[ExI] How new AI economics might change our systems

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
Sent: Sunday, 20 September, 2026 11:49 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: spike at rainier66.com; BillK <pharos at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] How new AI economics might change our systems

 

On Sun, Sep 20, 2026 at 1:11 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

 

> A government can devalue its currency and diminish its debt, but it still owes the bond holders.

 

If a bond holder gets repaid by a government in a post singularity AI world (if there still exists something called "government", a very big "if"), what would he be able to do that he couldn't have done if he hadn't been repaid? Why would Mr. Jupiter Brain value human money?  

 

John K Clark

 

 

We don’t know on any of these, no one does.  We don’t know what the AI wants to do, if anything.  But we must face the risk that AI will not undergo recursive self-improvement and will not kill everyone.  That is one of the possible outcomes of the current situation: AI is contained, it improves everything, analogous to search engines in the late 90s only better, but not really human level intelligence.

 

As I ponder that risk, I will cheerfully acknowledge that a malign superintelligent AI which does kill everyone is as bad (or possibly even worse) than runaway debt ruining the US government.  Both would be bad.  But there are other possible outcomes.  We don’t know what happens if LLMs eventually turn out to be not what we thought, not really an intelligence with a will analogous to bio systems, but rather a really good, really advanced form of a search engine, with some additional talents, such as doing math proofs and making artificial porn.

 

spike 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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