The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital

"This time it's different"

Linear growth is nonsensical. Growth is driven ultimately by consumption. Consumption is driven by population. The population either grows or declines in an exponential fashion. That's how this works.

What do you mean by 'overhang of debt'?

Debt and equity are equally valid ways to finance projects. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo... for the spherical cow version, but this holds approximately under real world conditions, too.

In general, I share you skepticism and agree that exponential extrapolation should be done only very carefully at best.

And the headcount charts are “incremental”, i.e. first differences rather than absolute values – hardly like-for-like.

Most ex walk st analysts don’t understand software.

> I turned on a payment option for my platform one quarter, and very quickly people were using it for one million a month in purchases.

How is that making a difference? These are sales that were already happening and you allowed them to do something like "pay with paypal" and then claim the entire sale?

As a result, one would assume price should crash to zero and everything would balance out because even though you're having nationwide impact, it fundamentally doesn't cost as much as making a car to make an app... So why should people pay as much for it?

Presently, it's mostly because laws sustain the author's ability to gatekeep the software, whether or not it's even running on capital they own.

One does wonder how long such laws will last, one way or the other, if their end result is a massive inequality of outcome.

No, it supposedly makes things more efficient and thus cheaper.

Excellent point— contractor and consultant headcount’s have ballooned at many firms. Lots of technical debt being taken on to make short term profits.

There would be a lot of negative externalities to removing all competition... Innovation would slow, prices would rise, quality of service would fall.

This would absolutely not be worth the few extra points of efficiency you might get. Maybe you would get a short-term benefit, but long-term the expected outcome would be much worse.

Indeed, competition is highly inefficient. It would be superior to eliminate it. (Signed, The Bourgeoisie)

In scenario 1, why would I ever start a business?

This is interesting thinking but I can quit understand how the incentives play.

Unfun thought experiment: In an AGI scenario, what lever of power do the UBI recipients have to force what you've described?

Historically, humanity's biological monopoly on the fundamental resource of "general intelligence" has always been that lever. Looking at the world today, it's pretty clear that democracies are just a temporary balance between the general contempt of the powerful towards commoners, and the fact that the powerful begrudgingly need our economic utility, which is ultimately based on our general intellect. Even callous dictatorships had to exercise partial restraint on violence and murder, to retain a pool of general intellect.

AGI will be a multiple-whammy here:

- most people will become economically worse-than-useless, they will be a total liability on the rich and powerful

- those same people are unlikely to be given access to any levers of power or influence, because they no longer have anything of value to provide to the rich and powerful

- AGI in combination with robotic platforms, after a certain threshold, will permit for insurmountable policing. The "rise up against the robots" cliches we see in film simply become impossible after a certain point.

I desperately hope we end up wielding AI to usher in a post-scarcity utopia, but looking at the types of people who own the world...we'll get what we're allowed to get.

Compare https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

> and more people doing other types of jobs

IQ is normally distributed.

I can’t think of many major resources left to extract. Attention seems to be the last novel one. So what’s the pivot from here? If people are increasingly digitally pacified, what genuinely new needs or industries emerge next? As a consumer, what would I still spend money on if my material needs are largely met, and my emotional needs can be managed, or at least soothed, through digital experiences? (For the record I don't see it as black and white as this- especially the ability for indefinite digital pacification - it's more food for thought) I don't believe the system as we know it is equipped to handle wealth inequality in an exhaustively exploited resource landscape. Especially not one where labour as a resource is being threatened to disproportionately lose value against assets.

Things do tend to balance out over time, but it feels like we’re heading for a real crisis before that equilibrium returns. Unless we pivot away from “productivity” and “efficiency” as our ultimate economic north stars, life for the working class could become increasingly unstable. In many ways, it already has, especially in advanced economies where housing prices have long outpaced wage growth. Not to mention the youths of the world are entering adulthood with far fewer opportunities than previous generations (even college educated). To me it looks like a potential storm of unrest brewing, that could be genuinely historically paradigm shifting.

I don't really have an overall point, but would love to encourage people that say there are naturally going to be new jobs as a result of all this to provide some speculation as to what they are and how we get to that. I don't doubt the notion that some new jobs will emerge, but to think we can find new opportunities for the displacement of even 20% of well established industries seems too optimistic to me. I think we seriously need to start to grapple with a new way of life. UBI being an obvious first step, as this is somewhat achievable as a incremental change, but that could be too little and potentially not meaningful enough. A system that values more than that which can be priced. Maybe money as a whole evolves completely with a well designed digital currency. Sustainability (not in regards to material resources) and wellbeing over exploitation, but none of this is easy to even begin to implement without a collapse of what is already there. Who knows what the future holds.

It's true!

an alternative reason is that there little to no property with new technology.

if you could remove private property rights over land, housing too would be much easier. Thats a regulation governments arent gonna touch though

Yep this is what I thought as well. All this is probably linked to money oversupply and generalized inflation. It is particularly noticeable on the non-essential items, like tech stuff.

And revenue is a weird indicator to take; profit would make more sense. We know tech gets very good effects of scale but it seems there are limits even for software.