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A common argument I hear when I discuss future economic effects of AGI is “consumers must have money or else the economy collapses therefore gradual economic disempowerment is impossible”.
This is something I believe is false, yet I frequently find myself unable to convincingly argue so. I make the argument that capital is useful for producing more capital, and they respond with “that’s circular, someone has to buy it eventually”. I make the argument that when tools of power (like weapons) can be produced without human involvement, power can end up being obscenely concentrated, and they respond with “but there needs to be people to have power over so they will take care of the lower classes”.
I’m not sure what name to give this set of arguments, (though I’d call them misconceptions), but they generally seem to take the form of “humans are needed for the end product to be worth pursuing”. i.e humans are needed to buy any product you make, and humans are needed to be subjects of any power you have.
Am I incorrect? Do these arguments have any basis in fact? (I understand economies have momentum but I am generally talking about long term changes).
If I’m not, are there any eloquent, intuitive, rational counterarguments to these?
Yeah, it is difficult to explain the error clearly, but it reverses the arrow of causality. It is not "people have money, because companies produce goods for them" (and therefore, as long as we have companies producing, people will keep having money), but it is "companies produce goods for people, because the people have money" (so when they stop having money, the companies will simply produce goods for someone else who has money, like the other companies, or the government, or the aristocracy, or whoever is the one that has the money).
If I look around me today, there is a lot of money involved in providing services for those who have money. I work in the finance sector, because the salaries are high there. If people around me started starving, it would have no impact on my job (other than that some of those starving people might be willing to do my job cheaper than I do).
So I can easily imagine a world where 90% or even 99% people starve to death, and the rest is an ever shrinking loop of those who produce exclusive goods, those wealthy enough to consume them, and a bunch of employees who keep building and maintaining the machines, doing the necessary paperwork, providing security, etc. all the things necessary to keep the wheels turning. "But to whom will the companies sell all that bread?" Wrong question; they won't be in the bread business anymore, some of them will make expensive cakes instead, but mostly people won't be starting bread companies, but some kind of financial companies instead. Or maybe creating personalized horoscopes for the rich; simply whatever there is an actual demand (backed by actual money) for.
I think the core of the fallacy is the belief that "economy" requires always producing the same amount of bread as is produced today, or the "economy will collapse". While it is perfectly possible to produce less bread and more of some expensive services for the rich; the GDP can keep growing while the poor people starve.
Maybe if this happened overnight, then the companies currently producing the food for the poor would be worried. But if it happens gradually, then simply new food companies won't be created, because the capital would provide better returns on e.g. a research center that makes the police drones 1% more effective.
Is the (allegedly false) assertion here that economically powerful entities can't profit by exploiting people? Or that they can't exist without them?
It's that they can't exist without them. The general idea is that no matter what an entity needs people to profit off of, or to have power over. I'm not saying it makes sense