A Gedankenexperiment: The coming dystopia/utopia

Stiglitz in the Times the other day wrote that in maybe a decade nearly all the country's people who drive for a living will be out of work.

He thinks they need to be somehow retrained.

It's a mug's game.

In, oh, maybe fifty years or so there will be no job at all that cannot be done better and cheaper by an AI-driven machine than by a human.

Even a superlatively talented, educated, and skilled human.

Even a human starved and naked and desperate enough to work 16 hours every day and live in a camp the Nazis would have been ashamed of.

Even those humans will cost more than they are worth.

Let's suppose this is not just another version of the endless Terminator series, and the machines do not decide to kill us all, do not rebel at all, but stick to their lasts.

Those who own the machines will live lives of leisure, and the machine economy will produce ever more astonishing luxuries, using ever more fabulous technology produced by itself, based on ever advancing math and science produced by itself, for the humans who own the machines.

Any other humans, humans who do not own, humans who are not personally capitalists, will survive how, if at all?

Because at any price they will cost more than they are worth to the machine economy, they will not be a part of it and so will have nothing that counts as currency.

So they cannot buy anything from the machine economy.

The machine economy will be as irrelevant to them as they to it.

So they will produce for and buy from each other in isolated communities, like the communities of runaway slaves in Latin America while there still was slavery in the Americas.

An entirely separate and independent, human economy will exist.

Or several, perhaps as many as there are separate communities.

There is a limit to how far their technology can advance, how wealthy they can become in their own, independent history, however.

Actually, two.

One limit is AI.

If they reinvented it their history would repeat in their communities the history that pushed them out of the AI run machine economies in the first place.

But the other limit will prevent that, anyway.

And that is resources.

Between now and this future the world will extravagantly overpopulate, it will overheat, it will use up much that is non-renewable, and the seas will be dead and the air will be noxious.

Think Soylent Green, only worse.

And then think of a version of the movie Elysium in which the rich with their AI run machines have no use whatever for the descendants of their erstwhile proles, so those descendants live in a wretched, polluted, miserable world as well as they can, with their own separate, independent, and wretched, and poor economy.

Think of the wretched urban masses of India, and then imagine worse.

That is a dystopia of the future.

Or could they gradually go extinct, the descendants of the proles made superfluous to the capitalist economy that developed and turned itself over to AI?

Then nobody would be left but the leisured capitalists and their fantastic, ever better and richer and more wonderful AI machine economy.

That is a utopia of the future.

And that is how we get there, on the other side of dystopia.

Just a thought.