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I've held this view and talked about it many times here before.

It seems like an obvious conclusion to me that the end result will be a few AI owners trading among themselves should AI develop in what seems to be likely: recursive self improvement, robotics allowing it to displace manual labor and combat.

Then the owners will be trading for land, AI tech, minerals, energy, which will likely be owned by the other AI conglomerates, and maybe the odd thing that can't be replaced by AI like human entertainers that would make up 1% of the economy.

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Landscape with Invisible Hand, only we grew the aliens instead of them showing up

For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?

That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction.

AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.


>What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?

I mean, there may be some things certain groups specialize in, like augmented obedient humans with 15 titties that these people trade back and forth.

But here's the thing, what if they don't need to trade anything? You get to be a nation unto yourself (and your slaves).

The particular problem we have is without something for 'labor' to do in the future the world we have now breaks.


To be fair, that doesn't seem to be stopping any of the billionaire class from trying frantically to accumulate more wealth today, I don't know why AI ascendant would change any of those incentives.

They literally always frantically try to accumulate more wealth. It’s their dominant trait.

It’s just working better for a few of them right now than it historically has.


Why does it feel silly? There are already billionaires, and now Elon Musk is a trillionaire, and they still want more even though they have enough money to spend for several lifetimes.

Some people always want more. And defending against others like that will result in infinite demand.


It's especially funny to me that Nozick's utility monster was alive and about 3 years old when he wrote the paper.



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