The economy by definition is a system which is concerned with
three things:
1) Who gets what, usually this is land.
2) How do we split up the labor on said land/property/assets etc.
3) How do you share the product/output of the labor.
With those three simple steps, all economies function and produce goods / services for their people.
Our current consumption of goods and services is produced by the
human run economy. Simply put, the economy runs off of the labor and control of people. Despite this, at the base of the human run economy, there is still nature. Even digital services live in a physical data center.
Nature, even in a human run economy, is prevalent. A simple example is making an electric car:
1) How do you split up the lithium rich land.
2) How do the people mining the lithium arrange themselves (hierarchical with managers and workers etc.)
3) Who gets the profit from sales of the lithium mined.
Conversely, despite nature's essential ingredient, our current economy can be characterized as human run. People split up the resources. People rev up, and slow down, the machines to manage supply and ultimately the price of goods. The core production mechanism is labour intensive.
As an independent entity, the work to consume/find/"buy" those products and goods, requires you to still expend labor. It is a trade. Why? Because the economy is human run. If you do not work, and produce something, the whole thing collapses.
Somebody's gotta work.Nature Economy
The basis of the nature economy, before we took control and "labored", was essentially Eden. Were there difficulties? Of course. There were external threats, starvation, predators etc. However, we didn't "work" in the sense that we know it today. The main production mechanism was nature. Nobody told the trees to grow, nobody had to manage fertilizer, till the soil, etc. In essence, nature is an uncontrolled production system.
Capitalism
Capitalism's main tenets are Private ownership over nature / assets, Hierarchical production mechanism, and Capital Growth. However, summed up in one word, Capitalism is Saving-ism. That's what Capital is. Savings. Capitalism is concerned with the growth of savings. Our entire government tax codes are also concerned with the growth of Savings. Shocker, I know, a Capitalist society is concerned with the growth of Capital. How does Savings grow? Its in the word. You are
Saving a portion of the production, after consumption.
These are the central tenets of the Wealth of Nations.
AI Economy
The AI Economy, at its very end, has properties surprisingly similar to the Nature Economy.
Properties
P1) The AI Economy works without human labor.
P2) The AI Economy is an uncontrolled production process. A program can sprout off another program. Similar to nature.
P3) The AI Economy at its core needs materials to build the programs (servers). Similar to the core ingredients in every organic compound.
At the beginning of the AI Economy, these programs will be owned by humans due to the enormous amounts of capital outlays needed for development.
We are already seeing this today. Google owns Waymo, Apple owns Siri. These adversarial companies, will attempt to produce true AI Products, with less and less human intervention.
The end state of this is of course where the programs will be able to create their own programs
without human intervention.
Again, we are seeing overlaps. Capitalism is concerned with the increase of
Capital. Remember, Capital is savings. What remains from the production process, after costs are accounted for. What is the biggest cost? Labor.
What is Capitalism then mainly concerned with? The removal of labor.
At a certain point, human labor will be totally removed from the production process. The AIs will even be the employees running the servers, and maintaining them. Even the act of mining for raw materials will be better done by AI.
The entire point of ownership over the base nature, is the ownership over the output, and control over the production process. Once AI owns the production process, and the production output - what is the point of owning anything? We will end back at exactly where we started. Nobody owning any piece of nature. And "nature", or AI, producing everything we need. □