I like how you mixed a few notions together in a way specifically designed to induce chaos.
Even assuming that AI can take away jobs, which is itself I think inaccurate, and provably so, that has nothing to do with people lacking money. In an ideal world, we could use technology to improve productivity so that we would need to work less.
So then what you are actually asking is a different question. What you’re actually asking is, what happens if we create an economic system that takes away most money from most of the people, to much larger degree than is currently happening. And for that, all you need to do is go look at the history books.
Finally, your question as posed is partly self-contradictory. You’re talking about AI being competent enough so that it can fire everyone, but improvements in technology are not always monetized. They can also lead to extreme cost savings. If for example, if I don’t have the money to hire an accountant, but I don’t need to because the software package is good enough to handle all of it for me, then there’s no problem to be solved. And this is true for any number of so-called white collar jobs.
So then what we actually see is that jobs change and evolve over time. The word computer used to talk about a person who did arithmetic and other such operations. Now it’s used to refer to the machine itself.
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 Englans 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.
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.
A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
The money is life. The money must flow.
They keep talking about UBI as income…. But I’m not a huge fan as it can be exploited in many ways.
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 bjeing stuck in the same situation they were born into with absolutely no wajy forward. It’s already like this in a sense but UBI is very likely to amplify it imo.
It’s the same capitalism we have now; Accept the bottom income level, isn’t zero anymore.
Who would be in what Cast?
Where do you draw the lines?My main fear is how this will affect renting and house ownership. Rents will probably go up as UBI comes into play and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit. I doubt UBI will be enough for monthly mortgage payments in any case.
It’s already very hard to move past the renting stage, I imagine it will be impossible once on UBI.
The cast would be comprised of land and business owners. Again, it’s already almost the case, I just think UBI without careful considerations would amplify it.
Rents will probably go up […] and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit.
It’s the same capitalism we have now.
Whatever it does to home and rent prices, as well as inflation generally, would be temporary until the markets adjusts. That can be softened by slowly phasing it in, maybe $100/m each year. The standard supply, demand, price balancing act at play. This time with the income floor not being at $0.
I completely agree with you. UBI is overall a good idea, I just think UBI alone won’t be enough to properly deal with massive job loss and certain aspects of our economic systems are going to greatly reduce its impact. It’s a very complicated problem and we have some serious decisions to make, it’s further complicated by the fact that the best solutions will probably end up dealing a blow to the billionaire class and big corporations and they will most likely fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
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.
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.
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?
Exactly this. That’s why groceries have dropped in price the last decade as cashiers are replaced by automated self checkouts. /s
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
Here’s the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn’t fit on a lot of people. I’ve done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.
Tha makes sense. My point was only to refute the “AI can’t do CPR” comment. Every technological breakthrough in history was imagined as impossible by some, so to claim that because something is hard to do means it probably won’t be done has been shown to not be the case
That problem exists only as long as no one makes a better CPR machine.
You are more likely to be fired due to offshoring
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.
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point.
Ohh wow really? i guess they can really only off shore manufacturing 🤡
What, do want a shitty graveyard shift call center job? Trust me, you aren’t losing out by not having access to that.
Unemployment isn’t even high right now. Why are you whining about a non-issue to begin with? What good would it do you to have more low paying jobs when the problem is that all the jobs are already low paying as it is? We just saw that if there are more jobs then people they’ll happily crash the economy until there aren’t just to make sure wages don’t go up. What do you hope to accomplish by spreading 30 year old conservative propaganda?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why are you obsessed around wealth of other people? You should be more concerned about your own income rather than some super wealthy CEO
Because my labor creates their super wealth, and because they’re destroying the planet to maintain it.
Because, as OP points out, wealth disparity is a zero-sum game. Being concerned about the super wealthy is being concerned about our own income.
wealth disparity is a zero-sum game
Except it’s not. That wealth isn’t cash in some bank account, in most cases it’s a stock in companies these people built from scratch - Bezos made Amazon, Gates Microsoft, Buffet Berkshire Hathaway and so on
The wealth of super rich is allocated in places that produce goods and services
Keep defending your CEO daddies. I’m sure their wealth will trickle down to you any day now.
Keep defending your CEO daddies
Maybe I’m one of them?
Lol
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.
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.
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.
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
Global warming isn’t fucking solved you twat!
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.
Cool, when is that going to start happening?
Apparently right now https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/05/08/a-major-turning-point-more-than-30-of-worlds-energy-now-comes-from-renewables-report-revea
Wow! More than 30%! Global warming over!
It’s a hopeful idea, but it may be too late.
I seriously doubt it’s too late, it’s more of a question how much damage will it cause
Alternatively: too late for who?
Should not stop us from trying though
Agreed.
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.
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
I think this oversimplifies it a lot. There were a lot of different actors involved - I’m sure a lot of development was coming both from the semiconductor industry, and from state funded research, but in the end, the greed machine (aka capitalism) takes care of further researching and scaling it to the global level.
Also it’s not like there wasn’t any money in that business years ago - even back then solar was commonly used as a remote power source in mobile applications (calculators, camping and so on). Also NASA, but this was purely state funded
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.
Except numbers aren’t confirming that theory Look at Wikipedia article about growth of photovoltaics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Solar power is booming world wide, consistently since many years. At >20% annual expansion rate, the exponential growth will start putting a dent on fossil within few years.
They are only slowing us down though. They really cannot stop the change, because solar power is simply cheaper than oil. Once governments stop subsidizing oil, the big oil companies will be done for if they haven’t innovated by than. That is also one of the reasons why they are slowing us down, so they can buy more time to innovate and remain on top with a new, green business model.
I hope all the big oil bosses get locked up for crimes against humanity, but I think they’ll just change their business model into something green and exploit us in some different way.
This is why they say “they’re too big to fail”.
Sort of like how Phillip Morris sells vapes now.
Ohhh, oh. So you didn’t see that episode of black mirror yet?
It’s a good one.
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.
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.
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.
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).
We got this guy Not Sure…
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 more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that use to be expensive but are now cheap) and don’t understand how life is more expensive.
