"Poverty in the midst of abundance: AI will make goods cheaper, but your labor will get cheaper faster" by cousin_it
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"Poverty in the midst of abundance: AI will make goods cheaper, but your labor will get cheaper faster" by cousin_it
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Some people are saying AI will make all goods cheaper, so you'll be able to afford a nice life by working. Without any redistribution, just by market mechanisms. These people are wrong.
AI will lower the price of goods you need to survive, and also the price of your labor. The question is which will get cheaper faster. Let's use energy cost as a proxy. A day's worth of labor equivalent to yours can be done by AI for just a few cents in electricity. But feeding you with e.g. apples for a day will cost more energy than that, because growing apples is harder to energy-optimize than generating tokens. So selling your labor at market price will leave you unable to afford apples.
This means a future with economic AI might look like "poverty in the midst of abundance". All goods are cheap, and tokens are cheap, but somehow you can't find a job paying even that much.
Maybe the problem can be solved by redistribution, or by everyone having investments, or something else. That's a bigger discussion. In this post I just [...]
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First published:
September 26th, 2026
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eLXTcJfkheLbqZXHa/poverty-in-the-midst-of-abundance-ai-will-make-goods-cheaper
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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