Review: Job-Less Utopia

Marcus Hutter—oldheads will remember him from AIXI—recently<br>published a book: Job-Less Utopia: Macroeconomics in the Age of<br>AGI. I’m always curious what the people building AI think or want the<br>future to look like, and I’m also always looking for non-doomer takes on the<br>post-AGI future, so I decided to read it and review it.

The first thing to say is that nearly every sentence is written by AI. To his<br>credit, Hutter says so plainly:

Claude also served as the most diligent editor I could have hoped for: While I<br>have a reasonable grasp of economic concepts, I am neither a professional<br>economist nor a native English speaker, so it was invaluable to have someone<br>polish my clumsy English into professional language. No text was taken<br>verbatim without my critical review, revision, and approval.

Like many people who use AI to write, he uses this tiresome “I’m not a native<br>English speaker 🥺” argument. But he published an English-language book<br>in 2005—which I read!—and it was infinitely more readable than this. Now, I<br>suspect Claude did more than just editing, because the book is full of<br>unnecessary and convoluted figures, tables, abbreviations, taxonomies, including<br>(and I swear to God this is verbatim from the book):

“a Wittgensteinian property-cluster definition of ‘job’ (11 properties × 8<br>edge cases)”

“a formal job–leisure spectrum showing how UBI degrades job properties”

“a four-camp taxonomy of positions on automation”

“A technology-level taxonomy (five cognitive AI levels plus two robotic<br>levels) is mapped onto a job-replacement matrix showing what threshold<br>automates 10%, 50%, 90%, and 99% of each occupation (Table 3.3).”

Which is exactly the kind of make-work cognitive dreck that LLMs love to write<br>to pass the time. As a result the book is unpleasant, confusing, verbose,<br>repetitive slop.

So, going forward, I’ll be treating Claude as the author. Sorry Marcus! Make<br>something real next time. Now, Claude’s argument is simple: AGI and robotics,<br>which are said to be inevitable, will take all our jobs, and we can tax the<br>vastly increased economic output to create widespread prosperity. Most of the<br>book is about the economic realizability of taxing AGI wealth and paying out<br>UBI.

The main problem with the book is the signal-to-noise ratio. Most of it is<br>obvious. Other than “AGI and robotics will take ~all jobs”, which is of course<br>uncertain, everything else is uncontroversial: yes, output in the jobless AGI<br>world would increase rather than decrease; yes, the surplus can be taxed to<br>provide UBI; yes, we still need money even in the jobless utopia to coordinate<br>economic activity. There’s some stuff about self-replicating machines I already<br>know: we’ve all read Drexler and Freitas here. You don’t need<br>260 pages to explain all this. The one part that is semi-novel is this idea of<br>using Pigouvian taxes to disincentivize so-called “bullshit<br>jobs”. God, I hate Graeber so much.

There’s an interesting bit about intellectual property. Claude’s argument here<br>is that AGI plus present-day IP law would lead to a massive concentration of<br>wealth, while simultaneously “the traditional justification for IP<br>(incentivizing human creativity through temporary monopoly) weakens markedly<br>once AI systems generate the bulk of patentable inventions and copyrightable<br>works at near-zero marginal cost”. The solutions: shorter patent terms,<br>Harberger taxes, compulsory patent licensing. So, as part of the<br>transition to the job-less utopia, the whole world will have to coordinate to<br>essentially abolish IP. Which seems very hard. I doubt the Disney corporation<br>will go gently into that good night.

The most interesting questions around AGI are not economic, but rather questions<br>of political economy. For example: if most humans become materially and<br>economically useless, how do they maintain a political voice? That is: how do we<br>preserve democracy when the state no longer needs its people? Claude admits this<br>is a problem, e.g. on page 132:

The “Age of Labor” conferred unprecedented political power on workers (Korinek<br>and Stiglitz, 2021); they could strike, withhold their contribution, and<br>thereby constrain employers and governments (Boix, 2019). Full automation<br>extinguishes this lever entirely: if no human labor is needed, a strike is<br>merely self-imposed privation. UBI restores livelihood but not agency over<br>production.

And page 141:

The economics are tractable in principle (Chapter 3), but translating them<br>into policy requires political will, social cohesion, and a credible answer to<br>the search for meaning in a post-labor world. When redistribution fails, the<br>consequences range from populism to regulatory capture and a transition-period<br>underclass risk, yet democratic feedback loops nonetheless incentivize<br>corrective action (Section 7.1 and Figure 7.1). A deeper structural question<br>follows: if the state no longer depends on citizen labor for economic output,<br>does the democratic social contract...