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I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unempl

• FeteCommuniste 1y ago
  I guess the idea is that the people left working will be made so productive and wealthy thanks to the miracle of AI that they can more than make up the difference with extravagant consumption.
  • isoprophlex 1y ago
    I too plan to buy 100.000 liters of yogurt each day once AI has transported me into the socioeconomic strata of the 0.1%
    • FeteCommuniste 1y ago
      My many robots will be busy building glorious mansions out of yogurt cups.
      • Terr_ 1y ago
        Or, as per a Love, Death, and Robots short film, the new superintelligence will be inextricable from yogurt...
  • darth_avocado 1y ago
    If you want to see what that looks like, just look at the economy of India. Do we really want that?
    • FeteCommuniste 1y ago
      Certainly not what I want, but it looks like we could be headed there. And the "industry leaders" seem cool with it, to judge by their politics.
      • eyesofgod 1y ago
        [flagged]
    • munksbeer 1y ago
      The economy of India is trending in the opposite direction to this narrative. More and more people lifted out of poverty as they modernise.
      • darth_avocado 1y ago
        The comment wasn’t on the trend or where things are going and the historical progress the country has made. The comment was on the current state of the economy. The fact that wealth concentration creates its own unique challenges. If as many people were unemployed and in poverty (or in the low income bracket) in the US or any other developed nation, the living conditions would have been drastically deteriorated. The consumer market would have shrunk to the point where most people couldn’t afford to buy chips and soda.
        • munksbeer 1y ago
          The point is, I don't see that happening. The reverse is happening in the world. The percentage of people in poverty globally is decreasing each year. I still fail to see why people think we're going to innovate ourselves into global poverty, it makes no sense.
          • darth_avocado 1y ago
            Poverty is decreasing because innovation is creating more jobs. Everything hinges on the fact that people can earn a living and spend their money to generate more jobs. If AI replaces those jobs you’re going the other way.
            • const_cast 1y ago
              Right, every economic system we've thought up relies on the assumption that everyone works. Or, close to everyone. Capitalism is just as much about consumption as it is production.
              • SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
    • JKCalhoun 1y ago
      I'd been thinking modern day Russia, but I admit to being ignorant of a lot of countries outside the U.S.
  • al_borland 1y ago
    A single rich person can only much door dash. Scaling a customer base needs to be done horizontally.
• keybored 1y ago
  We have consumer capitalism now. Before we didn’t. There’s no reason it can’t be replaced. Sure there can be rich people who are radical enough to push for another phase of capitalism. That’s a kind of a capitalism which is worse for workers and consumers. With even more power in the hands of capitalists.
• thmsths 1y ago
  Tragedy of the commons: no one being able to buy stuff is a problem for everyone, but being able to save just a bit more by getting rid of your workforce is a huge advantage for your business.
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    … in the interim, of course.
  • bckr 1y ago
    “tragedy of the commons” is treated as a Theory of Human Nature when it’s really a religious principle underlying how we operate our society.
    • Jensson 1y ago
      People hunted large mammals to extinction long before modern society, so tragedy of the commons is nature in general. We know other predators do it as well, not just humans.
• johnbenoe 1y ago
  You ever thought there’s more to life than work lol. Maybe humans can approach a new standard of living…
  • codr7 1y ago
    Excellent choice of words there: new standard. I'm sure we are, but it doesn't look like an improvement for most people.
    • johnbenoe 1y ago
      Not yet at least, but there’s no stopping this kind of efficiency jump. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in denial.
      • myko 1y ago
        Maybe, but aren't LLM companies burning cash? The efficiency gains I see from LLMs typically come from agents which perform circular prompts on themselves until they reach some desired outcome (or give up until a human can prod them along). It seems like we'll need to generate a lot more power to support these efficiency gains at scale, and unless that is coming from renewables (and even if it is) that cost may outweigh the gains for a long time.
        • johnbenoe 1y ago
          They’re burning cash at a high rate because of the grand potential, and they are of course keeping some things behind closed doors. I also respect the operative analysis, but the strategical, long-term thinking, is that this will come and it will only speed up everything else.
          • codr7 1y ago
            The grand potential of short sighted profits with no concern for society nor other humans, yes.
      • 1y ago
• roenxi 1y ago
  You're being confused by the numbers. We aren't trying to maximise consumer spending, the point is to maximise living standards. If the market equilibrium price of all goods was $0 consumer spending would be $0 and living standards would be off the charts. It'd be a great outcome. It just happens that up to this point there have been things that couldn't be done by capital. Now we're entering a world where there isn't such a thing and it is unclear what that implies for the job market. But people not having jobs is hardly a bad thing as long as it isn't forced by stupid policy, ideally nobody has to work.
  • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    In theory. In reality, how are the benefits of all this efficiency going to be distributed to the people who aren't working? I sure don't see any calls for higher taxes and more wealth redistribution.
    • SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
      The source article is an analysis of an interview (https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unempl...) where the CEO of Anthropic called for higher taxes and more wealth redistribution.
      • DrillShopper 1y ago
        I'm sure the Republican liches in the Senate have some views on that which kill it out of the gate
    • ikrenji 1y ago
      Let's face it ~ almost all work will be automated in the next 50 years. Either capitalism dies or humanity dies
  • alluro2 1y ago
    Given the current mechanics evident in the society - declining education, healthcare and rising cost of living, homelessness and exploding economic inequality - who is "we", trying to maximise living standards, and what movement do you see leading towards such an outcome?
• onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  > If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc? It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same. It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets. It's also easy to imagine a world in which you're able to cut more workers than everyone else, and on aggregate, barely anyone is impacted, but your margins go up. There's tons of other scenarios, including the most cited one - that technology thus far has always led to more jobs, not less. They're probably believing any combination of these concepts. It's not guaranteed that if there's 5% less white-collar workers per year for a few decades that we're all going to starve to death. In the future, if trends continue, there's going to be way less workers - since there's going to be a huge portion of the population that's old and retired. You can lose x% of the work force every year and keep unemployment stable... A large portion of the population wants a lot more people to be able to not work and get entitlements... It's pretty easy to see how a lot of people can think this could lead to something good, even if you think all those things are bad. Two people can see the same painting in a museum, one finds it beautiful, and the other finds it completely uninteresting. It's almost like asking - how can someone want the Red team to win when I want the Blue team to win?
  • munksbeer 1y ago
    >It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets. History seems to show this doesn't happen. The trend is not linear, but the trend is that we live better lives each century than the previous century, as our technology increases. Maybe it will be different this time though.
    • ryandrake 1y ago
      "Technology increases" have not made my life better than my boomer parents' and they will probably not make the next generation's lives better than ours. Big things like housing costs, education costs, healthcare costs are not being driven down by technology, quite the opposite. Yes, the lives of "people selling stuff" will likely get better and better in the future, through technology, but the wellbeing of normal people seems to have peaked at around the year 2000 or so.
• ben_w 1y ago
  Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the turkey's perspective in the problem of induction. So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit. Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them. It's easy to fool oneself that the economics are eternal with reference to e.g. Jevons paradox.
  • JKCalhoun 1y ago
    > turkey's perspective in the problem of induction… Had to look that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
  • abracadaniel 1y ago
    My long term fear with AI is that by replacing entry level jobs, it breaks the path to train senior level employees. It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse as no one is left with any understanding of how existing systems work, or how to design replacements.
    • pseudo0 1y ago
      Juniors and offshore teams will probably be the most severely impacted. If a senior dev is already breaking off smaller tightly scoped tasks and fixing up the results, that loop can be accomplished much more quickly by iterating with a LLM. Especially if you have to wait a business day for someone in India to even start on the task when a LLM is spitting out a similar quality PR in minutes. Ironically a friend of mine noticed that the team in India they work with is now largely pushing AI-generated code... At that point you just need management to cut out the middleman.
      • teitoklien 1y ago
        lol, what it’s soon going to lead to is unfortunately the very opposite of what you’re thinking. Management will cut down your team’s headcount and outsource even more to India ,Vietnam and Philippines. A CFO looks at balance sheet not operations context, even if you’re idea is better the opposite of what you think is likely going to happen very soon.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• untrust 1y ago
  Another question: If AI is going to eat up everyone's jobs, how will any business be safe from a new competitor showing up and unseating them off their throne? I don't think that the low level peons would be the only ones at stake as a company could be easily outcompeted as well since AI could conceivably outperform or replace any existing product anyways. I guess funding for processing power and physical machinery to run the AI backing a product would be the biggest barrier to entry?
  • layer8 1y ago
    Institutional knowledge is key here. Third parties can’t replicate it quickly just by using AI.
    • lubujackson 1y ago
      Luckily we are firing all those people so they will be available for new roles. This feels a lot like the dot boom/dot bust era where a lot of new companies are going to sprout up from the ashes of all this disruption.
    • floatrock 1y ago
      Also: network effects, inertia, cornering the market enough to make incumbents uneconomical, regulatory capture... AI certainly will increase competition in some areas, but there are countless examples where being the best at something doesn't make you the leader.
  • zhobbs 1y ago
    Yeah this will likely lead to margin compression. The best companies will be fine though, as brand and existing distribution is a huge moat.
    • azemetre 1y ago
      “Best” is carrying a lot of wait. More accurate to say the monopolistic companies that engage in regulatory capture will be fine.
• anvandare 1y ago
  A cancerous cell does not care that it is (indirectly) killing the lifeform that it is a part of. It just does what it does without a thought. And if it could think, it would probably be very proud of the quarter (hour) figures that it could present. The Number has gone up, time for a reward.
• SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  Business leaders in AI are _not_ excited and agree with your concerns. That's what the source article is about - the CEO of AI lab Anthropic said he sees major social problems coming soon. The problem is that the information environment is twisted in knots. The author, like many commentators, characterizes your concerns as "optimism" and "hype", because she doesn't think AI will actually have these large impacts.
  • spacemadness 1y ago
    I think he says this just to hype up how powerful of a force AI is which helps these CEOs bottom line eventually. Cynically “we’ve created something so powerful it will eliminate jobs and cause strife” gets those investors excited for more.
  • geraneum 1y ago
    They are. The audience of this talk is not normal people. He’s excited and is targeting a specific group in his messaging. The author is a person like majority.
    • SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
      I don't understand what you mean. The audience of this talk is Axios, a large news website targeting the general public.
      • geraneum 1y ago
        I believe he's talking to money, to investors. He does it through Axios, CNN, BBC, etc. Their company is not sustainable at this rate. None of the LLM service providers are. They need money for now and that's why they talk like this. 50% of a group of workers losing their jobs to this tech is not a worrisome future for him. It's a pitch!
• leeroihe 1y ago
  They want an omnipresent, lobotomized and defeated underclass who only exists to "respond" to the ai to continue to improve it. This is basically what alexander wang from Scale AI explained at a recent talk which was frankly terrifying. Your UBI will be controlled by the government, you will have even less agency than you currently have and a hyper elite will control the thinking machines. But don't worry, the elite and the government are looking out for your best interest!
  • pdfernhout 1y ago
    We already have that "defeated underclass" courtesy of a century of mainstream schooling (according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto): "The Underground History of American Education -- A conspiracy against ourselves" https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/10/john-taylor-gatto/the-cult-of-forced-schooling/ https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/10/john-taylor-gatto/the-cu... "As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates — these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched. I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises — no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system...." In 2010, I put together a list of alternatives here to address the rise of AI and Robotics and its effect on jobs: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
• carlosjobim 1y ago
  That's a very pessimistic view. People can borrow money against their property, then later they can borrow money against their diploma and professional certificates (and nobody should be allowed to work without being certified, that's dangerous). Then later I think it's time for banks to start offering consumers the reproductive right of mortgaging their children, either born or unborn.
• tim333 1y ago
  It's like all the farmers soil shoveling jobs were stolen by tractors. People moved on to more interesting things.
  • lowbloodsugar 1y ago
    In all previous such revolutions, humans were freed to do more productive work while the cost of goods came down. But that doesn’t mean the same is true this time. Now the revolution does not make physical tasks easier (like ploughing or spinning thread) but intellectual labor. This time, there are no jobs to go to, since those jobs are also done by AI.
    • tim333 1y ago
      There are still interacting with other humans jobs.
      • lowbloodsugar 1y ago
        So, prostitution? Bartender? There are still jobs now that require human interaction, but unless interacting with another human is the job itself, then, yes, those jobs are going. McDonalds already has kiosks for ordering. Yo Sushi has beer taps at your table. Young men are walking around having relationships with cute anime girls who listen and validate them (and how are they ever going to deal with an actual human female who has her own needs??). Others on HN are saying AI isn't good enough for this or that, but have you ever tried dealing with a real person in a call center, or a minimum wage employee at the job center, or a sales person at a cheap cosmetics counter. So sure, there are jobs at Chanel, or Audi, or Michelin starred restaurants, for the rich who can not only afford such luxury but enjoy lauding it over the rest of us, but for the rest of us there's Johnny Cab if we even have any way of paying for a ride in one.
• bravesoul2 1y ago
  How to move to post-capitalism is the question. We need something money-like to motivate but something different.