[ExI] Stability of Mutualist Societies in the Face of AI

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Wed Oct 23 02:09:46 UTC 2013


On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

>  On 2013-10-22 20:53, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 4:17 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
>>  A socialist would of course try to bring everybody into this state
>>> through joint ownership of the means of production. Anarchists hope that
>>> having a non-money economy will fix things (which is an interesting claim -
>>> I am not entirely convinced mutualist societies are stable in the face of
>>> AI).
>>
>>
>  Anders, I love how in the middle of a flaming political war, you throw
> in these little gems of plain old fashioned brilliance. I would love to
> hear more about your ideas about the stability of mutualist societies in
> the face of AI. What is it about AI that threatens mutualist societies, and
> do you see that we have a mutualist society today?
>
>
> I'm using the term from the anarchist community. As Wikipedia puts it, "A
> society where each person might possess a means of production, either
> individually or collectively, with trade representing equivalent amounts of
> labor in the free market."
>

Ok. Thanks for that.

Now, straight mutualism is based on the labor theory of value, so it is
> just plain wrong.
>

I would have to agree that labor doesn't account for everything, but like
an energy based theory of value, can't it be exchanged for non-labor types
of stuff? Then again, if I get oil easily in Saudi Arabia and with
difficulty in the Gulf of Mexico, the labor theory of value would mean the
Saudi oil would have less value than the Gulf oil, so that doesn't quite
work, does it?


> Even if one believes the theory, AI wrecks it: now things can be produced
> without labor, including labor-saving devices.
>

That seems to be wrecked with plain old automation, forget AI.


> But more relevantly, if AI can do stuff, why should I trade with you? Yes,
> you might have an AI, and I exchange some stuff I or my AI do for its
> products, but I am not really trading with *you*. If I had your AI I would
> just use it straight away. The whole trade idea goes away.
>

I kind of assume that "my AI" will be based roughly on "me" and therefore
would be unique. If I simply had a big computing cloud, that's different
than the software that runs on that cloud. Will I be able to rent out
copies of "me"?


> One answer is that in that case we have a post-scarcity economy and
> everything is fine. Except the usual problems with allocation: not
> everybody can have a beach-front villa in Malibu.
>

Well, we all can in virtual reality... I see the real limits being rare
earth elements... most likely... until we can go out in space and get all
we want... which is still hard.


> But it seems that AI also threatens to unravel the threads of mutual
> dependency that likely hold an anarchist society together.
>

That's depressing for someone that really wants to believe anarchy could
work, but I can see where you're coming from. Do you think AI means the end
of money? I would assume not.


> It might not produce total autarchy (everybody can produce everything they
> need), yet make people so independent that the incentives to work together
> and hash out disagreements weaken.
>

I can see that.

 -Kelly
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