[ probably the wrong place for this debate, so I’ll sign off after this. Feel free to respond/rebut/correct me, and I’ll read and do my best to learn, but won’t respond. ]
But I was trying to challenge this idea that you were somehow still going to earn your daily bread by selling the product of your labor… presumably to the holders of capital
I’m not sure I said that. It’s quite possible that many people will not be able to provide more value to the consensus of the rest of the world than they consume, and that will be unstable in unpleasant ways. I do pretty strongly expect that, on the long term, each person (or each dunbar-ish-sized group in many cases) must be seen as positive-value to the resource-allocators, whether they be distributed in markets, concentrated in political forms, or alien AIs. Capitalism is more of a result of property rights and optional trade than a chosen cause of such things (though it’s that too—current winners tend to push harder than “natural” resource ownership/allocation mechanisms do).
We’re headed toward a world in which letting any human make a really major decision about resource allocation would mean inefficient use of the resources. Possibly insupportably inefficient.
Oh, yeah. I fully agree that benevolent dictatorship would be great, and I do give some weight that AI will create dictatorship-conditions, either of the AIs or of humans that manage to corral the AIs at the right point in time. I don’t give a lot of weight to the hope that such a system will be all that benevolent to the non-producing class of humans.
there will remain SOME form personal property,
That’s not capitalism. Not unless it’s ownership of capital, and really if you want it to look like what the word “capitalism” connotes, it kind of has to be a quite a lot of capital. Enough to sustain yourself from what it produces.
This is probably a major point of disagreement. Whether a given resource is capital or not is based on it’s USE, not it’s nature. If individuals can influence the ways that resources are allocated to produce value for others, and be variably rewarded based on the success of that allocation or uses, they are involved in capitalism.
[ probably the wrong place for this debate, so I’ll sign off after this. Feel free to respond/rebut/correct me, and I’ll read and do my best to learn, but won’t respond. ]
I’m not sure I said that. It’s quite possible that many people will not be able to provide more value to the consensus of the rest of the world than they consume, and that will be unstable in unpleasant ways. I do pretty strongly expect that, on the long term, each person (or each dunbar-ish-sized group in many cases) must be seen as positive-value to the resource-allocators, whether they be distributed in markets, concentrated in political forms, or alien AIs. Capitalism is more of a result of property rights and optional trade than a chosen cause of such things (though it’s that too—current winners tend to push harder than “natural” resource ownership/allocation mechanisms do).
Oh, yeah. I fully agree that benevolent dictatorship would be great, and I do give some weight that AI will create dictatorship-conditions, either of the AIs or of humans that manage to corral the AIs at the right point in time. I don’t give a lot of weight to the hope that such a system will be all that benevolent to the non-producing class of humans.
This is probably a major point of disagreement. Whether a given resource is capital or not is based on it’s USE, not it’s nature. If individuals can influence the ways that resources are allocated to produce value for others, and be variably rewarded based on the success of that allocation or uses, they are involved in capitalism.
You didn’t, but I thought it was pretty much the entire point of the original article.