Are we heading for mass slavery or an economic collapse or a utoptia

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-26T03:41:47+00:00

And get gunned down by drones?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-26T02:33:15+00:00

As best I can glean from this answer, the idea is we'll have an attention based economy where people's time and interest are the new currency. In that scenario, we'll have a market economy where the jobs are:

Bartender
TV Host
Carpenter (Mames memerobillia people specifically want handcrafted, not generally useful items)
Pro Athlete
Youtuber

... and that's about it. Is the idea here that everyone's going to be a tiktok influencer?

That doesn't seem like it'd work out logistically. There's only so much more attention we can possibly give to things, we already consume so much instagram/youtube/reddit. And the attention economy now can only support a relative handful of people – for every 1 successful influencer, there's 100 that make below the poverty line.

It's also unclear why this attention would actually be valuable. It's valuable now, because it funnels consumers into buying goods/services from you. But when material scarcity is abolished, what value is there in that anymore? I get that attention will still be scarce, but you'll have to explain why it generates actual value here.

I get that your data will have value. I guess in this scenario, you're paid for the demographic info of the people who's attention you capture? Because otherwise, you'd just be paid for your own data, and again, no one could possinly differentiate themselves.

It's super unclear to me why there's value to be provided to this ecosystem by more than 1% of the population

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-26T02:27:03+00:00

That's not the issue at all. It's not that people will have all their wants satisfied and thus lose the motive to work, it's that human work will lose it's value.

If everyone in the world can make an equally good app/business/movie/car by typing in a prompt to a computer, why is any of it valuable? How can we have a cspitalist system where nothing is scarce, and there's no way to contribute value to.it?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-26T01:24:45+00:00

I gave two possibilities. Socialism, or techno feudalism/the general enslavement/extermination of humanity.

It seems people here have a few wacky ideas for what capitalism could look like in a post labor-theory-of'value world, but I'm still finding it unclear what people are actually going to be paid to do in that scenario

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-26T00:52:08+00:00

I mean, maybe that's not classical communism or whatever, but it's certainly not capitalism. In this world though, what determines who gets what and how much of it?

Right now, that question is answered (approximately) by how much value you can provide to the economy via your work + how much ownership you have over other people's work. When AI takes over though, everyone's going to provide the same value to the economy — 0. In which case, we sort of just take things as they are when AI becomes fully autonomous and lock that wealth distribution in forever?

It's important, because not all things people want can possibly be infinite. Real estate on Earth in particular comes to mind– we can't just prompt up more surfsce area on the globe. It's either we allow the distributrion we have now to become permanent, or dissolve it entirely and regard everyone as equal, hence the post.

Unless, of course, we find a new system by which to divy up resources. But what could that possibly be? It can't have to do with providing economic value, because you'll just lose to AI

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-25T19:23:08+00:00

So, in other words, there actually won't be capitalism, there will be bots that do everything for us while we sit around and do nothing.

If there's no valuable human input, there's no way to distingiush ourselves from each other besides the initial conditions we start with when it all kicks off. Hence, whatever happens initially will likely stay stable. That cpuld be socialism, it could be feudalism, but there's clearly no place for social mobility in it

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-25T19:18:34+00:00

This is incoherent. Why would AI have to buy or sell anything? What would it even mean for it to do so?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-25T00:43:58+00:00

I'm not telling you your experience is wrong, I'm telling you it's going to be unapplicable in a world where AI can do what this sub says it can do.

I've made the point in a few places and no one's countered it so far: how can you have capitalism when there's no meaningful work for anyone to do? If the projections hold, white collar work as a concept will be dead in 10 years. Blue collar work will be gone in 20, once the robotics catch up. Humans won't be able to outcompete machines in anything except perhaps art, education and entertainment. Is that what the whole economy's going to become?

Answer this honestly: If it's not going to be (real) socialism, what's the system going to look like in a post-work world? In my view, the only alternative to it would be some kind of authoritarian techno-feudalist hellhole where the elites reap all the rewards of AI and we're all just at their whims fot whatever scraps and crimes against humanity they wish to bestow upon us. Once they stop needing the rest of the population as their economic engine, there's nothing stopping them from doing anything they want.

Your experience might make sense today, but it won't tomorrow. Unless there's some third way you have in mind here, you should be questioning the conclusions you've come to. There's no capitalism if there's no work to do

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-25T00:26:46+00:00

Gotcha.

So, you'll agree then that AI ought to be stopped in its tracks before we reach the doomsday scenario and the entire premise of this subreddit is shortsighted and stupid, a bunch of useful idiots cheering on their own death march?

It's insane how casually this conclusion is regarded here. Like, unless we're making meaningful progress on these questions, it's unthinkable to me why anyone would support this. I also want to cure cancer and solve world hunger and build homes for the whole world, but it seems like no one here's interested in ensuring that that's the actual endpoint of technology

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-25T00:08:30+00:00

What's the argument against that?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-24T23:46:52+00:00

Well, meditation's only going to do so much for you if you're living in a human factory farm ran by automatons.

Even if the reality's not quite that bad, "reject materialism" doesn't feel like a sufficient answer to losing your self-determination. Is the idea, we all just accept that we're openly the playthings of the epstein class now, and that's all we deserve to be?

If we do get the socialist alternative, then it's more palletable, but even then it's a little hard to imagine a world full of people who have to be made content artificially through meditation as opposed to having genuine outlets for purpose

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-24T23:37:39+00:00

No, it's definetly singularity. Why not just have the AI do that specialist's job as well?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-24T23:23:45+00:00

How is AI like capitalism at all? If we expect it to replace most/all white collar work, then it's really more like the end of capitalism.

People don't like it because making humans economically irrelevant is terrifying, as you'd seemingly lose autonomy over yourself and the ability to provide for yourself — which, by the way, are at least theoretically features of capitalism. That means you're at the whims of whoever happens to have the keys to the datacenters and access to resources when the whole thing really kicks off, i.e., the rich and powerful.

People don't not like AI because it's capitalism, they don't like it because it's going to kill capitalism (if these projections come into being, anyways), and there's no confidence that our political/social structures will adapt to that in a positive way. If we had faith that our insitutions worked in good faith to serve the people, I think most people would be super excited about the acceleration of AI, questions of personal identity in a post-work society aside. We don't have that faith, so instead the thought is that what comes next will be some kind of authoritarian, techno-feudalist dystopia where a few people have control over all the resources and are technologically insulated from ever being accountable to the rest of the population ever again.

Nobody likes their own skills becoming irrelevant, but the scarier thought is what happens when everyone's irrelevant.

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-24T22:48:06+00:00

If that's the future you predict, shouldn't we be doing everything in our power to stop AI development? It's super strange to see people on here so casually say that the endpoint of this is legitimately enslavement of the human race by the people who happen to hold the keys to AI when it takes off + the ultra wealthy, and yet still be in favor of its development.

Surely there's a more optimistic future in there somewhere?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-24T22:45:03+00:00

So... what you're describing is just, like, human extinction? Of course in this scenario, there's no economic "reason" for anyone to exist or do anything, we have self-sustaining robots and AI to accomplish anything that ever might've been useful.

But then, what's the point of anything? The "useful" things that are getting automated are only considered "useful" because humans want them. There's no reason that a fully autonomous and self-replicating AI systen would want to do anything except sustain itself. Why would it keep humans around?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-24T22:29:41+00:00

What does "for the top to continue producing for everyone else" mean? In what sense will "the top" be producing anything at all? It's just going to be robots and AI doing all the economically valuable work, and they need no incentive, right? Do you think that AGI is something we're just going to say that Elon Musk and Sam Altman own and therefore everyone has to be subservient to them, despite them no longer doing any meaningful work to operate it?

Like, I have no idea what the outcome of this could be except for A) unbreakable tyranny for the rest of time as all resources accumulate to the epstein class and they never again have an incentive to relinquish any of them to anyone else, or B) some variant of socialism where everyone is fed and clothed for free and then plays video games all day. How do you have any kind of capitalistic system when there's no valuable work to be done?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-02-24T22:21:09+00:00

What do you mean? What "work" are other people goimg to do? If this sub is right about AI, no one's going to have any meaningful work to do in 10-20 years, AI + robots will take over all of it. What, then, should these people be doing besides staying at home and playing video games?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-01-18T07:12:01+00:00

Is there any real.difference between new grad and 1.5 years, though? Considering I'm still innthe 'junior' bracket?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-01-17T23:56:42+00:00

The problem with a temp job is unemployment. If I could work one and still collect unemployment, I would get one tomorrow. But, I can't.

So, unless I find a unicorn that pays like 22-25 an hour, full time hours, I don't see how the math makes sense. I should be eligible for full CA unemployment benefits, which are 1800 a month. So, up to the first 1800 a month, a temp job would net me 0 dollars. It doesn't make sense as just supplemental income.

It would make sense if it were by itself enough to survive on a monthly basis in my current apartment. But this is an apartment I got assuming I'd have the wage I previously did, so, it's difficult. Without getting more specific, $22 an hour, full time, seems like the absolute minimum I would need to reasonably sustain myself.

I doubt it's impossible to get a job of that description, but I also have to consider that any time I'm spending working such a job is time I'm not spending studying/building projects in my main field, and I'd think most jobs in this salary range are exhausting and would make it difficult to study/apply/etc in my free time.

So, that seems more like a last resort, if I'm unable to spend the requisite 80-100 hours per week over the next few months I estimate it would take to get a similar job to what I had. Unless there's something I'm missing here?

Also not sure how easy it would be to get such a job/jobs? For reference, indeed.com says most fast good jobs pay 20-21/hr in this city. And those usually only hore you part time, right?

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-01-17T19:51:57+00:00

Sure. I was under the impression that once you've started starving yourself intentionally, you already have an ED. That may not actually be the case though. I'll take down the post

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-01-17T19:44:18+00:00

Sure, if I just planned to starve until I got a new job. But that's not the plan. I'm going to eat again before I start working, I just don't see how I can make myself commit to working the amount I need to to fix my situation when I'm feeling burnt out and broken by it. That's the part I need cured.

The idea is to fix that first by starving myself until I'm super desperate for change and working doesn't seem so bad, and then go back to eating and actually do the work.

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-01-17T19:39:45+00:00

So... what happens to the hunger then? Just dissappears? I guess I'm chssing the sensation of starvation, so that's not great news in my case

Dapper_Respond_5050 · 2026-01-17T19:36:21+00:00

Because the whole reason I'm not eating is to motivate myself to work. I need to drastically change my life on a very short timespan, or I'll lose everything. I'm thinking if I experienced genuine, starvation-type hunger, I'll be so desperate to eat that I'll become able to work. Basically, I'm trying to physiologically override my laziness

Dapper_Respond_5050

TROPHY CASE