Subnostr

I need help from my betters.

I have heard the following argument several time :

"There are two ways out of the gigantic pile of debt countries have amassed over the past 50 years:

a) Financial repression through inflation. Paying old debt with freshly printed, debased dollars, hurting savers, and probably leading to social unrest/possible hyperinflation.

b) Enormous productivity gains. Before "Atomic Fusion" was the leading theory, now it's the emerging "AI/AGI" narrative.

I certainly agree with a), that's my base case.

However, regarding b), I don't see how productivity gains through AI would fix the debt situation, or our societies in any way.

The current AI is leading us to the "Automation Revolution", which allows a few skilled engineers to automate complex processes, by being assisted by unlimited superhuman assistants, which costs a fraction of human labor, are pretty malleable, reliable, and can learn to do any digital task you want.

Today, processes usually involve 2 to 100+ persons, and the timeframe and costs are correlated with the amount of persons involved in said processes.

The final cost and final time spent on a project are usually exponential.

AI, on the other hand, will have a rather linear time spent and cost, however big or small the project is, and it's easy to envision a team of 5 skilled engineers replacing (at least) 50-100 other person on a given project.

In this reality, I find really hard to believe that most of these 50 replaced persons will be able to find work in the same industry (if they were replaced, they didn't make the cut...).

Since another strong suit of AI is the ability to keep repeating/improving a project at very low cost, which then you can sell as a product/API, the incentive is to have the few best engineers/prompters leveraging AI as much as possible.

So, if we remove even just 30% (low estimate) of the white collar jobs due to "productivity" gains, these people will have to find a new line of work, which will probably pay them less... or will just have to stop working due to depression.

Meanwhile, the elite engineers working on developing/prompting AI will probably get paid much more than before, leading to even more wealth concentration.

Which forces me to think that with the coming automation of so many jobs, the only way out of it in a fiat world will be to print money. This will probably be done through UBI, most likely branded something like "Solidarity Tax", levied in a small part through special "token" taxes on AI company for political theater, and in a big part from printing money... which is basically the same result as a).

Am I missing something, or is something just wrong in my line of reasoning ?

Would love to have anyone's insight about it, and maybe some esteemed minds like #[0] #[1] #[2] can also chime in!

If you read til here, thank you. 🙏

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Discussion

Duncan Cary Palmer 2y ago

Greetings, #[1] !

You raise some interesting issues here... I see that you are a bitcoiner, and considering the issues in that light leads me to wonder if you've truly grasped the reality of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin has been referred to as NGU technology (Number Goes Up). However, I prefer the outlook #[3] has on that, calling it NGD. As we move in the direction of hyperbitcoinization, the price of *literally everything* will continuously diminish when valued in Bitcoin. As the closest thing to perfect money that mankind has ever had at its disposal, this means that any and every individual who holds any bitcoin as personal property will progressively enjoy greater wealth.

How do I relate this to the concerns you've expressed?

As the world wakes up to bitcoin, states that continue on a fiat standard will self-destruct and increasingly lose their power; think fall of the Roman empire. Economic activity will increasingly become peer to peer based on private, state-free exchanges for goods and services denominated in bitcoin. The workers you envision as displaced by AI and productivity gains will no longer be able to feed at the state teat. They will either fall back on the charity of family or church/humanitarian groups OR they will have to figure out how to produce something that others will value enough to exchange for bitcoin.

Bitcoin, as the form of money that most closely models the biblical ideal of "honest weights and measures, will incentivize individuals to discover and develop their own best skills and abilities to bring value to society. Those who learn this lesson well will drive the productivity and prosperity of society to never before seen levels as the parasite class of rent-seeking statists fall by the wayside and starve.

Perhaps I'm overly optimistic? But it does seem clear to me that this saying is true: "Fix the money, fix the world." I certainly expect far better outcomes globally as we move in the direction of a Bitcoin standard. #[0]