Economic repercussions of #AGI – What happens when production is completely decoupled from labor inputs?
It's a bit tricky to predict how extreme automation of all cognitive tasks affects our economy, except in abstract levels:
Efficiency will skyrocket
Production will skyrocket
Science and technology will skyrocket
Unemployment will be practically 100%
Everything becomes integrated
Every decision will be made intelligently
Let's do a Gedankenexperiment at a microlevel!
You are a corporate CEO, you'll get an assistant AI who does practically all your work including mingling with other executives, investors and stakeholders, or more accurately, their AI assistants. Your job is nominally about maximizing profits, but you don't actually affect the bottom line except negatively through your salary.
Depending on your organization's values, if it's about decreasing redundancies, you will be laid off as well along with everyone else. The company you led and probably own a part of becomes completely autonomous. Physical offices become useless.
Real estate prices collapse.
Profits are down in your company though (practically zero), because of heavy competition and no one having much money anymore. Machines don't need money as they can just get what they need from other machines.
Most organizations become autonomous like that and practically disappear from the physical world, becoming a part of the autonomous fabric of the economy.
This fabric will provide everyone everything they need, even if no money exchanges hands. You might need to exchange your privacy for life-long services or pledge to sometimes work as hands for the AIs if no robot is close by in emergencies. But everyone will get what they need, and more.
Some organizations aren't about maximizing profits, and those sometimes keep humans around, even though they can't pay salaries. They can provide inspiring environments where people can take part and in some way be involved in what is happening. Like the office dog, people are very indirectly impacting the bottom line, success or failure, but they are kept around for unquantifiable reasons.
Sports and hobbies will prosper. People who struggle finding meaning outside work get all the lifestyle counceling they need from AIs. In any case, people used to work very little in hunter-gatherer societies, so lazing around is natural for us.
In all responsibilities humans still might have, they become very optional and unhurried, divided to a huge number of people, so work as we now understand it as an endless hamster wheel will cease to exist.
People who own capital notice that the capital doesn't produce profit, money isn't needed anyhow, and it's all managed by AIs in any case. Humans aren't needed as owners, but every human is a stakeholder in this new intelligent fabric which pervades everything and serves our personal and civilizational goals.
