[ExI] thought experiment part 1

[John Clark]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2025 at 9:03 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:


> * >> Politics is about choosing a small set of people that get to make a
>> much larger set of people do what they tell them to do, and the foundation
>> of that persuasion has always rested on money, until now.*
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> * > Not entirely.  It's played a major role, sure, but there are plenty of
> examples from modern and olden times of the better financed campaign in a
> race losing. *


*I'm not talking about anything as trivial as campaign financing, the very
idea of "money" is going to radically change and it's going to do so very
soon. In the past the only way to have money is to inherit it or to earn
it, and the size of an economy, the thing that determines what is possible
or practical to accomplish, is severely limited by the need for human
labor; BUT if we can just turn on a wealth generating machine that doesn't
need human labor then we're going to have to rethink everything we thought
we knew about economics.  *


> *> Money usually does not directly buy votes. *


*If everybody has access to a wealth generating machine, for example by
establishing a Universal Basic Income, then there is less need to vote
because there is less need of government. AI changes everything, it's
impossible to overhype it. It's not business as usual, we can't keep
pretending that the same old economic and political ideas we've been using
for decades still work because, however good they may have been at one
time, they are rapidly becoming obsolete.  *

*I think the following is a pretty accurate depiction of what we can expect
if UBI is NOT established and established quickly: *

*Yes, AI Will Take Your Job. But What Happens NEXT Is Worse*
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6mTUK_yPKw&list=WL&index=1>


* >>  I can find no evidence to support the claim that humans have some
>> sort of mysterious "spark", a secret sauce, that an AI could never
>> duplicate.*
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> * > I dud not say "all AIs that could ever theoretically exist".  I said
> the current sorts (the ones that might cause a Singularity in the next
> several years, which is the time frame you appear to be talking about), for
> which you need to turn to tests of the creativity of the AIs that actually
> exist today.*
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*For at least the last 3 years AIs have done things that if a human had
done them virtually everybody would say demonstrated creativity. But if
they know it was a machine that did it then no matter how brilliant or
beautiful the act was some people will insist the AI that produced it is
nothing but a souped up adding-machine without a drop of creativity.*

*... and so, just before he was vaporized the last surviving human being
turned to Mr. Jupiter Brain and said "I still think I'm smarter than you
are". *


*John K Clark*
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