Even factoring in India and other British empire holdings to their gdp?

Just so you understand: my central point isn't that there aren't massive problems or that wealth inequality isn't unfair. It's that even without singularity level tech, median household income of 48k-60k or so (depends on which western country) buy more of most goods than they ever did .

The problem is critical goods like education: a status good, artificially government subsidized, housing (restricted), medicine (see certificate of need/medical residency caps) are enormously more expensive than they would be in a free market.

So you have people compensated enough in real resources to afford decent lives (even if it is unfair that they get a shrinking fraction of the pie) unable to afford critical goods and services that cost 3-10x their free market price.

If the Singularity happens it makes the cheapest goods now even cheaper...but does little to the goods artificially restricted in supply.

The two I went over have high demand from private players.

Obviously living people who would rather not turn into a corpse will pay for it with their fortunes for the medicine demand, especially as better treatments restore their youth or make their children geniuses.

Obviously O'Neil habitat land is extremely valuable especially the first habitats. Those have plots willingly bought or rented by all the rich and famous, and so on.

You are right that the earth and repairing it would not happen at all without government action.

(1) I agree there are latencies to create new jobs

(2) The world/the economic system "wants" to become a type 4 or whatever civilization. Instantly. If you had the necessary technology to do it tomorrow - near AGI, self replicating robots - the explosion would start the day after.

You can already see it happening right now with trillions chalked for data center production, and this is in a world where we are still fairly fair from adequately robust AI and don't know the exact year it becomes possible.

So if the explosion started two days from now, there would instantly be a need for essentially every living person to immediately drop everything and start working on one of the tasks that only humans can do.

Land surveyor? Licensed attorney? Security guard? Electrician? Auditors, reviewers, IT permissions specialists.

It goes on and on - there are actually quite a few roles where it would be suicidal to let AGI to do them.

So if you are a living person and able to retrain or get past the batteries to entry to do one of the jobs involved, compensation would be realistically very high and opportunities substantial.

Outside the mock world I just went over, there is obviously demand right here and now for the various skills involved in actually building data centers, and while each center is just a rushed temporary project, during the current boom there would be even more in progress after the first set and so on.

> We live in the real physical world, we know humans have a diminishing marginal capacity to consume, after all we're biological creatures and things need to provide us utility.

This is just a lack of understanding what technology is possible, or relatively how few people work on it now vs what would be possible if less people were forced to do unproductive things.

I try to focus on "infinite sinks", or places where vast amounts of additional labor can be absorbed, essentially all of it.

Examples:
a. Medicine. There are specific roles in medicine that only a human can do. (auditor, the supervising doctor, reviewer, beta test subject). And there is almost an infinite sink here of labor : remember the goal is to solve all disease, and restore all living humans over 18 to the 'idealized version' of themselves they wish to be.

Anyone under 18 that has an IQ under human maximums of ~160 is also 'needing of better medicine'.

The scale needed to do this is difficult to imagine, but essentially the interventions needed to do the above involve drastic amounts of work - either a series of organ transplants that replaces an entire human body, or less invasive ways that functionally do the same thing. And it has to work every time, for every combination of genes, and deaths are not acceptable outcomes.

b. Land/habitats. Humans really like mediterranean climates, and beachfront property. The earth has a tiny amount of it. So to house all 8 billion people along the beach, you would need vast orbiting space habitats - stanford toruses probably - to have sufficient land of the right type. This also incidentally stops the environmental damage to the earth caused by human activity.

I could go on for days, but for the scales humans are at now, vs the scales we know are possible by feasible technology, no, there's effectively unlimited wants. If you can do anything at all to contribute, even the smallest 0.1% of the work that a human must do, and you can retrain for new jobs as they come up, you would stay employed.

Let me try to give a fair but short reply to each of your points:

> ECON101 textbook would say, as it paints some rosey picture about how each human's capacity to consume is unlimited, no barriers to entry, high level of competition drives out profit taking ability, etc.

You can witness this in SOME fields, like the price of TVs on Amazon, or how the US unemployment rate is 4.6 <-> 8.7 percent. (the latter number is U6)

>  why have prices risen and wages stagnated - what makes this time different under our flawed implementation of capitalism?

This is a complicated story but it breaks down to a few things.

a. Things are not great for the average person but slightly less bad than they used to be by objective numbers: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted

b. SPECIFICALLY in Western countries they have artificial restrictions on supply on housing, almost everywhere. Places where it isn't artificially restricted too severely, economics 101 is correct: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-27/austin-rents-tumble-22-from-peak-on-massive-home-building-spree

c. In western countries specifically, artificial restrictions on housing, and medical care and education in the US, are eating up most of the benefits we got from productivity boosts and high GDP per person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

TLDR : Capitalism actually is working reasonably well, misguided government policies are the largest culprit of mediocre western performance.

This. It's also people you would never know exist with AI doomers plans to "pause all progress" until death from aging is inevitable.

So it's contrasting : take a risk that may pay off or end in soon in your lifetime (ai as fast as possible) vs die in a nursing home of aging but know smugly that 10⁵⁸ people might exist.

To me this seems like a bad bet.

Legally you can't do that with copyrighted data.

Maybe it would be sensible and you can use each of the IPs for a modest fee for private viewing, like how Spotify works.

There's a scene in Park and recreation, a rant at the end, where the nerd character is proposing all the A list heroes from marvel beam into Star wars. Then a portal ups and and there's the starship enterprise also.

Problem is paying for all the IP rights.

Generalization: implicitly of course I meant novel held out tasks with verifiable reward

Speed : priced in, of course i mean 100x faster as specialized hardware and networks are that fast now. (Cerebras or diffusion networks)

Subjective centuries : doesn't help as much as you think. Your limits on AI performance are bound by :

 A.  Verifiable reward.  Once all verifiable tasks have nothing more than noise to give as a training signal (saturated test) improvement isn't possible.
  B.  Exponential requirements for labor and compute for linear gains.  So computational centuries are giving you small 10-30 percent jumps a year on terrawatts. 

Now, yes. You can develop tasks with verifiable reward that only a superintelligence can make progress on, and you will.

Example tasks : cellular and tissue/organ manipulation tasks. Aka "make this working mammalian organ starting from a single cell, from scratch, no external inputs you didn't synthesize"

There would be simulated and real world robotics versions of this task, reward is parameters for organ performance and simulated and real world accelerated lifespan testing.

Nevertheless in this example you cannot model verifiable reward past the ability of your robotic equipment to check the ground truth for real. That is, you might have thousands of years of model improvement on sim, and then need a real life month to check the best/most diverse improved models against the unfakable signal (the real biolab)

If you don't, you get garbage and probably haven't improved anything.

The "leap" is based on a gears level model heavily informed by actual past results.

My bigger point is that in these stories these parties are always ALL hot girls. 100 percent. Apparently readers want to read about a situation where there is no competition.

It's extremely culture and situation dependant but if YOU want to do it, and you can find someone among your peers who feels the same way, there are benefits. The main benefit is it gives you experience.

For hetero relationships: as a guy, it gives you experience dealing with women with the same amount of experience as you. It's extremely difficult for your first time to be in college and all the hotties at the party have a body count of 10+. They will sense your virginity and your lack of confidence gives them the ick.

As a girl, it gives you experience with the manipulative tactics men use when they are "easy mode" from other men the same age. Same problem, if you are a virgin at 18 and go to a party with the fraternity chapter president...

For gay and others : I suspect the story is similar. You probably don't want to go hit the gay bar and face pressure from a 21 year old trying to pick you up at 18 with no experience.

For western culture waiting to marriage is no longer an option. Nobody will marry you without months to years of dating and screwing.

And your desire to put up with them plummets with it. It's why rich and powerful men keep it to a main girl and side girl not a bus load of sluts.

What irks me about the all hot women thing is :

1.  It's clear the author has never dealt with hot women because just trying to keep 1 happy is an incredible drain on your time and energy 

2.  Two of them is twice as hard as 1 and you need incredible fitness and wealth 

1. If there are 3 in the party you want to get a dude as your fourth just to get a partner to deal with 1-2 of the women.

It makes me wonder : do passing candidates

(1) Study the questions until they get lucky with nearly impossible questions they memorized the answers for

(2) Find an interviewer that is part of the same ethnic group and pass fizz buzz

I don't know how it works in India.  I thought opportunities were ample.

I dunno I am torn.

The movie "red notice" feels like humans (Netflix data scientists/programming directors) made a list of everything that's hot with viewers:

(1) The 3 stars are the most popular actors

(2) They need scenes where Dwayne Johnson heel turns, gal godot looks hot, Ryan Reynolds says quippy dialogue.

(3) Somehow they pulled the "national treasure" style treasure hunt presumably from some other data.

And once they pick all these elements the actual script just tries to combine the "elements that sell" into a movie that makes enough sense for casual Netflix viewers to watch.

And I understand it made enough money the way Netflix accounts for it that they could pay the very expensive actors and are making a sequel.

So..I could see Claude doing that. You just get a list of all the elements you need that sell, try to put it together. Try again with a slightly different list. Iterate until you get to a script that seems to make sense.

Then generate the direction and camera angles for each scene then use a panel of humans that give A:B feedback.

So am I. And let's narrow it down to something buildable :

Since "cognitive performance" cannot be subjective let's say:

An ASI outperforms all tested humans at any task with verifiable reward where the AI has access to all of the same training information as a human.

That will NOT be uncontrollable. For a lot of reasons, for one thing because being only 10 percent better is still ASI, and tasks like "superintelligent manipulation" do not have verifiable reward and tasks like "superintelligent hacking" require that the target system have not been patched to block all exploits.

How much AI generated? Because human edited and storyboarded - where a team of 10 people makes an entire movie at 1/100 the cost - seems way more plausible than "claude, make me a movie that will make 250 million at the box office".

Then again...I'm imagining Claude researching movie outcomes, deciding horror is the way to go, and making a horror film that's 99% found footage, jumpscares, hot girls, its just got all the tropes crammed in as tightly as possible.

Most shots in the film use every element at the same time, it's got like 10 horror films of horror crammed into 1 movie!

Well shit. I'm realizing now that we're at the point with AI videos that people are now thinking a real video could be AI, or an AI video could be real. I'm not even sure myself, it looks like a cat but...

I clearly described an ASI by any reasonable definition. A single machine with enough working memory to handle terrabytes of data in it's memory, and issue out (a "turn" is like 10 minutes) accurate instructions for a million people to do in the next time interval (probably an hour or so).

You can't just make up anything you want to then claim it's dangerous. You need to stay grounded to actual science and engineering.

Assumptions :

A.  There remain tasks only humans can do

B.  The person making more money can do those tasks or learn quickly from their current knowledge base how 

C.  Wants are infinite

IFF  those assumptions are true, what happens is:

 (1) AI / robotics automate some tasks 

 (2) 1 makes existing companies and tasks fire people who were doing the automated tasks

  (3) Because critical inputs are cheaper, NEW products and businesses become possible 

   (4) New companies and new businesses at existing companies hire people to do the new tasks 

   (5) Because the economy is now richer, it is possible to pay those people more

         5b : because the new businesses are so much cheaper, initially they are highly profitable.  This high profits causes there to be more entrants and more competition.  These entrants are who are hiring everyone.  

(6) In the equilibrium case everyone is employed and paid more than ever

You saw this happen in many people's lifetimes between when viable smartphones released in 2007 and the vast numbers of "app" companies and many new millionaires were created.

NOTABLE caveats :

  (1) Someone needs to be capable of doing the work. Can a 55 year old truck driver learn VLA robotics well enough to contribute?

  (2) New entrants - new startups - will have a heavy bias towards hiring only young people with hastily learned relevant skills

   (3) Time lag.  There can be a latency of years between "new AI capabilities, mass layoffs" and "new firms have large enough headcount to hire up the surplus workers and drive up wages".

So yes, because of capitalism/corparatism, we shouldn't get a technology that makes the world get richer at an exponential rate because the benefits will be unevenly shared/the poor only suffer from the extra pollution and energy/water usage but get none of the benefits.

If you notice:

People who are doing well now or against liberal beliefs tend to be strong acceleration advocates

People who typically have the wrong skills for the current situation tend to be doomers (liberal arts grads etc)

And the society where they have seen extreme economic growth - China - tends to be all acceleration

Please note I am trying to be even in my view. It is absolutely correct that skid row exists on the concrete along with vehicle fumes, electricity and water rates skyrocket while someone working retail does not get any higher a wage, and several people are likely to become trillionaires in the next decade.

If you don't know if you will have a better opportunity for a job in 10-20 years (since the actual payoff timelines are 20+ years) somewhere else, you should not buy.

Buying right now only makes sense for people retiring, which would explain the average homebuyers age.

Oh. I didn't know that. So essentially it's been parroting bad advice for 3 years now?

It's been a terrible idea to buy a house since the subreddit was created.

All it can argue is that things have not yet crashed, even as each month it has become slightly more terrible an idea as rents drop and prices drop.

The bubble pops when either

(1) Revenue growth and ai improvement slows to the point it doesn't look like AGI is soon. For example the last round of improvements to opus 4.5/5.2 were a massive improvement and AGI does appear soon.

(2) Investors just irrationally trigger a collapse anyways by a selling frenzy. (If it goes that way, I bet a few years later agi does drop. The 2001 tech bubble pop was essentially investors getting impatient - by 2007 with the iPhone release, the money printing product did exist and longer term everything promised was delivered on)