Nine Points of Collective Insanity

A scenario detailing how humans automate away other humans, as the beginning of the economic decoupling of the AI-hardware economy from the human-wetware economy.


Excerpts compiled below:

  • Where/​first it begins with the customer service people – they are automated away (since that is expensive, and no one wants to do it – everyone hates working with abusive customers anyway).

  • that then the engineers building the capability to build capability automate themselves away, (but *not* before also developing automation of maximally efficient optimized marketing and sales processes, since those sales/​marketing people tend to also be *very* expensive (and opinionated temperamental narcissist artist types too)).

  • then, when the VC – seeing that the executive team is no longer needed – (since everyone else has already been factored out of the overall company structure) that they (the VC folk) notice that they also have the capability to make fully autonomous corporations (maybe using some of the newer ‘Decentralized Autonomous Orgs’, with a heavy crypto emphasis).

  • then that the overall situation is effectively “passive income on steroids for the VC, so much so, to the point that even the VCs themselves, are no longer even having to evaluate startup business plan proposals at all – they already have the perfect evaluative tools, and the ability, with their ‘owned’ AI, to identify the ‘best possible versions’ (the most profitable, and extractive versions) of any possible business plan(s),

That the net effect ends up being that fewer and fewer actual people (users) have any degree of significant potential for any sort of combined economic impact (aside from (maybe) a very few world scale global trillionaires), and the total share of the overall world total economy that has anything to do with the real needs of people – since the total value of their ‘investment ability’ is monotonically decreasing, and at an ever increasing rate.

→ Read link to Forrest Landry’s blog for more.

Note: Text is laid out in his precise research note-taking format.

Crossposted from LessWrong (−2 points, 3 comments)