The broken window fallacy is the idea that it's good when your window gets broken because you have to pay someone to fix it and it increases their income. If that were true, then it would be bad if you could easily repair windows without spending time or money. It's false because we're better off if we can spend our resources on things we actually want rather than constantly maintaining our windows, even if that means some window repairmen need to find other jobs.
What do we do when former window repairman can't find other jobs? Just fuck em, right?
The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
When there really aren't any jobs for the former window repair man to do, we are in a "post scarcity economy", which could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
Or of course, a few billionaires could hoard the wealth.
There's a Wikipedia page about it.
We could be in a post scarcity economy now, except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
>could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
It definitely could be. With current trajectory as of now, do you think it will be?
>except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.
I see the opposite sentiment. I see previous basic necessities further out or reach then they were last generation. People aren't raising their standards, they are sinking towards poverty.
But then their worries are dismissed because they can get a flatscreen TV for 200 dollars. A TV that is likely feeding your data back to corporate to make thousands off you.
You're going back one generation, and I'm thinking further back.
Like, if we all settled for a 1950s British living standard, using current manufacturing technology, we could achieve that while everyone works a little bit less.
But, we'd prefer to keep labouring and have nicer things.
The supposed goal of "Make America Great again" is to invoke that 50s era of American exceptionalism. So surely there's something there people miss.
And your theoretical implies we have choice in the matter. I'm sure many would in fact take a smaller home with less amenities over a modern home with cheap appliances. Not that I'd actually be given that choice given my family lineage, but the general living standard of the 50's was quite high. I doubt the act of AC and the lack of knowledge of abestos are the things that made housing skyrocket over the decades.
Sure, but if we run AI all the way to its endpoint, it’s not just about window repairmen anymore. Our current notions about economics assume there’s always another job class for people to move to, here eventually there won’t be.
So here you never have to pay anyone to fix your windows, because they fix themselves, but conversely nobody will give you money to fix their windows! And then you have to pay your self-fixing windows a rent in tokens without an income.
> here eventually there won’t be.
That's a pretty big leap.
I don’t think so, even if the whole “AI exponential” idea is wrong, that’s just the shape of the curve. There still is a curve. Even if these things take 50 years to happen instead of 5 (which would be better and which I doubt will be the case) it still happens eventually. I think the current capabilities of AI are enough of a heuristic for us to assume this is going to happen.
It is a stated goal of several prominent AI business leaders. Altman, Amodei, and Musk at the very least have had mask-off moments where they said as much.