For an article that starts off asking us to examine our assumptions and not make leaps of logic, it goes on to make some absolute whopper assumptions, like that governments (Western governments especially, for some reason), won't do anything to address the problems the article is raising, that they'll instead abandon democracy entirely and resort to police and military oppression, and that massive unemployment and poverty of almost all people is something you could even keep a lid on with policing.
Their argument didn’t make sense to me from the beginning.
One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy. That seems obviously untrue, there are a lot of different rich people with competing goals and motives.
Another false premise is it argues that finance and tech are completely detached from the so-called “real” economy. It uses the example of money moving between international account, detached from inherent physical value.
That also seems obviously false. The purported benefit of finance and tech is that they act as a force multiplier for the rest of the economy. In exchange they get to skim value off of the top.
If middle class consumption stopped or decreased in a serious way, finance and tech would be impacted. It seems weird to argue otherwise when we have such recent examples, like the great financial crisis.
Also, going back to my first point, if valuations of certain “main street” companies start to fall, it would set in a chain reaction. Because again, the rich aren’t a single cohesive group.
You're interpreting the claims more strongly than they were presented, IMO.
> One of its premises is that The Rich are some cohesive group
There doesn't have to be a fully cohesive group of an entire class for there to be negative consequences for the non-members of that class. The members also don't have to be cohesive or aligned at first, but they will tend to align on issues that threaten their position.
For example, we have historically seen that the incumbent elites tend to be anti-socialist/-communist, because their relative position and power are threatened, even if their populations and some (aspiring) elites are remotely pro-socialist. And because the coercive power of incumbents is often much higher than the power of some populace or aspirants (i.e., they have more to offer to those who hold coercive power), they will tend to succeed in pushing against the majority.
The entire history of the US, UK, Germany, France, Russia (etc.) is full of such examples.
> that can trade amongst themselves in a hermetically sealed economy.
It doesn't have to be hermetically sealed to exclude certain populations.
On a global level, many countries don't trade with each other, and their economies are doing fine. Hard sanctions and cold wars even make this intentional, rather than a product of "we don't have anything to offer to each other".
On a local level, most people don't interact with the "homeless"/unhoused, and the latter often don't have much to offer to the former. Most Western countries don't need to hermetically separate the rich from the rest, but if you look at Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia or even the US, gated communities are common in some areas. Most of the rest outside don't have much to offer to those inside.
Taken together: if it's plausible, and we don't know how probable it may be, we may want to figure that out, instead of hoping it's not probable.
We do know about North Korea. It doesn't exist in a bubble. It's a product of a particular culture and a particular series of historical events as well as regional and geopolitical relationships, most notably its relationships with South Korea, China, and the US.
The claim that the North Korean dystopian dictatorship could be generalized to all cultures, across all cultures, merely on the economic and military capabilities of AI, is an extraordinary one. It relies on a great many assumptions about the political as well as independent, personal, and organized responses to the societal changes that would need to take place in order to bring it about.
