Money is just an intermediate step. Money is needed to access capital and labour. Why would you need the money to go through the hands of people who don’t do any work if you own both capital and labour, or can trade directly with the others who do?
Are you actually visualizing the world that we’re talking about here, or are you just generalizing what we know now about economics to a context that’s wildly out of domain?
Right now, capital alone is dead without labour put in. This means labour is valuable; and the only way to mass purchase labour is to pay people. Labour is the only resource that scales precisely with the number of people, and you can’t just make more of it on demand. Because labour is valuable, and virtually every person on this planet has an equal-ish share of it to rent out, everyone who wants to produce goods must pay for labour. This means that workers have some resources (note btw that looking for example at past systems like slavery does not change the situation: slavery is inefficient and expensive, especially for complex cognitive labour, and doesn’t overcome the scarcity issues, so even economically speaking and discarding all morals, it’s a dead end for an industrialised society). Since workers want to spend those resources to stay alive, and also, having as much people as possible is good because it means more labour with which to produce more, then the best thing to do is to sell them goods. Capital enhances the productivity of workers, allowing them to make a lot more stuff than they would alone; in exchange they get some of that stuff (via salaries that allows them to buy the product of other workers’ efforts), and the rest goes to those who own the capital.
AGI + robotics is capital that needs no labour. With AGI, you get all the benefits of ideal slavery without any of the downsides. You can command AGI to just make more AGI, it will grow easily way past the limits of a human supply of labour and much faster. It doesn’t just make labour a lot cheaper, pricing human labour out entirely; it changes the ownership distribution of labour. Right now, every human owns exactly one human’s worth of labour, with some allowance for variable individual capability. With AGI, if you own a server farm and enough robots, you can own thousands, millions of humans’ worth of labour. Not rent it out: own it. It’s yours, and it maintains itself. It’s also much cheaper than what you could rent. Now dedicating resources to maintaining human labourers becomes a drain on something that could just be used to make more AGI, or more products for you to use. Don’t auto-farm to feed billions, auto-farm to feed thousands (you and your fellow AGI-capitalists), and exchange the food with them for whatever extravagant products their robotic factories make, and save all the other labour to do more fun stuff. The other humans have nothing to offer you; they used to have a nigh-monopoly on labour by sheer dint of numbers, but that’s not the case any more. The economy would be completely upended, and this would inevitably also reflect on social and moral norms, in time.
Capitalists need labour to make things to sell things to make money. Labour needs money for practical things like clothes and shelter. Top tier capitalists are way beyond that: they use money to score their status games. How do they do that if they can’t sell anything.
Money is just an intermediate step. Money is needed to access capital and labour. Why would you need the money to go through the hands of people who don’t do any work if you own both capital and labour, or can trade directly with the others who do?
If you are not selling stuff to other people in some sense, you are not going to pull ahead of other billionaires.
Are you actually visualizing the world that we’re talking about here, or are you just generalizing what we know now about economics to a context that’s wildly out of domain?
Right now, capital alone is dead without labour put in. This means labour is valuable; and the only way to mass purchase labour is to pay people. Labour is the only resource that scales precisely with the number of people, and you can’t just make more of it on demand. Because labour is valuable, and virtually every person on this planet has an equal-ish share of it to rent out, everyone who wants to produce goods must pay for labour. This means that workers have some resources (note btw that looking for example at past systems like slavery does not change the situation: slavery is inefficient and expensive, especially for complex cognitive labour, and doesn’t overcome the scarcity issues, so even economically speaking and discarding all morals, it’s a dead end for an industrialised society). Since workers want to spend those resources to stay alive, and also, having as much people as possible is good because it means more labour with which to produce more, then the best thing to do is to sell them goods. Capital enhances the productivity of workers, allowing them to make a lot more stuff than they would alone; in exchange they get some of that stuff (via salaries that allows them to buy the product of other workers’ efforts), and the rest goes to those who own the capital.
AGI + robotics is capital that needs no labour. With AGI, you get all the benefits of ideal slavery without any of the downsides. You can command AGI to just make more AGI, it will grow easily way past the limits of a human supply of labour and much faster. It doesn’t just make labour a lot cheaper, pricing human labour out entirely; it changes the ownership distribution of labour. Right now, every human owns exactly one human’s worth of labour, with some allowance for variable individual capability. With AGI, if you own a server farm and enough robots, you can own thousands, millions of humans’ worth of labour. Not rent it out: own it. It’s yours, and it maintains itself. It’s also much cheaper than what you could rent. Now dedicating resources to maintaining human labourers becomes a drain on something that could just be used to make more AGI, or more products for you to use. Don’t auto-farm to feed billions, auto-farm to feed thousands (you and your fellow AGI-capitalists), and exchange the food with them for whatever extravagant products their robotic factories make, and save all the other labour to do more fun stuff. The other humans have nothing to offer you; they used to have a nigh-monopoly on labour by sheer dint of numbers, but that’s not the case any more. The economy would be completely upended, and this would inevitably also reflect on social and moral norms, in time.
Capitalists need labour to make things to sell things to make money. Labour needs money for practical things like clothes and shelter. Top tier capitalists are way beyond that: they use money to score their status games. How do they do that if they can’t sell anything.