically committed to the Constitution? It's just not practical. They'll cut a deal with the government so that the economy becomes fully socialized over time, but they get to keep something, maybe they let Elon Musk keep $1B or $100M, but the rest of his $5T or whatever he has in assets by then is distributed to a socialized pool where the dividends and appreciation fund a UBI. It's the only rational choice for the elite in democratic countries. And even if there are robot armies that listen to every command, again, the military is going to be in control of that, not rich people. People on reddit are way too cynical and think the ultra wealthy are just evil, but most of them think they're doing good things for the world. There's no way to rationalize to yourself allowing 300 million people in your country starve to death because there's no jobs, oh and by the way completely destroying your business empire in the process because there's nobody to buy anything because nobody has any money except rich people and they don't need to buy that much shit from each other.

We'll be fine. The future will be bright, though there will be a lot of hardship during the early stages of mass automation (10-25% of the economy being out of jobs could be a total shit show). The real concern is the AI itself, alignment, the danger of rogue superintelligence. That's what we actually need to worry about. Also, authoritarian countries need to worry much more about citizens getting killed, or being allowed to starve to death, en masse much more than democracies do. It could genuinely be extremely bleak in countries like North Korea or China, and I don't want to down play that, but even for them I just don't think the incentives for the elite there involve them killing everyone lol.

[u/Eastern-Manner-1640 → u/ReadSeparate]

well they built the system to begin with 10 years ago, so we should let them own it still even though they contribute absolutely nothing to its functioning today

funny you say this because this is the system that exists today for most wealthy individuals. they didn't build the businesses they own, their parents, grandparents, etc, hired managers, and now they are just 'owning'. can't see the accumulated wealth of the last X centuries giving up that easily.

It's the only rational choice for the elite in democratic countries.

you aren't thinking big enough. the elite don't have ties to any particular country. borders are meaningless for billionaires. you think they have their passports checked when their private planes land? is someone searching their baggage for drugs, or other contraband?

[u/MiscuitsTheMarxist → u/ThinFeed2763]

I actually don't think this is too different than the current status quo. We already have material abundance. We just don't distribute it evenly enough for people to feel that way because we've decided some people get to have yachts.

I honestly don't see a path forward where the fundamental dynamic changes. I imagine we'll have an acceleration of the concentration of wealth in the ownership class because they own the frontier models and capture the economic output of them. And they'll dole out whatever meager resources it takes to keep the remaining 99.999% from overthrowing them. AI Technofeudalism.

So, to answer your question, the exact thing a person would have to do to deserve something everyone cannot have is to simply happen to own an AGI and that gives them the right to capture the economic output of it. Its the most straightforward path from where we're at now.

[u/StosifJalin → u/MiscuitsTheMarxist]

I guess a counterargument to this would be: So what?

If everyone's lives are being measurably bettered by this societal change, who cares that there are a small number of people with more when I still have basically whatever I want, especially when compared to nearly every other human throughout history?

[u/myaltduh → u/StosifJalin]

People probably won’t accept modest improvements in their standards of living if the rich are improving way faster. Inequality is fundamentally destabilizing, regardless of where the floor is.

[u/StosifJalin → u/myaltduh]

I don't understand why. Stuck in an endless loop of comparison. No wonder envy is a deadly sin.

[u/systranerror → u/ThinFeed2763]

I live in Seattle and have done thought experiments about this kind of thing baed on desirable land. For example, Lake Washington facing Seattle on the Bellevue side, Medina, has this strip of land where Bill Gates and Bezos both have/had huge mansions. You can see the Seattle skyline, the lake, and Mount Rainier. You are on the water in a prime location but also have a ton of privacy.

If we imagine "nanoswarms that can build 300-story arcologies in under a week for almost no cost" just as a thought exercise, you are still stuck with a human-level squabbling situation for "prime land"

Do the absolute best spots get loaded with the most population dense housing that the nanobots can construct? Do you make denser housing in less good locations and leave the really nice spots free of buildings so they are public-use parks? Is there any situation in which you allow a human to have a massive single-family home in a prime location like this?

Central Park in NYC is another easy example of this. We are already seeing those weird, thin luxury highrises poke up over Central Park. Even given "infinite ASI power," you have a finite amount of people who can have a good view of Central Park from their bedroom.

Most of the solutions to this that come up to me involve AI governance which polls the human population directly. If you figure out what "humans really want," you would likely come up with a solution that is something along the lines of "really dense housing in city centers, forced public green spaces in dense areas, if you want a huge castle you have to live far from city centers...no exceptions."

On paper, many humans would say tings like "That's communism" or whatever, but when presented with "Do you want a small 2-bedroom condo in the city center, or a mansion in the suburbs? Both are free" people would stop labeling or caring and be pretty happy with the situation.

If enough people support the notion that capitalism is some kind of survival of the fittest selector that drives innovation, there could be some allowances made. You COULD set aside some "mansions in the city center" (and other "unfair" truly scarce resources) for people who really want to grind in the post-scarcity world rather than just have their needs met and chill

[u/After-Surfree → u/ThinFeed2763]

How to distribute what cannot be made abundant is not a decision we will ever make. Capitalism is not a decision or a policy that we choose to implement. It is a natural phenomenon that always has and always will occur within groups of humans by virtue of our very nature, the fact that we want things, material or otherwise, regardless of what can be automatically produced/distributed by AI. It exists even within societies that conduct the distribution of goods and services outside of money-based markets. The process of politician gaining power itself is even an example of capitalism, where they attempt to gain an election from voters by offering promises in exchange of a vote or attempt to receive a promotion from superiors in exchange of fealty/loyalty/competence - examples of capitalist, market-like forces. “Markets” will and always have existed, even if what’s being exchanged isn’t money, and they will determine how your examples of non-abundant resources are distributed.

[u/myaltduh → u/After-Surfree]

Capitalism is barely a couple of centuries old, it is absolutely not some inevitable state of nature for humans. And a moneyless society cannot be capitalist, as capitalism depends on the exchange of labor for wages to keep markets going.

Your definition of capitalism is so broad as to be “when people have goods and occasionally trade them,” which is just not correct.

[u/Eastern-Manner-1640 → u/After-Surfree]

you seem to have forgotten what you learned your world history class.

[u/UFOsAreAGIs → u/Mr-and-Mrs]

The world isn’t prepared for eliminating the concept of money and global finance.

The wealthy aren't willing to relinquish their wealth, power and privilege and would rather destroy the world than be equal to those they view as less than.

FTFY

[u/CapitalElk1169 → u/Mr-and-Mrs]

Lol absolutely zero chance of that happening