FIRE in an AI world

[Ron Scott]

One of the hosts of the Hard Fork podcast recently reported being told by a young tech at an AI conference that he stopped saving for retirement because savings won’t be needed in the future. LOL

We don’t know if the future envisioned by AI’s enthusiastic supporters or its “doomers” will be realized. But it is becoming clear the ranks of those who see AI as peaking now or having little effect on us long-term are dwindling.  A consensus is growing that we’re in AI’s infancy and capabilities are improving fast.

One potential future almost everyone wants is one in which AIs remain completely supportive of humans, humans remain in control, and the world becomes peaceful, safe, and affirming of life. Since human investors are in control today and for the near-term future, this seems plausible.

So—according to some—future-world may start off as a rocky transition period in which AIs become proficient over time at performing the work humans do today. Governments will need to manage the shift from a traditional, temporarily high unemployment problem to a society that simply doesn’t require many humans to work jobs that produce necessary goods and services. This will usher in the most profound paradigm shift for humanity in history. We will be transitioning from a competitive, dog-eat-dog, world of scarcity to one of abundance, in which all basic needs are met and humans are free to pursue other interests. In other words, people will never have to wring their hands over the 4% Rule again: Humans will be FIREd by AI and FIRE as we know it will be a thing of the past.

My big fear has been the need to cope with the Jan6 types who aren’t burdened with day jobs. Hopefully that can be handled! If so, we could have a world comprised of coasters, self-actualizers, and everything in between.

I suppose most of us will see the beginnings of all this and today’s teens may see a good part of the jobs transition. Perhaps babies born today-at least in the developed world—will never work a full career?

Bonus AI-related tech treats:

https://youtu.be/MO7cGJq-Bkw

https://youtu.be/nQuQCJ-F4Uk

[Log]

…we could have a world comprised of coasters, self-actualizers, and everything in between...

I think my increasing realization of the last few years is that we already live in this world. Nobody in America who doesn’t work is starving to death. Maybe they’re homeless or don’t have access to medical care, but everyone can access food, clean water, and shelter from extreme weather without “working” in any traditional sense. Many more who aren’t working or barely work have housing, internet access, video games, etc..

The wealthier countries of the world would be seen by our forebears as functionally being a post-scarcity utopia. The question now is how to pass the time. Further technological advances will bring about further bifurcation between those who choose to work for extra material rewards and status, and those who retreat from the physical world and simply indulge in endless digital entertainments from the comfort of their home.

This is why the status hierarchy has flipped from the time of Veblen: leisure was high status when it was only accessible to the elite. Now it’s high status to get a “dream job” in a highly competitive, intrinsically rewarding field (arts and media, politics, certain kinds of non-profit work). The general public looks down on people chasing money in fields that are too remunerative: finance, Big Law, tech, management consulting. The real status is in making lots of money while having plausible deniability that it’s all about the love for the work, rather than the money itself.

[Cannot Wait!]

My dream AI world is one where AI's mandate is to create and enforce a sustainable environment. 

[twinstudy]

AI is like every other tool we've developed (e.g. the printing press) - it will be harnessed overall for productive means, but it won't usher in a utopia any more than the printing press and agriculture ushered in utopias. I mean if you think about it, for decades if not centuries we have produced enough output to keep everyone in the world fed and happy; that hasn't come to pass though. So I don't see AI changing that.

This is why the status hierarchy has flipped from the time of Veblen: leisure was high status when it was only accessible to the elite. Now it’s high status to get a “dream job” in a highly competitive, intrinsically rewarding field (arts and media, politics, certain kinds of non-profit work). The general public looks down on people chasing money in fields that are too remunerative: finance, Big Law, tech, management consulting. The real status is in making lots of money while having plausible deniability that it’s all about the love for the work, rather than the money itself.

Real status is in having time to do what you want without being bound by the needs of a day job. Someone in a non-profit does the same drudge work as everyone else - just for a client with less money.

[Ron Scott]

…we could have a world comprised of coasters, self-actualizers, and everything in between...

I think my increasing realization of the last few years is that we already live in this world. Nobody in America who doesn’t work is starving to death. Maybe they’re homeless or don’t have access to medical care, but everyone can access food, clean water, and shelter from extreme weather without “working” in any traditional sense. Many more who aren’t working or barely work have housing, internet access, video games, etc..

I would credit rule of law, effective capital markets, tremendous strength in economies that engender trust—and the hard work of untold millions of people over a century or more—for the current status. And I’d note that the vast majority of those who benefit now live in a household where at least one person works or did and retired.  The difference between this and the potential AI future is critical: A job would not be needed.

My dream AI world is one where AI's mandate is to create and enforce a sustainable environment.

The loose consensus among the writers on the subject I read is that an advanced AI would know how to do this. I’m guessing they’re right since a fair number of people today will tell you it’s common sense. Whether future human leaders, who may still be politically motivated, would do what is needed, is debatable. Sorry…

[Log]

…we could have a world comprised of coasters, self-actualizers, and everything in between...

I think my increasing realization of the last few years is that we already live in this world. Nobody in America who doesn’t work is starving to death. Maybe they’re homeless or don’t have access to medical care, but everyone can access food, clean water, and shelter from extreme weather without “working” in any traditional sense. Many more who aren’t working or barely work have housing, internet access, video games, etc..

I would credit rule of law, effective capital markets, tremendous strength in economies that engender trust—and the hard work of untold millions of people over a century or more—for the current status. And I’d note that the vast majority of those who benefit now live in a household where at least one person works or did and retired.  The difference between this and the potential AI future is critical: A job would not be needed.

How do you see such a redistributive regime coming into place? My point is there’s no magical threshold of abundance at which the UBI kicks in. Prior innovations have already overcome basic scarcity and eliminated huge categories of work, and we came up with new work to do. I think people are always going to work, and in all likelihood, society is going to continue to expect people to work.

[twinstudy]

…we could have a world comprised of coasters, self-actualizers, and everything in between...

I think my increasing realization of the last few years is that we already live in this world. Nobody in America who doesn’t work is starving to death. Maybe they’re homeless or don’t have access to medical care, but everyone can access food, clean water, and shelter from extreme weather without “working” in any traditional sense. Many more who aren’t working or barely work have housing, internet access, video games, etc..

I would credit rule of law, effective capital markets, tremendous strength in economies that engender trust—and the hard work of untold millions of people over a century or more—for the current status. And I’d note that the vast majority of those who benefit now live in a household where at least one person works or did and retired.  The difference between this and the potential AI future is critical: A job would not be needed.

How do you see such a redistributive regime coming into place? My point is there’s no magical threshold of abundance at which the UBI kicks in. Prior innovations have already overcome basic scarcity and eliminated huge categories of work, and we came up with new work to do. I think people are always going to work, and in all likelihood, society is going to continue to expect people to work.

Any job that is not hunting or gathering is not technically needed for society - yet as we have created new technologies, we have spawned new jobs.

[Ron Scott]

Perhaps there is a subtext to this thread I should have thought harder about at the outset. It involves two related but still separate emotional experiences: a) whether having is as desirable as wanting (an old mystery) and b) whether any given level of wealth is more rewarding when you earn it or it is given to you.

If you have no need to “achieve” FI to RE, does the resulting freedom taste as sweet?

[Cannot Wait!]

The freedom I have sitting on this beach in Mexico avoiding a Canadian winter, avoiding alarm clocks, commuting, work BS, etc  is pretty damn sweet to me no matter how it came to be.

[baludon]

If I was born into the world where I don't have to struggle to earn money just to survive I bet there would be other things that I would worry about and struggle just the same.

[2sk22]

You all are way too optimistic about the progress of the current set of AI technologies. They are more brittle than people realize and there are already signs that they are not scaling up as much as expected.

Even with programming which is one of the best use cases for LLMs, once you veer off the mainstream, code quality deteriorates rapidly. For example, I do a lot of programming in C++ for embedded systems for my hobby and I can assure you that not a single LLM I have tried properly understands the constraints of programming in such environments. They all confidently generate incorrect code which does not take concurrency into account.

[GilesMM]

Between AI and Cybercrime I expect a serious of horrific market disruptions/collapses that decimate investment accounts and FIRE plans in the next 3-5 years.

[Paper Chaser]

So—according to some—future-world may start off as a rocky transition period in which AIs become proficient over time at performing the work humans do today. Governments will need to manage the shift from a traditional, temporarily high unemployment problem to a society that simply doesn’t require many humans to work jobs that produce necessary goods and services. This will usher in the most profound paradigm shift for humanity in history. We will be transitioning from a competitive, dog-eat-dog, world of scarcity to one of abundance, in which all basic needs are met and humans are free to pursue other interests. In other words, people will never have to wring their hands over the 4% Rule again: Humans will be FIREd by AI and FIRE as we know it will be a thing of the past.

This is very reminiscent of what was said when automation took over assembly lines, and again when computers became commonplace. It doesn't seem to consider human psychology at all. Some amount of people will always want more. They're the ones that start businesses, hire others, invest, etc. Those types of people will always want more. They're not going to be content to let employees do less. They'll see that as inefficiency resulting in them getting less. Without workers banding together, business owners will use AI as a tool to extract more efficiency from their employees and grow their wealth.

There will always be those that have, and those that do not. And there will always be those that want to move up and those that want to avoid moving down. There will be no utopia where everybody is happy with their financial position or opportunities.

[twinstudy]

Between AI and Cybercrime I expect a serious of horrific market disruptions/collapses that decimate investment accounts and FIRE plans in the next 3-5 years.

I doubt that this is going to happen, but any one who is not yet FIRE'd will be delighted at market collapses. If the market fell 50% I could buy twice as many houses/shares, and that would generate more passive income. To me the actual value of the principal asset doesn't matter - it's only the passive income that matters, because I don't ever plan to sell the asset.

If houses crash by 50% that means twice as many for me, assuming that my job security is reasonable, which I think it is. Not everyone will be affected by AI or disruption, and those who keep their income will make hay.

[Ron Scott]

To me the actual value of the principal asset doesn't matter - it's only the passive income that matters, because I don't ever plan to sell the asset.

We can both list scenarios in which the asset value was certainly material but yeah, your statement is pretty much a bingo.

[twinstudy]

To me the actual value of the principal asset doesn't matter - it's only the passive income that matters, because I don't ever plan to sell the asset.

We can both list scenarios in which the asset value was certainly material but yeah, your statement is pretty much a bingo.

Which is why I find it strange so many people want a booming market.

It makes sense to want a crashed, collapsed market.

[Wolfpack Mustachian]

To me the actual value of the principal asset doesn't matter - it's only the passive income that matters, because I don't ever plan to sell the asset.

We can both list scenarios in which the asset value was certainly material but yeah, your statement is pretty much a bingo.

Which is why I find it strange so many people want a booming market.

It makes sense to want a crashed, collapsed market.

If you're not in the accumulation phase and you aren't living just off of dividends, the answer to that question seems fairly straightforward.... Right?

[Ron Scott]

To me the actual value of the principal asset doesn't matter - it's only the passive income that matters, because I don't ever plan to sell the asset.

We can both list scenarios in which the asset value was certainly material but yeah, your statement is pretty much a bingo.

Which is why I find it strange so many people want a booming market.

It makes sense to want a crashed, collapsed market.

If you're not in the accumulation phase and you aren't living just off of dividends, the answer to that question seems fairly straightforward.... Right?

If we’re talking about buying opportunities for obviously solid companies who are hiccuping, that’s always nice. A market correction or mild recession that sets a baseline for growth is fine too. And if you’ve got years of savings ahead of you, cash on the sidelines, and your income is secure I suppose a big market mess allows you to redeploy the cash and dollar cost average your paycheck contributions on the way up.

Not many folks are cheering for true market crashes tho. Major recessions and multi-year losses just aren’t that much fun.

[ChpBstrd]

Call me a pessimist, but I see AI as creating the same sort of threats to human well-being we never saw coming from the introduction of the internet:

• The end of democracies, ushered in by monopolistic control of the means of information production, the obsolescence of human fact-checkers or journalists, and the concentration of information control in a few hands.
• Algorithms that can detect and exploit addiction pathways in human brains, creating dependencies that can be used to drain people's wallets. Contemporary examples are "web 2.0" social media apps. Future examples might be AI "friends" that adapt to maximize your engagement with them.
• Increased time spent on devices, at the expense of time spent cultivating families, friendships, organizations, or involvement in civil society.
• Larger and larger portions of household budgets going toward devices, subscriptions, data sources, service connections, and accessories, even while the financial stability of most households is in decline.
• Increasing political radicalization, led by multi-billionaire AI owners with motives to tear down society so they can rule over it.
• A lowering of the general population intelligence, as the combination of the viral spread of false information plus a reduction in social interaction, a reduction in reading, the use of IT tools as parenting surrogates, and a general lack of reality-based experience can only increase as we start to offload even more of our mental tasks to AIs. Today we whip out our phones to do basic math or remember simple facts. Tomorrow we will turn to AI to resolve our more complex challenges.

Of course, the only way to guardrail the development of AI to ensure a more positive outcome for humanity than we got from web 2.0 would be an aggressive regulatory state. However, the deregulators and AI overlords now run the government, and feed us propaganda about how great they are through their captive information services. The population is not demanding an aggressive regulatory state, or even recognizing the problems as they emerge and wreck their own lives. Cassandras like Scott Galloway or the producers of The Social Dilemma have been largely ignored.

Seen in this light, the problem is not the future of work in capitalistic democracies; it is a slide backward into feudalism, authoritarianism, and the end of critical thinking, education, participatory politics, and the institutions which historically kept society together. We're worried about the details when in the big picture the foundations of middle class prosperity and the possibility of retirement is eroding beneath our feet, with AI being the next biggest threat to our interests.

[blue_green_sparks]

Call me a pessimist, but I see AI as creating the same sort of threats to human well-being we never saw coming from the introduction of the internet:

• The end of democracies, ushered in by monopolistic control of the means of information production, the obsolescence of human fact-checkers or journalists, and the concentration of information control in a few hands.
• Algorithms that can detect and exploit addiction pathways in human brains, creating dependencies that can be used to drain people's wallets. Contemporary examples are "web 2.0" social media apps. Future examples might be AI "friends" that adapt to maximize your engagement with them.
• Increased time spent on devices, at the expense of time spent cultivating families, friendships, organizations, or involvement in civil society.
• Larger and larger portions of household budgets going toward devices, subscriptions, data sources, service connections, and accessories, even while the financial stability of most households is in decline.
• Increasing political radicalization, led by multi-billionaire AI owners with motives to tear down society so they can rule over it.
• A lowering of the general population intelligence, as the combination of the viral spread of false information plus a reduction in social interaction, a reduction in reading, the use of IT tools as parenting surrogates, and a general lack of reality-based experience can only increase as we start to offload even more of our mental tasks to AIs. Today we whip out our phones to do basic math or remember simple facts. Tomorrow we will turn to AI to resolve our more complex challenges.

Of course, the only way to guardrail the development of AI to ensure a more positive outcome for humanity than we got from web 2.0 would be an aggressive regulatory state. However, the deregulators and AI overlords now run the government, and feed us propaganda about how great they are through their captive information services. The population is not demanding an aggressive regulatory state, or even recognizing the problems as they emerge and wreck their own lives. Cassandras like Scott Galloway or the producers of The Social Dilemma have been largely ignored.

Seen in this light, the problem is not the future of work in capitalistic democracies; it is a slide backward into feudalism, authoritarianism, and the end of critical thinking, education, participatory politics, and the institutions which historically kept society together. We're worried about the details when in the big picture the foundations of middle class prosperity and the possibility of retirement is eroding beneath our feet, with AI being the next biggest threat to our interests.

Agreed. I see AI being used the same way religions have been for thousands of years. Exploit the evolutionary quirks inherent in our Simian brain structure. The desire to be part of a tribe is strong in us. The desire to live forever. The passion to partake in a purpose larger than us. All easily exploited by powerful, psychologically targeted AI. Real evidence never required. Hang on to your butts.

[GuitarStv]

Democracy has been a very short lived experiment.  Authoritarianism and feudalism are the human norm, and we're reverting to it.  AI seems likely to hasten this reversion.

[Just Joe]

That might be a good topic: how to function best and prosper under authoritarianism and feudalism while staying closest to your moral guidebook.

For some folks, this might be a very good thing to ponder as fairness and truth goes out the window.

[GuitarStv]

That might be a good topic: how to function best and prosper under authoritarianism and feudalism while staying closest to your moral guidebook.

For some folks, this might be a very good thing to ponder as fairness and truth goes out the window.

The easiest way to be moral under feudalism/authoritarianism is to be in power.  That's when you decide morality.  Otherwise morality is something that's imposed upon you.

[Just Joe]

True. I won't ever be in a position of power. There are alot of people out there who might struggle to "read the rooms" they are dealing with.