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?
217 comments
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Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Further proof of this: Climate change.
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Funny thing is that capitalism accidentaly solves global warming same way as it created it - turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
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It's a hopeful idea, but it may be too late.
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The problem is that the previous accumulation of capital has centralized a lot of power in actors who have a financial incentive to stop renewables. If we could hit a big reset on everything then yes, I think renewables would win, but we're dealing with a lot of very rich, very powerful people who really want us to keep being dependent on them.
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This is not "capitalism accidentally solves climate change". This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way. From there, capitalism took over, as intended. For green energy to be be feasible, we needed it to get picked up by the capitalist machine, because the capitalist machine has all the power and infrastructure in place to make it into a succes.
I predict that the same thing will happen with large capacity, small size home batteries once they become economically feasible. They are on the brink of becoming profitable and once they do, they will become a huge success and help reduce energy waste.
Same thing goes for fusion, but we're a long way off making that economically viable.
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Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it's more expensive than renewables.
The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There's a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.
Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a "bridge fuel" that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what's been built doesn't seem like much of a bridge because there's no plan for ramping down natural gas.
Colour me shocked.
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turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
Cool, when is that going to start happening? Because I only see a handful of electric cars and I see a whole ton of coal power plants.
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These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Well that's not true at all. The vast majority of investors are in it for the long run.
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Did you mean to say shareholder and corporate management? Investment itself (especially diversified) is completely about long-term performance.
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Yup, economics are all about "LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!!!" It's infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.
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Pathogens don't really think of what will happen after the body they're abusing dies
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They kind of do. (I am so sorry, not trying to be that guy).
Look at HIV. The original strain is horribly deadly, but the strains that have evolved within the last decade are much more tame. It’s because the virus that kills its host doesn’t get to spread - Zombie outbreaks excluded here.
The flu is the same way. New strains always emerge, but they are usually not fatal to most even without a vaccine.
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They manage this by dying en masse and self-selecting, soooo...
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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.
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I dunno man, this tech is evolving quickly. It's a fad and buzzword now but at one point so was social media and the Internet. I only see this growing and getting bigger.
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Remember when crypto replaced all the banks?
No, I actually don't remember that. When did this happen?
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exactly his point
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It still might, but only if you invest in my Wooshcoin.
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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.
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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.
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We're already there, in a sort of way. Products aren't built to last, aren't built to be repaired. Buy a new phone, computer, washing machine, every year! You wouldn't want the social embarrassment of not having the latest gadgets! And if that fails, we'll just release a patch that prevents the irreplaceable battery from lasting a full day.
Plus after computers made it so one person could do the job of 100, entire new industries popped up to do meaningless jobs shuffling digital money around. Some of the most comfortably-paying upper-working-class jobs are entirely pointless. But it keeps educated people from questioning the system. As long as they get a cushy paycheck twice a month they'll happily make another B2B web 3.0 cloud-based KPI tracking analytics platform and not question if their job is meaningful.
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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.
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A major problem is all the money from these increases in efficiency go to a handful of people, who then hoard it. A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
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A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
The money is life. The money must flow.
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The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.
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This doesn't sound sustainable at all. A billionaire only needs so much gasoline, food, medicine, TVs...
Collapse of entire industries will happen way before we even get a chance to see industries reinvent themselves to cater to billionaires. Don't believe me? Just look at what happened to the economy during the pandemic.
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Yeah of course industries will collapse. 100 car factories will close, 5 superyacht factories will open, tying up the same amount of productivity. Owned by the same guy.
There will be tons of spacecraft launchpads, private jet hangars, etc.
And wars of course.
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They won't, they'll simply die and the market will slowly adjust to those with capital.
This is all happening because we shot a gorilla in 2016 btw.
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Don’t forget your sacred duty boys, dicks out for Harambe.
It’s the only way to fix this fucked timeline
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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.
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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.
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There is zero chance any UBI model would keep the economy going in a mass layoff scenario UBI may keep people alive for a short while (few years) getting the basics needs but that's as far as it would go.
In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.
This is likely the mildest of outcomes
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.
100% agreed. AI evangelists overhyped "AI" to get companies to commit more money than it's worth through FOMO. Exact same way CVS lost its panties to Elizabeth Holmes
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I'm an optimist, so I'll believe one day we'll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don't criticize me too harshly
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Hey, that's a reasonable thing to hope. The flip side, of course, is that I'm hoping I don't have to live through Star Trek's idea of how the 21st century goes. They definitely got all of the details wrong, but I'm afraid the vibes are matching a little too well.
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Hey, we've still got 2 months to the Bell Riots, and DeSantis was talking about putting all the homeless people in Florida on an island
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While I agree, I'm skeptical that we'll see any meaningful advance toward that end in our lifetimes.
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I think it's as relistic a future as the complete destruction of mankind, but your point of view makes life a lot more enjoyable. Here's a nice quote to back it up:
"There is nothing like a dream to create the future" - Victor Hugo
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I am also an optimist. I believe one day we'll all be dead, and all that will remain are robots that fuel off blood, left to invade hell for the only thing that will sustain them.
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With that quote I expected to open a lyric video to a metal song
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In a better world machines would do the work and humans just would share the wealth and live life in peace.
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The thing is though, everyone needs to do something just for the satisfaction of not doing nothing.
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Due some special circunstances a few years ago I was one year without a job and without the need to find a job because I had my finances and laboral future secured. At no point I was without anything to do. I just did a bunch of personal projects that were not driven by money but for my own enjoyment and the need to create some things. Also did a lot of exercise and took on trekking.
I could live all my life like that if I needn't a job for sustaining myself.
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It's only fools and the rich who pedal the narrative that a whole section of society would turn into lazy slobs, do nothing except watch TV.
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I wonder if there are ways for people to find meaningful things to do other than being forced to work in order to be housed and fed?
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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.
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All kinds of people fatasize about the end of times. From the losely asociated groups of rednecks, to the religious cults. The rich just has a better budget for their hobbies, and their toys are more visible. Which, paradoxicaly, disqualifies them from the prepping game.
Number one rule about the secret bunker is not telling anyone about the secret bunker.
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rednecks, to the religious cults
I see your point, but usually those groups don't have the ability to accelerate the arrival of the end times, whereas the billionaires might.
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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).
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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.
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Why are you obsessed around wealth of other people? You should be more concerned about your own income rather than some super wealthy CEO
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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.
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In the USA, it would be option 3 all the way. We would see three classes: Mega Rich, the warfighters of the mega rich, and then the rest of us left to starve.
They wouldn’t just pull the plug and leave us to our own devices, they would actively destroy farming equipment and industry to make sure life is awful
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I'm not even sure it will be 3 classes because having a soldier class risks them deciding to just take over. This is one of the real dangers of AI, they won't have any issue going into an area and killing everything that moves there until they are given an encrypted kill command. Or maybe the rich will even come in with an EMP (further destroying what infrastructure is left) and act like they are the heroes while secretly being the ones who give the orders to reduce the numbers in the first place.
Worst part is the tech for that already exists. The complicated kill bot AI is getting it to discriminate and selectively kill. I remember seeing a video of an automated paintball turret that could hit a moving basketball with full precision 20 years ago. Not only that, it was made by a teenager (or team of teenagers).
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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.
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Yeaaaah, the issue there is that, that is completely incompatible with our current system of capitalism. If we do not take deliberate steps to transform the system, it will collapse.
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It's no less compatible with capitalism than any other economic system. The idea that humans are no longer needed to do any kind of work is an issue the world has never faced before.
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Good. The system is fucked.
Let it collapse and we can work on a new system without hundreds of years of entrenched rich elites deciding it.
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Look at empires of the past.
Things were so bad in Dickens' London that living in sewers to live off whatever scraps you could find was an actual occupation.
Wealth creates its own reality.
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And they couldn't even murder their royals, fuck the brits
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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.
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So we will have a handle of people living like The Jetsons, and everyone else like the Flintstones down below.
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They won't need maintenance if they're a general purpose intelligence. A technology that has the possibility to free all of humanity from scarcity, has the possibility to finally collapse dominance of aristocracy for good. Sure, they'll try and put themselves on top somehow. But once the knowledge exists, anyone can create a version for the greater good.
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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.
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You're describing the end goal of monopoly
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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.
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Which is why you place hards limits on capitalism with a lotmof oversight like in the north European countries. It can be done right ifnits done right. That is, of you wa to do it right. If you simply want to say "fuck it, I want to get rich" then you go for the no limits no safe wors style that the US is practicing.
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My base rule is that if it's needed or used by a majority of people, then the government should have it (probably exclusively too). Like hospitals, schools, infrastructure like roads and trains, electric grid, eventually the internet.
Now, shops and food isn't in there, probably because we shop wildly differentt I guess, but some base could be handled by rhe government (which is usually the case, like minimum rights to food etc).
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You’re implying AI has the intelligence to remotely achieve this. It doesn’t. It is all venture capitalist porn for over glorified keyword copy paste. Thats it.
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You're implying AI will never progress beyond its current potential.
I doubt it'll be taking our jobs anytime soon, but to assume that it will never improve would be naive.
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It has barely improved since the 70’s/80s. Hardware got faster.
Its a fallacy to assume “line go up”.
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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.
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This question was asked, and the answer was "Kill the poor, make line go up."
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I remember in Interstellar, the Blight caused huge starvation among the poor causing them to riot. The government asked NASA to drop an orbital bomb on them but NASA refused, which caused the government to remove funding for NASA and close it publicly. It was just fiction then but it's looking a bit grim now.
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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).
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Norway
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Neoliberalism is killing the good parts of Norway (and there were bad ones to begin with).
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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.
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i don't think prices will shoot up, it's just the wealthiest will have accumulated the absolute most amount of wealth they possibly could. Everything would crash but they would own everything. That's of course if AI can fully replace us and produce everything that humanity needs practically forever but behind a paywall.
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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.
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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.
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If all the money is hoarded by the rich, who is going to spend money to make the economy run?
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The rich will live in their bunkers while society collapses and blame it all on communism.
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The rich will keep trading with each other. Look at housing for an example.
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Well here's a story written in 2003 about exactly that, that I find myself thinking about more and more often
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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.
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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.
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An llm will never be able to do this. Unfortunately the word AI has been hijacked by companies and marketeers. Ai now means just about anything really.
They're actually coming up with new words to describe what AI used to mean such as AGI, which stands for artificial general intelligence.
To elaborate on the premise of this post, The boost that we're going to get from an actual artificial intelligence one that is perhaps sentient will be so much that the tasks that were once performed Will become so mundane and menial that it will not make any difference who performs those tasks or if they're even being paid to do so.
In the same sense that the printing press removed the necessity for scribes, at least for the majority. Or the firearm displaced the bow and arrow as the dominant weapon.
Eventually, what general artificial intelligence will give us is a world free of our Faith-Based monetary system currently dominating the world.
In essence, we shouldn't need money after general artificial intelligence is implemented.
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The term AGI has been used since more than 2 decades ago, and AI never specifically implied something with human intelligence (maybe in the 40s-50s when it was just being invented, but not after that). "AI" has always refered to things like Siri and the YouTube algorithm and pathfinding AIs and trackers for anti-air systems and whatever else.
I remember that before I started programming I'd get annoyed at machinery like 3d printers for the "stupid AI" not working. Then I'd probably bang it or something to try to get it to work lol
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Well it's hard to make societal predictions with zero basis in reality so you'll have to forgive me for grounding the premise to current phenomena.
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If we all run out of money they will harvest the marrow from our bones. They'll extract a fee, don't doubt it.
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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.
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They'll be making stuff for rich people.
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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.
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You are more likely to be fired due to offshoring
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That hasn't really been an issue for more than a decade at this point. Domestic manufacturing production in developed nations has actually been increasing. They just don't use humans much. You're not losing your job to poor people overseas. You're losing it to robots, and you have been since before the current AI craze.
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People will find other things to do that AI can't. Like welding, or tapdancing, or sex work.
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AI will never be able to pick their nose like I do.
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You know we have robots that weld right now? And people are building basic sex robots? The idea that AI can't replace a human is narcissistic hubris.
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To be a little pedantic, should you permit me, the question said AI not robots. 'Robots' have beem welding cars for decades, but that hasn't replaced people. When you learn to weld, because it is AI proof 🙂, you'll find that there are some things you need to do by hand.
Sex work isn't synonymous with sex, and sex isn't the same as fucking something/someone. Just wait until you and another person use one another, or you have make uo sex, and you'll know what I mean.
I trust you'll grant me tap dancing? Either way, don't worry young (d|gl)oomer, everything is going to be fine. You should probably worry more about what's going on in the politics threads 🤣
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Personally I welcome a post scarcity economy
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Bad news: it is going to be an artificial scarcity economy. It basically already is, we have plenty of money for everyone to live well but it is all going into hoards.
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This is what the mega rich don’t seem to realize. They already have 99.9% of the wealth, but if they had 99.1% of it no one would give a shit how much money a few trust fund babies had.
We would all be able to take care of ourselves and our families. Instead they want all the wealth and are willing to kill most of the global population along with the earth to get it.
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I would if I didn't fear that the scarcity will then be artificial to keep groups in power. The idea is beautiful, our current direction is terrifying.
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1024: This new farming technology means one person can feed 1000 people! What are the other 999 people supposed to do? Are the lords just going to conscript all us serfs and have us fight for their entertainment?
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That’s pretty much what happened tho
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That doesn't matter because they won't be here by the time that happens
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nobody has money anymore
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Except the rich 1%, who will be bathing in money. Great!
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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!
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The bots hooked to our stolen credit cards.
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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
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Someone always has the money. That's who will be buying things.
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We got this guy Not Sure....
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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.
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People in other countries
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In the extreme case, you would have AIs buying from other AIs. Humans aren't the only possible economic agents.
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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
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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.
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Ohhh, oh. So you didn't see that episode of black mirror yet?
It's a good one.
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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.
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It'll be an elephant walk of ai and ai adjacent services.
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Depending on the details of the system... Who cares?
Sure, we can have a couple investigators working on gross abuse of the system, but we spend more money fighting social security and disability claims than it would cost to just pay every request.
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It sounds like the beginning of a cast system, I can't imagine it not being abused in our current economic system. It's also essentially welfare + a bit extra so you can actually live on it.
How will this deal with home ownership and paying for your kids education? And then your kids end up being stuck in the same situation they were born into with absolutely no way forward. It's already like this in a sense but UBI is very likely to amplify it imo.
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I've heard people say a UBI is easy to exploit before.
But I don't see how.If everyone gets the same payment, with the only qualifiers being citizenship and age; How can it be exploited?
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That's economic ignorance - the more AI is used to produce goods, the cheaper they are - so you have to work less to fulfill your needs.
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Hell yeah! People in 50s and even 20s worked 40 hours per week to feed a family of 4! Now we can do that by working much less than… wait, not even 2 working parents safely feed a family of 4? Even with all the gains in productivity?
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Exactly this. That's why groceries have dropped in price the last decade as cashiers are replaced by automated self checkouts. /s
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That seems like a Q3 issue for 2026 let's put the conversation off till then.
/s
Q3 2026 will come around and the AI will report that revenues are down. The CEO will respond the only way they know, by ordering that costs be cut by laying off employees. The AI will report there is no one left to lay off but the CEO.
Fade to black and credits roll.
The thing is, for AI to work we still need hardware, houses, food etc. Yes a lot of jobs will change but other new type of jobs will come.
Remember at the end of the day AI can't do CPR
Yet