AI threat

Hangout on Air: Our Final Invention – AI and the end of the human era

Hi Roland,

Couldn’t agree more and the issue is deeper.

There is a fundamental issue in using market values as a basis of our economic system.
Markets are great at valuing things that are genuinely scarce, but fail if things are genuinely abundant.

We are developing technologies that allow us to deliver genuine abundance of an ever increasing set of classes of goods and services, yet our attachment to market valuation (money) is a major counter incentive to the delivery of such abundance. The diamond market is perhaps the best known example.

Samuelson described this as the “paradox of value” and tried to get around it with “marginal utility analysis”, which works in a very restricted and very technical sense; but fails in practice to address the fundamental issue that markets do not incentivise real abundance, and actually provide strong counter incentives to any emerging abundance.

Until we address that issue, we are at real risk from any AI coming to awareness.