If everyone is fired by AI, who's going to buy the products and services made by the companies if no one has money anymore?
If everyone is fired by AI, who's going to buy the products and services made by the companies if no one has money anymore?
Don't think of people having money as an on-off switch. It's a gradual shift, and it's already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.
Capitalism doesn't look that far ahead.
I agree it's going to be problem. It's already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn't pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that's why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is relatively more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that used to be expensive but are now cheap) and don't understand how life is more expensive.
Ever heard of the everlasting sustainable war? https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Sustainable_War
If robots generate all of productivity and human labor is no longer needed, the economy would not be able to sustain itself. Instead, in trying to cope with the unneeded human labor and to ensure continued productivity, the only area where productivity would be ensured is by means of war using human resources, namely destroying things in order to be rebuild, thus generating a sustaining feedback loop. The rich will get richer and everyone else will only be employed as soldiers in a continuing war economy.
Even though this is a sci-fi concept, i believe it's not a stretch to say we are headed to this direction.
This is a common question in economics.
It's called technological unemploymemt and it's a type of structural unemployment.
Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.
An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there's like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.
There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.
Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.
There's been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there's not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.
Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.
One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn't as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.
In theory, UBI.
In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.
If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it's not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.
Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, can't think past their quarterly reports. The ones that are private are competing with the public ones and think following trends by companies that are "too big to fail" will work out for them.
As stated, the companies that push AI aren't concerned with the long-term consequences. But if you want to know how the individuals who run those companies personally feel, do a search for billionaire doomsday preppers.
TL;DR: They've got a vision for the future. We're not in it.
AI owners will.
And if you then go around wandering "oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want", "that's way too few people to fill a market", or "and what about all the rest?"... Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).
The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we'll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.
I see three possibilities if AI is able to eliminate a significant portion of jobs:
- Universal basic income, that pays out based on how productive the provider side was per person. Some portion of wealth is continually transferred to the owners.
- Neofeudalism, where the owners at the time of transition end up owning everything and allow people to live or not live on their land at their whim. Then they can use them for labour where needed or entertainment otherwise. Some benevolent feudal lords might generally let people live how they want, though there will always be a fear of a revolution so other more authoritarian lords might sabotage or directly war with them.
- Large portions of the population are left SOL to die or do whatever while the economy doesn't care for them. Would probably get pretty violent since people don't generally just go off to die of starvation quietly. The main question for me is if the violence would start when the starving masses have had enough of it or earlier by those who see that coming.
I'm guessing reality will have some combination of each of those.
Why would we need anyone to buy things? Remember that money is an abstraction for resources. If you can do everything with AI, then you already have all the resources you need. Whether or not someone else needs what you produce is irrelevant when you already have access to everything you could want.
That's the neat part. No one.
If the rich can hire a handful of the middle class to build and maintain their robots, then they can just cut the poor and working poor out of the economy entirely, and they will be willing to accept any conditions for food and shelter.
We can arrange the economy anyway we choose. Taking all of the decision making for themselves is part of the plan.
That, my friend, is the problem for whichever schmuck is in charge after me, a C Suite executive. By then I will be long gone on my private island, having pulled the rip cord on my golden parachute.
You're describing the end goal of monopoly
Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.
That's the cool part, you won't. If everything crucial is automated, people can drive things forward for passion rather than for money. Of course, this would effectively collapse capitalism, which won't happen painlessly.
The whole increasing concentration of wealth and fall in median quality of life can be traced back to basically each individual of the Owner Class thinking that somebody else will keep the system going by employing people and paying them well enough so that they keep on buying stuff.
The whole think is pretty much a Tragedy Of The Commons as defined in Games Theory, only instead of a shared grazing commons that would be fine if just one person had a few more sheep than they should (but gets overgrazed and then everybody looses if more people have a few more sheep than they should), we have the Economic system.
Historically one of the big reasons for the invariable appearance of some kind of social construct above the individual with the ability to make decisions for the group and force individuals to comply (from the "council of elders" all the way to the modern Democracy) is exactly to stop people from, driven by pure selfishness, "overgraze" in the various "commons" we have and ending up destroying the whole thing for everybody - if you have one or two doing it the "commons" can handle it, but too many and you get a tragedy.
And here we are after 4 decades of Neoliberalism whose entire purpose was to reduce the power of entities making decisions for the good of the group to overseeing the commons and force individuals from overexploiting it, so it's not at all surprising that we are seeing various common systems starting to collapse due to over-exploitation.
I'm pretty certain that whatever societies will be dominant next are not those which embraced Neoliberalism the most as those will be the ones with the most collapsed systems and that stuff takes a lot of time to recover, plus the very people who overexploited them to collapse will do all they can to avoid having stop what they've been doing and that gave them so much personal upside maximization and they've basically bought politics in the West, so there is no actual will to do it in the Power Elites (there's a will to get the upsides of a well functioning society but no will for they themselves to do the concessions needed, only for somebody else to do it, which is exactly the mindset that when not stamped out by some kind of oversight entity causes the problem in the first place).
The real answer is no one. They will quickly realize that at the root of the economy are the regular people, and since the economy is a cycle, when you cut off a part, the cycle doesn’t work anymore.
People (doomers) here are saying businesses and rich people will, but this can only, work for a limited time, because either the products will shoot up in price since only the rich can afford them, or the businesses won’t be able to sell their products, so they can’t buy new things, which means no more revenue to the shareholders.
Think of all the companies that live from b2b models, when you look closer, they are all at some the suppliers of b2c businesses, except, maybe military companies. That company that makes the lithography machines (asml) only sells to other businesses such as tsmc. Tsmc also only sells to other businesses, but they sell to businesses that sell to consumers.
If the AI can run everything, then we become a post scarcity society. I'm hoping for Iain M Banks Culture series myself, but who knows. Or maybe the AI becomes so intelligent it just checks out like in the movie Her and we have to go back to doing it with non-AI tech.
Well here's a story written in 2003 about exactly that, that I find myself thinking about more and more often
Whoever still has money. Either importing wealthy immigrants to replace the American market or they'll move their products to the markets that still have money.
I like how you mixed a few notions together in a way specifically designed to induce chaos.
Even assuming that AI can take away jobs, which is itself I think inaccurate, and provably so, that has nothing to do with people lacking money. In an ideal world, we could use technology to improve productivity so that we would need to work less.
So then what you are actually asking is a different question. What you're actually asking is, what happens if we create an economic system that takes away most money from most of the people, to much larger degree than is currently happening. And for that, all you need to do is go look at the history books.
Finally, your question as posed is partly self-contradictory. You're talking about AI being competent enough so that it can fire everyone, but improvements in technology are not always monetized. They can also lead to extreme cost savings. If for example, if I don't have the money to hire an accountant, but I don't need to because the software package is good enough to handle all of it for me, then there's no problem to be solved. And this is true for any number of so-called white collar jobs.
So then what we actually see is that jobs change and evolve over time. The word computer used to talk about a person who did arithmetic and other such operations. Now it's used to refer to the machine itself.
If we all run out of money they will harvest the marrow from our bones. They'll extract a fee, don't doubt it.
In the 2000s, there was a strong angle about how programmers would no longer exist thanks to drag and drop programming tools and website builders. The average office worker would write little programs as easy as a excel formula, and a "programmer" would cease to exist.
I remember CS professors fearing for the future as they talked about the doomsday scenario of programmer jobs ceasing to exist, going the way of human calculators and the people who put letters together for a printing press.
Of course, business is still normal. It ebbs and flows.
I think about that whenever I think about AI.
Well, in the purely fictional hypothetical that an LLM could advance to the point of reliably replacing humans without a stark loss of quality and marginal cost-benefit before legislations step in to make the cost of increased power consumption and environmental damage reflect on what these companies pay in:
Their will be an owners class who have stake or claim over facilities and technology to utilize the AI, and then there will be an everybody else who have to fight tooth and nail politically for basic human rights as well as shelter and food. Just the current system but whether it's that much worse or better depends on how well our democracies function.
Were already seeing a drop in product quality and reliability. Just try a search engine for practically anything. Chances are you already type "wiki" or "reddit" or "Lemmy" or whatever along with your search terms. AI(LLM) is just advanced cargo cult development. It won't translate to physical design even though that's being pushed by management level and marketing. Products will stop being useful altogether.
That's on top of the tailoring to business and wealthy class as others have argued here. But even that will have to endure enshitification. Ultimately the wealthy will pay for labor on their toys(they already do, we just can't afford those).
This us a marketing and executive delusion issue.
When there is a scarcity of resources a population will shrink to sustainable levels. Right now there are too many people to share the scraps left from the billionaires hoovering up all the capital. People will stop having kids, others will die homeless, and population will decrease just as happens in any population of animals experiencing scarcity.
They'll be making stuff for rich people.
That doesn't matter because they won't be here by the time that happens
That's why private property is so cool. You can even enslave sentient AI to work for you because you inherited things. Capital rules all as long as it has more firepower. Though I bet the AI would be better at organizing a strike than we are.
Other companies? Companies also need things, so they would also need things to buy and sell. Buying and selling to each other doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, particularly if the goods are non-physical. A company selling editing services for articles to a company that writes those articles for a news company who might be selling stocks to an investment company, and ad space to an ad company, etc.
Realistically, though, that doesn't tend to be that high a priority, or much of a long-term worry. Most of the concern these days seems to be focused more on the short-term profit more so than anything else, even if it will ultimately harm the company.
Not that it would really matter for most, since a lot of the people who might otherwise be affected would likely be out and away by the time that that rolls around. It would barely affect them.
The bots hooked to our stolen credit cards.
The rich people don't care, they'll have already retired to their private fortress islands and gotten eaten by their own security staff long before the survivors can track them down.
Software has already been doing a lot of stock market buying and selling for many years, even before AI came along, I imagine that sort of concept but on a more expansive scale, for a start!
It'll be an elephant walk of ai and ai adjacent services.
There were literally humans that were both Jewish and helping the NAZIs kill other Jewish people during the Holocaust.
There will be humans willing to serve A.I. and sell out humanity.
This isn’t any different from any other automation , so far. Every time there is a new level of automation, someone asks this question. Yes there can be disruption, even a generation or two lost at the level of “Industrial Revolution”, but so far it’s always come back with more jobs, more opportunity.
So what’s different this time? Do you thinks it’s good enough to replace thinking? That was my fear when it looked like self-driving was coming fast, but that fizzled out, and I have Vern blower expectations for this round of generative ai. Sure, it might be transformative to some roles and destructive to the remains of journalism but I don’t see it taking many actual jobs
We’re arguably already in this situation with outsourcing, smart automation, service industries, where there seem to be fewer “middle” jobs. While some of us can be the higher skilled new jobs, way too many new jobs are just not
They don't need anyone to buy products if they already have all of the resources, and an army of drone soldiers and slaves. For an example, watch Elysium. It'll be like that, but without the opportunity to revolt.
How is everyone going to be fired by AI? First define AI, because what we have now is a bunch of LLMs.
In the end, it's more practical to have both working in tandem. You have a person who has common sense guiding and an AI tool who assists the person in doing the work.
At worst, people would have to up skill/re skill to have working experience with AI tools.
But people are not gonna stop working. New jobs will be created and some old jobs will disappear, as it has been the case
Ohhh, oh. So you didn't see that episode of black mirror yet?
It's a good one.
We got this guy Not Sure....
In the extreme case, you would have AIs buying from other AIs. Humans aren't the only possible economic agents.
Someone always has the money. That's who will be buying things.
People in other countries
Our robot overlords will.
But more seriously: There is a lot of stuff that AI can't do. And is far off of. It can barely do anything at all for me. Like translate stuff or re-write an E-Mail. The rest is hype. It can't do my laundry, clean up the kitchen. It can't drive the train that gets me to work, not fix a toilet. And it's years if not decades away from being able to do it. I'd be worried if I had some callcenter job or first level support. Or was a useless manager who just pushes paper around all day. These jobs are going to be replaced fast, yes. But it'll take some time for lots of other jobs.
And if we (at some point) advance to a future, where we live in abundance, and technology can do all the hard work, so humans don't have to... Wouldn't that be great? We could do whatever we want. Of course culture and society has to change. We can't have concepts like salaries if we don't work. But by definition we'd have our basic needs met. Food will be enough, or we wouldn't not work anymore. So I guess we just do away with money. Or everyone gets a fixed amount. You could make up your own job. Do arts and crafts, or travel, or spend the day with your kids.
There is one big caveat, however: We won't automatically arrive in a Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. Currently all the AI is owned and designed by big corporations. They also own the computers to run it and they are in control of it. And there is a lot of corporate greed, lobbyism and generally unhealthy divide. I'd say it's very likely that rich people and big, greedy corporations will want to keep everything to themselves. The rich will get richer and assert their dominance with this powerful tool. The poor will get poorer. And can't compete with that at all. And despite theoretically living in a sci-fi world, it'll be a dystopia and end in a big mess / class war / oppression.
But yeah, you're right. Our current form of economy with supply and demand, and money, won't work under those conditions. And I don't think there is a fix to it sou we could keep it.