> Our own past is actually built on the dystopia of the industrial revolution where people had no rights and worked until they dropped dead. Most of us on this forum have jobs that most of those people would not have considered real work. Hence us procrastinating on hacker news instead of doing real work.

Part of that fight for workers' rights led directly to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels inventing Communism. My history on that topic is a little vague, so it may be mere ignorance that I have no reason to think neither foresaw Stalin.

Likewise for capitalism, given what (little) I know of Adam Smith[0], I don't think he would've foreseen the Irish potato famine.

Smith and Marx both saw the world changing, the era of feudalism passing and fading, and the need for a new system to replace it. What we have now is neither what Smith nor what Marx advocated, though bits of each are still popular.

So… what's the AI version of the February Revolution? What's the AI version of the Great Depression (as in 1929–1939, I didn't mistype "Great Recession")?

I can very easily see ways that AI can bring about surveillance to make the Stasi blush. Those amateurs were drilling holes in walls and putting bugs in watering cans, today we carry trackers and bugs in our pockets voluntarily, and even when those are restricted, laser-microphones are simple enough to be high-school student projects, and WiFi can be modified to run as wall-penetrating radar that can do pose detection with enough resolution to give pulse and breathing rates.

The Paperclip Optimiser is basically the reductio ad absurdum of capitalism's disregard for environmental impact and externalities, except that software generally has bugs and pre-LLM AI generally hasn't shown the slightest sign of what people would consider "common sense", which makes it… my Latin is almost non-existent, "reductio non absurdum"? For what AI may do.

Even between those two examples, while it's certainly possible on paper for AI to give us all lives of luxury with minimal to no work required… from the point of view of the pre-industrial age, so did machine tools, so did the transition from alchemy to chemistry (despite chemical weapons), so did electricity and the internal combustion engine (despite the integrated CO2 emissions), so did atomic theory (despite the cold war)… and despite that, we still have 40 hour weeks.

So perhaps we'll all end up like aristocrats, or perhaps rents (literal and metaphorical) will go up to take the full value of whatever UBI[1] we are given.

[0] while I doubt politicians who quote him know any better than me, this cynicism may be borne from the last decade of British Prime Ministers…

[1] IMO, UBI is the only possible way for a sustainable society where AI is at the level of the smartest human, and in practice it's necessary well before AI is that capable — if a suitably embodied AI can do every task that an IQ 85 human can do, for a TCO/time less than your local minimum living wage[2], you've already got 15% of your population in a permanent economic trap.

I also think that UBI can only avoid a hyperinflation loop when the government distributing the UBI owns the means of production, because if they don't then the people who do own the AI will be tempted to raise prices to match the supply of money.

But there's always the temptation for a government to exclude some group, for one reason or another — "Oh, not them, they're foreign. Not them, they're criminals. Not them, they're too young. Not them, they're not smart enough. Not them, they're…", and it's very hard to make those exclusion lists smaller, as those on the less-money list wield less power, and also everyone else would have to lower their expenses if they undid it and shared their wealth more equally.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage