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talkingtab 4 minutes ago [-]
We have an economy like this:
producer => provider => consumer.
What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?
1. A producer grows a potato
2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10
3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00
This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.
The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.
Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.
Aurornis 43 minutes ago [-]
> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment.
No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions.
Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services.
UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?
einrealist 24 minutes ago [-]
I strongly doubt it will even provide us with a roof over our heads. In an unconstrained market, the pressure to extract as much as possible from the UBI will be enormous. The amount of UBI will probably always lag years behind the actual amount required to create a liveable situation, and increasing its amount will be a constant political struggle.
UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.
wmf 24 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. 90% of UBI would go to rent and 10% to food. That isn't some kind of artificial demand; people have always needed food and shelter.
As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.
baddash 21 minutes ago [-]
This is also what I was thinking... how did this article get so many upvotes when it has some glaringly weak points?
bluefirebrand 32 minutes ago [-]
> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.
phainopepla2 6 minutes ago [-]
If the rich have control over the communication networks and over highly intelligent AI systems then it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps.
This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the golden apple to shame.
bodge5000 37 minutes ago [-]
The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently.
The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going
wmf 21 minutes ago [-]
Going green is much cheaper now than it was. That may invert at some point but it's hard to predict when that might be.
bodge5000 4 minutes ago [-]
Thats certainly true, but to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change we also need to do much more now than before (its debatable at this point whether its even reversible, that wasn't always the case). I suppose the point is that what was enough a decade ago costed more then than it does now, but thats no longer enough
tombert 30 minutes ago [-]
The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career.
It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.
But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
schnitzelstoat 45 minutes ago [-]
We’ve seen this before when the mines and factories closed.
Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.
Apreche 59 minutes ago [-]
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
thinkingkong 24 minutes ago [-]
We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living.
We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.
luke5441 6 minutes ago [-]
We cannot all live like Americans because we do not have enough crude oil -- even not taking into account the consequences for the climate.
So given there are constraints, resources must be rationed/allocated somehow.
Maybe we now have the technologies to remove this resource constraint. We'll see.
malfist 9 minutes ago [-]
Something that drove this home to me is that there is more vacant housing than there are unhoused people in the US. We could solve homelessness tomorrow, but we'd rather confiscate their camping equipment and throw them in prison than help. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am and what about mental illness and drug use. As if those people don't deserve our compassion too.
tuatoru 7 minutes ago [-]
Nurse Ratched was not a sufficient argument for ceasing to protect the mentally ill from themselves, it turns out.
Andrex 16 minutes ago [-]
The true horrific realization I had with Colossus: The Forbin Project was how equally scared and accepting of the AI's message I was.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
elevatortrim 14 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. And this is why ideas like post-scarcity or universal-high-income are not realistic. Because we can already make life heaven on earth for everyone alive. But we won't. Not because we do not have the resources or means of production, but because we do not have the willingness and systems in place. If we do not fix these first, AI-abundance will bring more suffering, not more prosperity.
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
jamiequint 14 minutes ago [-]
And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.
coldtea 46 seconds ago [-]
>And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history
Nope, they're worse than past 2-3 decades and getting even worse.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
enochthered 11 minutes ago [-]
Things aren’t perfect therefore they’re terrible.
paulhebert 4 minutes ago [-]
Things aren’t terrible therefore they’re perfect
theonemind 45 minutes ago [-]
The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
bodge5000 32 minutes ago [-]
If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
fwipsy 20 minutes ago [-]
Nobody can do jobs for money, so money is scarce, so nobody has/uses money, so money becomes worthless, so therefore even if jobs are available people won't do them?
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
bodge5000 10 minutes ago [-]
> Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
wisty 23 minutes ago [-]
Or it's just shares in companies (productive or otherwise). People get mad over how much Bezos has, but if it's all Amazon shares who cares? It's spending, not saving that consumes scarce resources. Get mad about his jet, sure, but not his paper wealth.
morkalork 43 minutes ago [-]
Must be why they're all hot for humanoid robots: security that doesn't get paid or have families to worry about
isomorphic 25 minutes ago [-]
This is just Terminator with extra steps.
They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
tremon 26 minutes ago [-]
Or might have their own opinion about certain orders.
fwipsy 15 minutes ago [-]
They have their bunkers but it's not plan A. Even a psychotic oligarch doesn't want to live in a hole in the ground while the world collapses around them. They want to own the world, perhaps remake it in their image, but not destroy it.
colordrops 21 minutes ago [-]
It's a race to get robot servants and warriors before the working classes rise up. They'll build their walled cybercities while everyone else is busy scavenging and sustenance farming.
Imustaskforhelp 40 minutes ago [-]
Yes! This is something that I have been saying or thinking about too but the rich people contrary to popular belief that they themselves sometimes believe in, but the best way for them to achieve growth is by improving the conditions of people in general.
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
tw04 20 minutes ago [-]
You’re assuming they care what happens to their children when they’re gone. We’re talking about sociopaths. Sure they care more about their children than the random plebe walking down the street, but they definitely don’t care more about their children than their own personal desires. That’s empathy, and empathy is for the weak.
thewebguyd 19 minutes ago [-]
> wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing."
It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.
(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
jeremyjh 14 minutes ago [-]
In many places in the world, the only interests of government are those of the rich. I do not think the rich will be petitioned so much as they will be … persuaded.
svachalek 13 minutes ago [-]
In the US, the government only answers to the wealthy class.
Joker_vD 9 minutes ago [-]
> It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens.
As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
hn_throwaway_99 43 minutes ago [-]
All you have to do is look at the state of the world today to see this is the endgame. Huge swaths of humanity live on basically subsistence level agriculture, and it's not like we're all sending UBI to them. The top .001% can see the rest of us fall a lot further before they have to worry about who will buy their products.
interstice 32 minutes ago [-]
I don't really get this, you still have to go outside once in a while as an ultra rich person surely? Why not spend some relatively tiny amount of resources on fixing terrible roads + picking up trash + healthcare for the homeless? Does this happen and I just don't know about it?
winter_blue 25 minutes ago [-]
In India, you've got lots of relatively-speaking well-off people. And extreme poverty that would shock and boggle the mind. Poverty worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of the "middle class" (which is just making over $12k USD a year) literally drive their cars through impoverished streets into their homes.
greenavocado 18 minutes ago [-]
White people are the largest group of people on earth to exhibit strong out-group altruism. Most of the world has a very different outlook.
fwipsy 12 minutes ago [-]
Because "wealthy" is relative. Because the sort of people who do that stop at just "rich;" they don't make it to "super-rich."
dec0dedab0de 24 minutes ago [-]
healthcare for the homeless means seeing more homeless. It’s much more effective to let them die.
iknowstuff 38 minutes ago [-]
Hmm I share your concern but we do regularly develop new economies? The EU pumped a ton of money into eastern Europe, the west collectively did the same by outsourcing to Asia which is now the largest market for very significant industries.. Latin America and Africa have been abused and hollowed out for centuries but seeing decent growth now, so I'm more optimistic
Brendinooo 38 minutes ago [-]
This is such an odd take, when the percent of the world doing subsistence farming has never been lower at any point in human history, and a mixture of capitalism and technological innovation is the primary driver of that.
ospray 50 minutes ago [-]
At some point a AI that maximises paperclips and one that consumes resources to achieve a few people self interested desires starts to look the same.
cgannett 31 minutes ago [-]
What people dont understand is we already invented Roko's Basilisk in the 1600s. It just doesnt have the power to torment you for more than 1 human lifetime yet.
andai 5 minutes ago [-]
No, the incentives are aligned. Bread and circus reduces the number of data centers getting bombed and the number of heads rolling. The good AI and the evil AI both point to UBI.
cube00 45 minutes ago [-]
> Altman theorized a system where society has "an ownership share in whatever AI creates." In this "universal basic wealth system," people can barter their share of the world's AI capacity. [1]
It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock.
Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?
> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]
I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.
Sam Altman is too stupid to realize he's arguing for nationalizing the AI companies.
Terr_ 20 minutes ago [-]
I see it more as a mix of grandiose promotion (to investors) and and vague empty promise (to everyone else.)
"We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
mrbungie 13 minutes ago [-]
He is saying that while holding Worldcoin as THE solution behind his back. He hopes to show it when the time comes.
binary132 16 minutes ago [-]
I’m quite sure he knows that this is exactly what he’s arguing for and would like his AI company to be one of the main regulated providers
greenavocado 24 minutes ago [-]
He will be perfectly happy when his friends crown him the AI czar
colordrops 20 minutes ago [-]
He's not that stupid, he's just gaslighting people.
GeoAtreides 8 minutes ago [-]
And, as we know, hungry desperate people just lie down and die. Maybe nibble at a piece of cake if they have some.
tuatoru 5 minutes ago [-]
This is true surprisingly often.
altairprime 30 minutes ago [-]
No, they’ll jail those unable to pay into prisons where workers are required to labor without a reasonable wage, and only let the rebellious workers die. The end goal is generally to replace the lost unpaid labor of now-illegal slavery with the more indirect enslavements of debtors prison labor and corp-indentured servitude. They don’t want to reduce the size of the worker pool, they want to reduce the demands of it — otherwise they end up vulnerable to organized labor by the few workers left.
ivraatiems 52 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, reading this, my first thought was: "that's the neat part - nobody!"
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
SubiculumCode 48 minutes ago [-]
When clankers become the new consumer, we won't even be needed :)
block_dagger 11 minutes ago [-]
French Revolution says the people win in that case but who knows.
windexh8er 44 minutes ago [-]
I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.
DangitBobby 36 minutes ago [-]
Not sure I agree. Things are looking kinda shit already, yet we can't even get people to agree there is a problem, let alone who is to blame. In a poorer, less informed society where the wealthy have an even larger megaphone I don't see it becoming any more obvious.
stevenpetryk 42 minutes ago [-]
But in this "Elysium"-like scenario, that same class would have automated protection in place that makes them ~untouchable and capable of keeping the rest of humanity incapable of pushing back.
iugtmkbdfil834 39 minutes ago [-]
This. And unless people were not paying attention, the automated protection part is getting pretty close to reality.
windexh8er 39 minutes ago [-]
I don't believe this to be true. Sure, for a short period of time they may be "untouchable". Long term, nope. Most of them can't do anything for themselves in terms of real world skills at this point. They are, literally, the most vulnerable without the protection and production of others.
throw310822 33 minutes ago [-]
I don't get it, in what sense "the wealthy [will have] destroyed the global economy for short term wealth"? Do you think that if the big corporations stopped developing AI it would, like, disappear?
booleandilemma 27 minutes ago [-]
We're already there and no one is doing anything about it. A data center the size of Manhattan is being planned. Have the people proposing this being lynched? No. Soon everyone's going to be arguing about who they're voting for in 2028, like it even fucking matters.
hn_throwaway_99 40 minutes ago [-]
Any fantasies of that sort went out the window for me when Trump got elected, largely on the base of "left behind" voters who have done very poorly economically over the past 30 or so years.
What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly" blame the people responsible is laughable at the point.
baby_souffle 18 minutes ago [-]
Exactly.
It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.
Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.
Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable
echelon_musk 42 minutes ago [-]
They have big guns. Good luck.
dessimus 34 minutes ago [-]
They aren't the only ones: on average there are 1.5 guns for each person in the U.S.
echelon_musk 34 minutes ago [-]
Try shooting a tank with a 9mm.
greenavocado 23 minutes ago [-]
The real robot terminator is 50 BMG
2001zhaozhao 27 minutes ago [-]
There's no point being the whale in a P2W mobile game if there are no free to play players to stomp over. I think this translates at least somewhat to the real world.
15 minutes ago [-]
bluerooibos 35 minutes ago [-]
So, back to the author's title - if they leave everyone to die/with no money, who buys their services and enables them to turn a profit?
grogg 17 minutes ago [-]
The genuine answer is that the workers will rise up. If you want to be a pessimist, we could say the rich will be dragged down with us. But this doesn’t take into account the rapid increase of class consciousness and organizing that is already happening and only gaining momentum.
If you’re asking what the logic of the rich is, they couldn’t care less. “Power corrupts” has become a phrase, so perhaps people don’t think too deeply about it. I often hear people confused about the Epstein class, wondering how so much power ended up in the hands of so few depraved people. The truth is that we’re living I a system that not only rewards psychopathy, but nurtures it. Anybody under the delusion that they would behave any differently under the same conditions hasn’t thought deeply enough about how their environment shapes their thinking. The amount of power that the Epstein/ruling class has accumulated has corrupted them to the point that their plan is literally to violently force people to serve them. They already do this and have no problem ramping up the violence as needed to keep living like gods.
philipkglass 37 minutes ago [-]
Mamdani was elected in New York despite (or perhaps because of) explicitly running against the interests of moneyed elites. Let all the frontier AI labs and their investors burn billions in the R&D phase, then vote in governments to use the Magic Everything Machines for the interests of ordinary people. If today's LLMs don't actually evolve into Magic Everything Machines then we probably don't need UBI anyhow; some jobs will be lost but many others will stick around. In that case just vote for Scandinavian style social safety nets.
The franchise is much more inclusive now in every developed country than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
cgio 19 minutes ago [-]
They will pay us to colonise Mars! One way trip.
supertrope 2 minutes ago [-]
"A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!"
WorkerBee28474 37 minutes ago [-]
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
bediger4000 27 minutes ago [-]
Yeah! Bones, no matter how young, do not make decent concubines.
AnimalMuppet 13 minutes ago [-]
If that's what happens, and "leaving us to die" results in very many people actually dying, then we'll start killing rich people until they realize that this isn't the world that they want to live in either.
When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them.
Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...
daedrdev 45 minutes ago [-]
FDR created the US welfare system which destroyed socialism in the US. I'm not predicting the future but it has basically happened before.
greenavocado 25 minutes ago [-]
The goal of automation is to end humanity
smashah 32 minutes ago [-]
This is why the Epstein Class is planning a mass culling (world war).
55 minutes ago [-]
hsuduebc2 39 minutes ago [-]
If nothing will change and overhelming majority of wealth in time become owned by the marginal piece of society I wouldn't ruled out that in some future there will be another revolution against the so called ruling class by basically same reasons it was before.
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
quater321 10 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
rvz 31 minutes ago [-]
> The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers.
Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale.
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
That is the hard truth.
Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
alexanderdmitri 13 minutes ago [-]
why 2030?
datadrivenangel 60 minutes ago [-]
This is one of the biggest questions as the singularity compresses the deployment of capital and material resource allocation: if the majority of people aren't competitive with machines, who provides for them and how is that structured?
ajb 44 minutes ago [-]
If we are outdone in intelligence, diligence, and creativity, humanity will have to fall back on its weakest talents - integrity, fairness, and compassion. What a nightmare.
awakeasleep 54 minutes ago [-]
History provides the same answer every time this question arises
Night_Thastus 52 minutes ago [-]
...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history.
If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'.
That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
ihumanable 48 minutes ago [-]
CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time.
For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist.
We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys for the wealthy.
The question is if labor will follow the same path.
BuyMyBitcoins 21 minutes ago [-]
At the risk of invoking “but this time it’s different”, AI hasn’t produced a new job sector. A farrier who can’t make a living off of horseshoes could at least go work at the Ford assembly plant.
In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.
clarle 41 minutes ago [-]
Population in developed countries is already decreasing, so who knows what happens after that? Unfortunately a lot of the foundations of our economy are built on top of an ever-increasing populace.
jacobn 51 minutes ago [-]
Historically it has fit reality, but yes, this time may well actually be different...
DanielVZ 50 minutes ago [-]
I think his answer is just even more work. In this case it could be services where in general and for historical reasons people want to interact with people.
TFNA 48 minutes ago [-]
> History provides the same answer every time this question arises
You mean that after some popular discontent arises, the top authorities will simply be overthrown by a competing faction within the ruling class, but that competing faction will fool the masses into thinking that “people power” won out and things are any better?
That is, after all, how most “successful” revolutions have played out. Other revolutions that end with the ruling class being completely overthrown often cause the country to collapse into instability that is terrible for quality of life, until a strongman manages to cement his authority.
mrbungie 37 minutes ago [-]
Well, we were overall better for a couple of centuries after abolishing all-powerful kings + some welfare laws here and there (ymmv, maybe serfdom sounds nice to you). So those changes can work for a while, big emphasis on can and for a while.
Greedy accumulators always end up ruining things for societies when it gets into ridiculous extremes (and there is a part of society that notices and gets fed up).
Gigachad 15 minutes ago [-]
You will starve to death while Musk gets a luxury space yacht.
cdrnsf 14 minutes ago [-]
The singularity is a fairytale.
a_e_k 51 minutes ago [-]
Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?
junga 44 minutes ago [-]
> how am I to make heavy use of frontier AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?
You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.
a_e_k 28 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I get that and meant to imply it with "frontier". But my question was more about how my biggest uses by far of data center-provided AI in terms of tokens have been in things like experimenting with agentic coding on my desktops. If I'm just tapping away at my phone with some questions in a chat window, my AI needs are much lower. Compete with me for the HW resources that I need to make full use of your data center-provided AI supply, and I'll just drop my demand accordingly.
(I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)
bellowsgulch 9 minutes ago [-]
I think the whole, “If we all lose our jobs who will buy things?” Question is like the nuclear scare of the 1950s or the concerns of environmental collapse and the end of the world of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
No, it can and will get so, so much worse.
I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA.
Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere.
This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents.
And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get.
You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory.
Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected.
You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy.
Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class.
And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing.
And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget.
And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.
fwipsy 4 minutes ago [-]
Why do you think that physical labor will become incredibly expensive if nobody has jobs? Do you think tools are that hard to get? Chinese tools are cheaper than ever.
SimianSci 37 minutes ago [-]
Wealth and Power are linked, but power is the goal for the wealthy, not the wealth itself. The moment the relationship of wealth and power is uncoupled, they will discard it in favor of whatever comes next in their accumulation of power.
It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them.
On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.
Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.
vanuatu 45 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure I follow
Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth?
In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those
FuckButtons 38 minutes ago [-]
You assume that the people who are at the top of the organizations generating said wealth will have any incentive to do that. Look around the world at the petro states for examples of a highly capital intensive industry generating money that subsidizes the rest of the economy.
throw310822 28 minutes ago [-]
If you think that people won't have work and therefore no money to buy anything, there will be no wealth- not for the people and not for the riches. The value of Google or Tesla go to zero without masses of people paying for their products.
vanuatu 31 minutes ago [-]
1. AI seems different here, American AI companies doing better seems to result in the rest of the American economy doing better as intelligence is generally productivity increasing. Plus it's not bound by physical scarcity as oil. It feels more like cloud computing or electricity
2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela
bensyverson 42 minutes ago [-]
Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"
tombert 23 minutes ago [-]
Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away.
However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do.
Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things.
I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.
krupan 19 minutes ago [-]
Are you getting paid to do any of these?
Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive?
Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed
tombert 13 minutes ago [-]
I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases.
My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope.
I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.
krupan 21 minutes ago [-]
Seriously. The AI psychosis that has people actually believing this stuff is far scarier to me than what might maybe possibly could happen if AI somehow actually performs to the level that the people selling it say it will.
ryeights 1 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
kjs3 26 minutes ago [-]
I don't think anyone seriously believes 'labor' in the abstract is going away (well...I'm sure some people do, but not the people at the core of "use our AI product it'll be awesome trust us..."). The issue (IMHO) is that it will be "the labor opportunities left to you will suck way, way more than the ones that have been obsoleted/eliminated".
ryeights 17 minutes ago [-]
The cynical conclusion of AGI is that humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.
tombert 11 minutes ago [-]
Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator?
Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
sp527 22 minutes ago [-]
You sound blissfully ignorant. I'd honestly advise staying that way. The alternative is depressing af.
kypro 7 minutes ago [-]
This time isn't different.
History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.
The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.
This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.
However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.
Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.
Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?
The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.
Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.
Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?
SilentM68 2 minutes ago [-]
I don't believe that shared ownership of AI, though a noble idea, is an attainable goal, no matter how much anyone wishes for it to happen. It's naive to believe it will happen when there is just too much money involved. I do believe that an UBI plan should be, at least, prepared, ready to be implemented, in case the situation arises. It never hurts to be prepared.
Thank you for letting me in!
Sol Roth
PS:
Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
dwa3592 29 minutes ago [-]
No one. Wouldn't it be better if they let the population of the world drop to say a 100 million? they don't need the human resources like they used to; they will have robots doing the work.
watersb 15 minutes ago [-]
Tesla sold lots of Cybertrucks to SpaceX.
SpaceX sold lots of xAI capacity to Anthropic.
They don't need us.
wcfrobert 11 minutes ago [-]
"If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?" - Henry George in 1879
It's a frightening thing to realize that utopian abundance and abject poverty can co-exist in perfect harmony. One does not contradict the other. Heaven and hell are next-door neighbors. If anything, this is the default state of affairs for most civilizations throughout history.
LarsDu88 22 minutes ago [-]
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here goes...
The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy.
It's important to ask two questions:
- What happens to the workers?
- What happens to the capital?
For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all.
The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers).
It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science.
During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines.
These are all overall good things for the world.
By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.
marcocampos 3 minutes ago [-]
The things some people on HN believe leaves me baffled.
Sol- 18 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for this post. I am always amazed on how people only ever look at nominal wages (which might collapse for the "obsolete" class) but ignore the wealth being generated in the process.
What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.
A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.
LarsDu88 9 minutes ago [-]
I think people's imaginations are overfitting on current reality or the past 20 years where people's vision of technology is something like Facebook (a multibillion dollar college yearbook app) or Netflix (TV, but on the internet), and the economy needs a horde of subscriber consumers binging on a buffet of digital mind slop to keep the whole system running.
The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer never had most of the wealth in the first place. Not since the 1970s at least.
Just like Nvidia makes a lot more money selling GPUs to megacorps rather than to people playing games on their XBox, future corps can make plenty of money serving each other rather than retail consumers.
An autonomous fleet of delivery vehicles needs an autonomous fleet of vehicle service robots, etc, etc. At some point the entire stack will be automated.
Will the working classes be at the bottom of the pyramid and wealth inequality skyrocket. Absolutely. It's practically inevitable. But will the economy collapse? No way.
Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens, at some point armies of robot servants built by the "tech companies" will be integrated into every facet of human life, from the lowest plebians to the wealthiest patricians.
mistic92 45 minutes ago [-]
We need global UBI but it's not going to happen.
hsuduebc2 38 minutes ago [-]
Not before violence takes the place. People are semi-developed selfish tribal monkeys and it sadly looks like that.
zaik 53 minutes ago [-]
> who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment.
Very optional consumption.
stavros 44 minutes ago [-]
Wait, if I had a company, why would I want to pay my workers more so they'd buy more? That just sounds like I'm keeping my money with extra steps?
40 minutes ago [-]
cdrnsf 53 minutes ago [-]
They'll pay people to listen and nod approvingly as they bloviate.
fancyfredbot 49 minutes ago [-]
Who will vote against seizing your assets if you fire us all?
jdiff 45 minutes ago [-]
The same crowd who always vote against their own interests. To paraphrase, "give them somebody to look down on, and they'll empty their pockets for you."
fancyfredbot 25 minutes ago [-]
It's going to get a lot harder to convince people that $outgroup took your job when $outgroup are all obviously unemployed too.
didip 52 minutes ago [-]
I think the billionaire class will expand BNPL type products so everyone will stay in-debt forever. And expand gig economy so everyone can stay "employed" forever.
CharlieDigital 36 minutes ago [-]
Employed doing what? At some point, we'll have autonomous tractors, autonomous techs to fix those tractors, autonomous cars and delivery vehicles, robot plumbers, AI doing information work.
Employed doing...what?
thewebguyd 24 minutes ago [-]
If we reach a point where all labor is automated, then realistically we should have achieved post scarcity utopia at that point. If not, the only realistic options are some form of UBI, or state sponsored make-work. Grow the bureaucracy, the state employs people to do BS fake jobs. Audits, compliance, oversight. Middle-management type work just to continue the illusion of a work for income social contract.
Havoc 41 minutes ago [-]
Society has managed a transition from gold to fiat and also towards a world where the majority live paycheque to paycheque and still diligently work ever harder.
...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion
metalliqaz 17 minutes ago [-]
Farmers won't be fired. AI won't replace plumbers. Hairstylists, chefs, landscapers, escorts, nurses, fisherman, etc. There are and will be plenty of people with jobs that AI can't do.
gyanchawdhary 21 minutes ago [-]
You can almost map each comment to a kubler ross stage
joe_the_user 50 minutes ago [-]
One of the theses of JM Keynes (of "Keynesianism" fame) in his General theory was that the rich save and the poor spend. That's been an ongoing assumption of state policy for a while now. One factor to consider is that today we seem to have a mid-level consumer sector - a group of people with high ($100K+) incomes who still spend nearly all that income. This group may provide the demand to support the investments of the super rich while still allowing a large percentage of people to sink to the underclass.
thewebguyd 32 minutes ago [-]
That's already happening to some extent. Consumption in the US is very top heavy right now, and the top 40% of households by income already account for over 60% of all domestic consumption.
Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets
Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption
Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.
The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.
The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.
The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.
deadbabe 36 minutes ago [-]
People are confused.
The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.
Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.
NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.
The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.
luizfzs 55 minutes ago [-]
That's the greatest contradiction in our current system.
Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.
loyukfai 58 minutes ago [-]
They can get rid of non billionaires next?
desireco42 43 minutes ago [-]
I think this is legitimate concern that a lot of well paying jobs will essentially ruin prospects of more upscale services.
44 minutes ago [-]
kittikitti 41 minutes ago [-]
The comparison to slavery is apt. With increased surveillance and austerity measures, workers are being turned into underpaid labor with the constant threat of losing their livelihoods. Coupled with anti-union departments like Human Resources, there is no better way to describe the job market in 2026. Simply put, it's techno feudalism and we are the new slaves.
The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.
quater321 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
TuahaJawaid 16 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
rvz 38 minutes ago [-]
"Agents"
Humans will be cut off from work and will be on a forever UBI system that you will have to be spending tokens as currency for basic services /s.
carlosjobim 53 minutes ago [-]
That's when you whip up a war to kill of as many young men of your own people as possible. Why do you think war has always been with us?
producer => provider => consumer.
What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?
1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00
This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.
The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.
Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.
No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions.
Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services.
UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?
UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.
As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.
And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.
This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the golden apple to shame.
The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going
It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.
But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.
We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.
So given there are constraints, resources must be rationed/allocated somehow.
Maybe we now have the technologies to remove this resource constraint. We'll see.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
Nope, they're worse than past 2-3 decades and getting even worse.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing."
It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.
(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock.
Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?
> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]
I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.
[1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...
"We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly" blame the people responsible is laughable at the point.
It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.
Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.
Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable
The franchise is much more inclusive now in every developed country than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them.
Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale.
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
That is the hard truth.
Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'.
That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist.
We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys for the wealthy.
The question is if labor will follow the same path.
In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.
You mean that after some popular discontent arises, the top authorities will simply be overthrown by a competing faction within the ruling class, but that competing faction will fool the masses into thinking that “people power” won out and things are any better?
That is, after all, how most “successful” revolutions have played out. Other revolutions that end with the ruling class being completely overthrown often cause the country to collapse into instability that is terrible for quality of life, until a strongman manages to cement his authority.
Greedy accumulators always end up ruining things for societies when it gets into ridiculous extremes (and there is a part of society that notices and gets fed up).
You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.
(I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)
No, it can and will get so, so much worse.
I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA.
Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere.
This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents.
And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get.
You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory.
Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected.
You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy.
Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class.
And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing.
And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget.
And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.
It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them.
On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.
Nor in recent patterns of "democracy".
Why You Don't Matter Anymore (Economically Speaking) https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY
Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.
Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth?
In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those
2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela
However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do.
Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things.
I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.
Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive?
Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed
My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope.
I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.
Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.
The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.
This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.
However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.
Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.
Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?
The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.
Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.
Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?
Thank you for letting me in!
Sol Roth
PS:
Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
SpaceX sold lots of xAI capacity to Anthropic.
They don't need us.
It's a frightening thing to realize that utopian abundance and abject poverty can co-exist in perfect harmony. One does not contradict the other. Heaven and hell are next-door neighbors. If anything, this is the default state of affairs for most civilizations throughout history.
The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy.
It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital?
For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all.
The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers).
It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science.
During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines.
These are all overall good things for the world.
By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.
What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.
A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.
The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer never had most of the wealth in the first place. Not since the 1970s at least.
Just like Nvidia makes a lot more money selling GPUs to megacorps rather than to people playing games on their XBox, future corps can make plenty of money serving each other rather than retail consumers.
An autonomous fleet of delivery vehicles needs an autonomous fleet of vehicle service robots, etc, etc. At some point the entire stack will be automated.
Will the working classes be at the bottom of the pyramid and wealth inequality skyrocket. Absolutely. It's practically inevitable. But will the economy collapse? No way.
Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens, at some point armies of robot servants built by the "tech companies" will be integrated into every facet of human life, from the lowest plebians to the wealthiest patricians.
Very optional consumption.
Employed doing...what?
...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion
Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets
Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption
Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.
The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.
The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.
The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.
The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.
Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.
NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.
The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.
Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.
The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.
Humans will be cut off from work and will be on a forever UBI system that you will have to be spending tokens as currency for basic services /s.