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Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency an

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

Tadpole9181 2y ago
This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model. Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.
- sharemywin 2y ago
  1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
  - ohplz 2y ago
    [dead]
  - RealityVoid 2y ago
    > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work. I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities. But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
    - kcb 2y ago
      I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
      - RealityVoid 2y ago
        Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time. 1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
    - razakel 2y ago
      >Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives. UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
      - themaninthedark 2y ago
        I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations. I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose. People are weird and different.
  - Tadpole9181 2y ago
    This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end. 1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility. 2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too. 3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind? I thought it was giving people money.
    - Loughla 2y ago
      I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        Right now I get zero ubi so I guess I am even more limited on all of those, and am even more a pet.
        c0nducktr 2y ago
        Right now you can live without it.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
        As a pet. More of a pet than someone on UBI. I'm someone already experiencing the bad thing we worry might happen to someone on UBI—withdrawal of it. Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    > 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?
Teever 2y ago
Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up. Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity. Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do? Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes? The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.
- sharemywin 2y ago
  I don't think the costs go to zero though for that.
- thijson 2y ago
  I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
- allturtles 2y ago
  > The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task. Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
  - 2y ago
markus_zhang 2y ago
UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people. Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons. We will see. Edit The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.
- dttze 2y ago
  This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. Only in a democracy. China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway. America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t... (I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)
jvanderbot 2y ago
You cannot do everything with robotics, no matter what those selling you robots will claim. There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans. The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Everything, sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have them do the things they can.
ryandrake 2y ago
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries. We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
- netsharc 2y ago
  The Uberfication of the workforce is incredible to see: you work when the algorithms tell you there's work, you'll get paid what it wants to pay you. Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
- hangsi 2y ago
  Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
- atrus 2y ago
  But the wealthy don't spend their money. A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
- hsuduebc2 2y ago
  Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
  - 2y ago
bufferoverflow 2y ago
When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.
treis 2y ago
The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce. In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work. The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are. The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation. While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society. [1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  I still haven't seen an example of technical workers being replaced by AI
  - ChuckMcM 2y ago
    Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost. We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search. What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.
regularization 2y ago
Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly. Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  And yet the revolutions he inspired end up (in many ways) more dystopian than the capitalism they seek to replace..
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Since then there's been a realization that you can simply regulate the worst aspects of capitalism while still reaping most of its rewards. Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done. It'll probably be too late though.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
    - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
      I agree with your points but they do not lead to the conclusion that the GP was implying (that Marx contains the solution to what ails us)
megaman821 2y ago
Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.
- guhidalg 2y ago
  I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
    - guhidalg 2y ago
      > Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US. > At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right? We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism. > Specializing only works when line goes up forever. I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.
keybored 2y ago
Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords. (It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)
gwbas1c 2y ago
That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines. I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.
ambicapter 2y ago
The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue. Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Economics is inherently political. The original (and more descriptive) term for the subject is "political economy".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - ambicapter 2y ago
    > Economics is inherently political. Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.
carlosjobim 2y ago
In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people. Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all. The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.
heavyset_go 2y ago
Read the Plutonomy paper from CitiGroup circa 2005: https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
danans 2y ago
> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people. This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc). Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists. 1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571 https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
Galatians4_16 2y ago
Money ≠ Wealth. Currency ≠ Money. As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen. If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.

Tadpole9181 2y ago

This is where discussions of post-scarcity and post-labor economy come in, like UBI. We keep kicking the can down the road on that front, but this is going to happen and we need to establish such a sustainable model. Unfortunately, it really seems like the plan is to strip the house of the copper for billionaires to become trillionaires, then burn down the house with the rest of us inside.

sharemywin 2y ago
1. there are limits to natural resources. 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table if their insight and wisdom can be replicated by a machine.
- ohplz 2y ago
  [dead]
- RealityVoid 2y ago
  > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. That's one way of looking at it. Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. I would love to be FIRE, for example. A lot of people will love it. Some won't, and they will work. I think UBI is not there yet, but a hallmark of this is the rise of influencers and time burned on media and Netflix. This tells me that leisure time is rising and we have the economic capability of sustaining non-productive activities. But we're not there _yet_. I don't fear the inevitability of UBI in my lifetime for example. But I'm confident we'll be able to devise a useful system when we get there. In the end, we didn't have capitalism untill we thought up this system. There is surely another kind of system we could have converged to, I seriously doubt it's some magical rule of nature. But we did not, we wound up here. We'll end up in another place at some point.
  - kcb 2y ago
    I don't think anyone would choose to work in any way like today, especially if work is focused on generating wealth with a large portion of it being redistributed. Work would have to change to something more like volunteerism.
    - RealityVoid 2y ago
      Well, many people would choose to work for the extra income that would bring them. Or some other status symbol that working could bring, welfare won't bring you that Rolex! Or some cultural shift that makes certain work "cool" (1). Or just fostering a sense of community and mission for doing certain work. People do many many many things motivated by other things than money. I agree that it's only a subset of the population, but if you decrease the work input needs to less than that percent of the population, that's doable. Still, as I said, we're not there yet and I believe we won't be there yet for a long long time. 1. Sometimes I wonder if the state shouldn't hire one of those fancy firms to push cultural outlooks about stuff to change. They have campaigns, but they mostly suck. If you put money on the table and say "hey, marketing company, by each 1% you improve this behavior you get x million dollars" I'm sure that would help motivation.
  - razakel 2y ago
    >Another is that humans will find other ways of exploring and spending time that doesn't necessitate productivity. Take just about any British musician from the past 50 years - the ones who weren't middle or upper class almost all say that being on welfare (the dole) was what gave them the time and freedom to be creatives. UB40, for example, are literally named for the application form.
    - themaninthedark 2y ago
      I think that there are definitely people who have been on welfare and used it to better themselves and there are people who thrive in the face of adversity, overcoming the worst situations. I also think that there are a large number of people who ended up lost without direction or purpose. People are weird and different.
- Tadpole9181 2y ago
  This isn't a rebuttal, the only solution you're allowing space for is "kill everyone". The universe is finite and all things end. 1. We aren't close to exhausting our resources and we're getting better at minimization and reuse. We need to spend money on cultural initiatives that discourage consumerism and reduce waste. The bigger issues are not the limited resources in, but the nasty things going out: the stability of the biosphere is far more important and 100,000,000 people in America outright reject the responsibility. 2. No, it's not. Or is disability and child welfare and Medicare and veterans care all keeping them as pets too? It's called taking care of your people. Anyway, glad you're proposing solutions too. 3. They're leeches and need to be removed. Tax wealth and productivity gains from automation to pay for UBI.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  > 2. UBI is basically keeping humans as pets. UBI is similar to confining an animal? Deciding what and when it eats, when it bathes, where it goes? Training it, whether it likes it or not? Deciding whether it gets medical care? Whether it gets to have companions of its own kind? I thought it was giving people money.
  - Loughla 2y ago
    I mean, depending on the amount, yes it could be deciding all of the things you said. You would be limited in your choices depending on how much the ubi actually is.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      Right now I get zero ubi so I guess I am even more limited on all of those, and am even more a pet.
      - c0nducktr 2y ago
        Right now you can live without it.
        alabastervlog 2y ago
        As a pet. More of a pet than someone on UBI. I'm someone already experiencing the bad thing we worry might happen to someone on UBI—withdrawal of it. Not the worst, unclear to me why this was a concern in the first place. Be cool to have UBI though.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  > 3. what value do billionaires bring to the table It's a good question. The Reagan-era response would be that having billionaires inspires people to work hard, take risks, come up with ideas and better themselves. In a post-scarcity era where the only route to wealth is capital, and machines handle the hard work and ideas, I'm not sure what benefit remains from having billionaires. What good are incentives at that point?

Teever 2y ago

Imagine a near term scenario where a humanoid domestic robot that can do the dishes and laundry goes on sale for about the price of a luxury car. boomers who want to stay out of the retirement home for as long as possible will snap that up. Now imagine it's been a few years and one of these robots that used to go for the price of a nice car is outdated and can be bought for a couple grand and with a couple grand for a replaced battery and maybe upgraded hands for more dexterity. Let's say an industrious young hacker gets their hands on this device and after fixing it up and jailbreaking it decided to get it to do stuff -- what's the first thing they should get it to do? Why not see if it can assemble a copy of itself -- if you find a genie in a lamp why not ask it for more wishes? The second a certain kind of mind gets their hands on a self-replicator is the second everything for humanity changes, the economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task.

sharemywin 2y ago
I don't think the costs go to zero though for that.
thijson 2y ago
I've seen this plot in various movies, TV shows, and books. It definitely is a possibility. In the Dune universe the AI's are banned after a war against them.
allturtles 2y ago
> The economy will never be the same because any task that used to be bottlenecked by materials or labor is now more or less bottlenecked only by the time it takes self replicators to build copies of themselves to divide and conquer the task. Wouldn't these self-replicators also be bottlenecked by materials and other infrastructure? Does each one have a semiconductor fab, mining equipment, metal foundry, etc, built-in? I also don't see how you get from a laundry robot to a self-replicator through garage tinkering, those seem very far apart.
- 2y ago

markus_zhang 2y ago

UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the common people. Am I too pessimistic and/or narrow-minded? Maybe. But I don't think AI and AI powered robotics replacing humans is the same as trains replacing wagons. We will see. Edit The reason I think UBI won't fix much is, UBI cannot give people purposes to live. Obviously we already have enough material wealth for everyone and UBI is just a confirmation. But "meaning" is always a luxury, and will be more so when less people need to work.

dttze 2y ago
This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. They don't really need those lower end resources anyway. I think they are OK to give them away just in case.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > If they don't adopt UBI then some populist politicians are gonna raise a flag and grab some power. Only in a democracy. China has elections, but is also a one-party state. Given the culture (thinking in terms of the group rather than the individual), I think they may actually want UBI anyway. America is a democracy right now, but such things have been known to change before. Doesn't even need to be all at once — say the US disenfranchised convicted felons, that would mean the sitting president wouldn't be allowed to vote… and because I google before posting comments, wouldn't you know it, this is already a thing the states do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t... (I don't know how accurate the book title is, does the average American really commit 3 per day? https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229 https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocen...)

jvanderbot 2y ago

You cannot do everything with robotics, no matter what those selling you robots will claim. There will always be demand for those supporting the machines that make things. Tech will still require humans. The goal should be to make as many things as China and EU with a USA population.

fragmede 2y ago
Everything, sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to have them do the things they can.

ryandrake 2y ago

> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Other wealthy people. I knew someone in the yacht-building business who would say "If you want a business that will last, sell to rich people--they're the ones who have money." We are very quickly moving towards a world where the economic activity (earning + spending + producing) of the median person is insignificant next to the activity of the very rich. There are individuals who have more wealth than the GDP of entire countries. We're bifurcating into a society like the movie Elysium: A relatively small number of wealthy people who matter to the economy, and a huge number scraping by day to day whose economic activity amounts to a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

netsharc 2y ago
The Uberfication of the workforce is incredible to see: you work when the algorithms tell you there's work, you'll get paid what it wants to pay you. Cheap transport, cheap postage, cheap delivery of foods...
hangsi 2y ago
Tell that to the Pierce-Arrow company: makers of the first official cars for the white house, but they didn't survive cash flow problems from the great depression. Meanwhile, Ford survives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierce-Arrow_Motor_Car_Company
atrus 2y ago
But the wealthy don't spend their money. A billionaire doesn't spend more money than a million people on...anything probably.
hsuduebc2 2y ago
Wealthy people would buy hundreds of millions of different phones? I strongly doubt it. Luxurious electronics for very rich people is usually something like iphone with diamonds covered back. This solves nothing and creates zero innovations.
- 2y ago

bufferoverflow 2y ago

When all the labor (physical or mental) is automated, you've basically solved a huge problem for humanity. Doesn't matter who owns the robots. They either share the products of the labor for close to nothing, or they are producing for themselves only. Someone will produce for the population.

treis 2y ago

The West more or less doesn't pay the people who produce phones today. Partially because they don't make much and partially because of the trade imbalance.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

There is an interesting twist here. "Socialist" and "Communist" economic models where those who can't work are supported by spreading a portion of the GDP produced by an economy to support those (whether it is UBI or a 'free' living space, whatever) are more able to make the transition to a robotic workforce. In the US, if we transformed to a robotic manufacturing base today our oligarchs would horde all of the resulting wealth that was generated rather than provide for folks who were no longer employable. As a result we get strong labor actions that resist the automation of factories because they know that if their jobs are replaced by robots, they won't be able to work. The other twist has been the "GenAI" replacement[1] of technical workers today which is easier to do because of the lack of unions and collective bargaining leverage. They are getting screwed faster than the factory workers are. The 'utopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is distribution of that wealth across the population, a "post scarcity" society where people can do what ever they want without fear of poverty. A 'dystopian' outcome when a society overproduces wealth relative to its population is the concentration of wealth into individuals and their families and regulatory capture that prevents any distribution outside of that circle. Dooming the bulk of society to poverty and depredation. While China has it's oligarchs, its communist roots may allow it to come out on the positive side of the transformation. The US, in its current configuration, would likely not become a post-scarcity society. [1] Yes, I know, so far it hasn't actually been an productivity or efficiency 'win' yet, and may not ever be, but it is happening anyway.

fallingknife 2y ago
I still haven't seen an example of technical workers being replaced by AI
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  Perhaps we have differing definitions of "technical workers" ? Here in the Bay Area at least there are a number of companies which are replacing "senior staff" with an LLM and a junior engineer. The argument is that this combination is "cheaper" than the salary paid to the senior engineer. For me that is exactly analogous to replacing a factor worker with a robotic work station and a technician to maintain the robot. There is a ceiling on that junior engineer's career which occurs when they are themselves replaced by another junior engineer to reset the salary cost. We've seen some of them post "Ask HN's" about what they should do now because they aren't getting callbacks or any traction on their job search. What I haven't seen yet is this replacement penciling out to actually be less expensive when you look at time to complete tasks and support costs from faulty code/designs getting fairly far into production before being re-tooled. That may turn out to be endemic (at which point the replacement will stop and the trend will reverse) or there may be developments that mitigate these costs and get the combination to be more cost effective. It's something I watch for, evidence of it going one way or the other.

regularization 2y ago

Keynes wrote about how this can be done, while kicking the can down the road. Basically debt of all types, and government spending. For the US this would be military expenditures and social welfare for the elderly. Of course the can can only be kicked down the road so far. So to answer your question more in depth, there was a German exile in England who wrote a book answering this question back in 1867.

aaronblohowiak 2y ago
And yet the revolutions he inspired end up (in many ways) more dystopian than the capitalism they seek to replace..
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  Since then there's been a realization that you can simply regulate the worst aspects of capitalism while still reaping most of its rewards. Now, that has been realized - but hasn't happened - in the United States, but it can certainly be done. It'll probably be too late though.
- AngryData 2y ago
  So what? People have been misinterpreting and misusing knowledge, realizations, and stories since basically forever. That doesn't make the original works worthless or any less insightful. You would be hard pressed to link most of the policies of communist nations to things Marx said or advocated for. The vast majority of Marx's works is pointing out flaws in capitalism, not prescribing policies to use instead.
  - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
    I agree with your points but they do not lead to the conclusion that the GP was implying (that Marx contains the solution to what ails us)

megaman821 2y ago

Why are manufacturing jobs special? People will upgrade their tastes to consume more. Middle class houses with artistic stone work and well-manicured gardens. Skin treatments, massages, and health scans galore. More entertainment and more niche too. Banking apps that could win design awards. We are nowhere near the end of useful work.

guhidalg 2y ago
I think most MAGAs have this idea that 1) manufacturing is a good paying job and 2) if the US isn't manufacturing stuff, that means China is doing it for us, which will lead to 3) when we decide to go to war with China we will not have the industrial capacity to fight the war. In their world model, the opportunity cost of manufacturing things domestically is not considered, and certainly not the benefits of manufacturing things cheaply abroad and having US workers move up the value chain.
- from-nibly 2y ago
  Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with the us right? Specializing only works when line goes up forever. Heck sometimes line not going up as fast as yesterday is a "crisis".
  - guhidalg 2y ago
    > Is there not opportunity cost in both directions? Yes, but there are more working age people outside the US than inside the US, and they’re willing to work for less than people in the US. > At some point someone needs to have a reason to trade with us right? We trade plenty of goods, and we trade more services than goods. The people that produce services tend to be college educated, which is negatively correlated with conservatism. > Specializing only works when line goes up forever. I’m not sure what you mean by this. If you want cheaper and better quality goods and services, then you need specialization. Every country had some competitive advantage, whether it’s natural resources or specific human capital. When an economic downturn happens, it’s not like that competitive advantage suddenly moves abroad. If it’s cheaper to make things in China, it’s still going to be cheaper during a recession. Raising tariffs on China _maybe_ means companies move manufacturing elsewhere, or _maybe_ means they just pass on costs to consumers. I’m willing to bet money it’s the latter.

keybored 2y ago

Why is this difficult to imagine? The capitalists need human labor commodity as long as, well, human labor commodity is the only labor commodity that can do the job. Once it (if ever) isn’t? And they own all the robots that can do the work? And they own all the robot soldiers that can protect their ill-gotten wealth? (Just in short total automation) Well, no need for consumer capitalism any more. Then you just have totalitarian capitalism where everyone else will have to live out their lives at the total mercy of those overlords. (It doesn’t have to pan out like that. But the point remains that there’s not law of nature that consumer capitalism has to continue, even under Capitalism.)

gwbas1c 2y ago

That was a fear the first time automation came around. (I have a vague memory of machines used for weaving textiles.) Turns out people bought more cheap clothes, and thus people were needed to run the machines. I would assume that automating menial jobs in one place will create menial jobs in another place. I would also push for strengthening social security so we can lower the retirement age. If there really are less menial jobs to go around, it's easier to shrink the workforce if everyone can retire at 55 instead of 65.

ambicapter 2y ago

The plight of the poor is not an economic problem it is purely a political one. Progress in technology isn't really a root cause of poverty, rather a proximate cause with the root cause being "because the fruits of technology are not adequately shared by government policy", a policy issue. Tax the billionaires and do what government is supposed to do (use that money to protect the safety of their people), it won't matter if they make their wealth via robots or via people.

HPsquared 2y ago
Economics is inherently political. The original (and more descriptive) term for the subject is "political economy".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ambicapter 2y ago
  > Economics is inherently political. Yes? The political policies will have an impact on the economy.

carlosjobim 2y ago

In past times this question was solved by the ruling class commissioning monumental buildings and fine art, as well consuming enormous amounts of luxuries. This gave at least some form of employment back to the people. Today's rulers however have no interest in monuments or in culture. And the great expenses of the past time have mostly gone out of fashion; such as having a harem, waging small wars, or constructing impressive public works. Today's rulers are content to let everything rot, as long as they themselves get to sit highest up on the pile. Not even maintaining their power through client networks cost them much, as they sway the entire population any which way they desire through the media. And that cost is tiny. The populace worship their rulers because they are told to, and the rulers do not need to show their greatness in any way at all. The only exceptions I can think about who are actually doing something different, are the American billionaires building space ships. At least that's something.

heavyset_go 2y ago

Read the Plutonomy paper from CitiGroup circa 2005: https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf

danans 2y ago

> Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes The headline last week was that the top 10% now accounts for 50% of consumer spending [1]. As that trend accelerates, the economy will reconfigure to focus ever more on selling goods and services to a smaller, wealthier group of people. This trend is already visible in many service-oriented sectors (i.e. concierge medicine, private membership based ski resorts, etc). Exacerbating wealth inequality is the objective with which these technologies are being deployed, even if it's not the objective with which they are developed by engineers and scientists. 1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-rich-spending-2c34a571 https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...

Galatians4_16 2y ago

Money ≠ Wealth. Currency ≠ Money. As long as we use inflationary currency, the wealth gap will widen. If people could save money without worrying about deminishing of its' value, the gap will mend itself to natural levels, along skill/merit lines, as opposed to family inheritance/connections. Then they could also aquire wealth without needing to pawn it off to keep paying the bills.