Thread · HN Continuity

Economics is the science of how scarce resources are used, produced and distributed. AI is in its developed form is post-economics, because it turns what used to be economic resources into free resources.

The concern over what will happen to people who can no longer earn economic resources from their occupation misses the point. Post-economic abundance is already the ultimate goal of an economic system. And in so far as AI eliminates jobs, it does that by moving us to that post-economics paradigm. People are going to be orders of magnitude better off.

Imagine we lived in a world where oxygen was scarce. There were oxygen merchants that sold you oxygen so that you could breathe. And then suddenly the planet transformed and oxygen was plentiful. It became a free resource instead of a scarce resource.

Everyone would be better off. Even the oxygen merchants, while being harmed in one narrow sense, would be vastly better off in general.