no permanent underclass
look most economic assumptions pretty clearly break if ai progress continues in its current direction. there's no need to coordinate the incentives structures of rational economic agents when you can spin up better-than-human entities *arbitrarily aligned to any goal*.
@tenobrusthe whole concept of "permanent underclass" is pretty obviously ridiculous. it relies on a tiny target combination of very aligned very tool-like AI plus continuation of current social structures. inequality will be something that gets massively magnified for a few years at most
there's no utility to be had in investing in someone else attempting to solve a problem when you can just spin up a perfectly aligned corporation yourself. there's no need for governments to rely on private labor incentive structures when they can just specify their desires
it quickly collapses to a simple question: who in fact gets to spin up agents? who owns the data centers, and who spins up the power-consolidation-swarms first? that's all that matters. once done they do not need further coordination. they certainly don't need to sell access 🤣
so it's either one of the frontier labs, or it's a government. it's easily a government if they're smart enough, the only way they let a frontier lab retain control of their assets to the point of criticality is if they totally fail to realize what's coming
if it's a government then that's basically it. political and resource singleton. communism in fact basically works in the presence of infinite align-able labor. central planning basically works. private innovation is totally pointless.
why bother incentivizing private innovation and research when any gov employee can just as easily kick off the research swarm? nothing whatsoever differentiates any given human anymore
if its a frontier lab you basically end up at the same outcome with more steps and less legitimacy
the only other possibility is multi-polar, multiple labs or governments each consolidate agent-capabilities at basically the same time. then incentives are more complicated but there remain very few relevant actors
but the hypercapitalist fantasy of every random billionaire and millionaire being able to become a trillionaire by leasing gigacompute? obvious nonsense. the power gets consolidated. these troops and laborers do not need to be paid or even talked into their goals.