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Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either. And the sentiment that goes around is more

Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either. And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetization/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat... > McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet." The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?

jmkni 11mo ago
There's a karma element too Maybe I can make things more efficient by getting rid of you and replacing you with AI, but how long until my boss has the same idea?
thewebguyd 11mo ago
> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? The same people who are buying products and services right now. Just 10% of the US population is responsible for nearly 50% of consumption. We are just going to bifurcate even more into the haves and have-nots. Maybe that 10% now becomes responsible for 70+% of consumption and everyone else is fighting for scraps. It won't be sustainable and we need UBI. A bunch of unemployed, hungry citizens with nothing left to lose is a combo that equals violent revolution.
- Eisenstein 11mo ago
  I posit that the consumption is the problem.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  The top 10% income bracket of the US is broad enough to include basically all US software developers, isn't it? If all jobs evaporate, what does the economy look like when just based on interest and dividend payments?
  - jimbokun 11mo ago
    It looks like Mad Max.
  - thewebguyd 11mo ago
    Pretty much yeah, I believe it's around $200k/year puts you in that bracket. If all jobs evaporate, then only asset owners will have money to spend, everyone else is left to fight for scraps so we either all die off or we get mad max.
  - stackskipton 11mo ago
    Top 10% of households are 212k. Plenty of software developers don't make that but if they have a spouse with 70k job, they are in top 10%. However, many software jobs are starting to be in HCOL so they probably don't feel like they are in top 10%.
  - coffeecat 11mo ago
    > The top 10% income bracket of the US is broad enough to include basically all US software developers, isn't it? I wish! My salary is a bit below the median US household income.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- tharne 11mo ago
  > Maybe that 10% now becomes responsible for 70+% of consumption and everyone else is fighting for scraps. Or everyone else starts fighting that 10% once they get tired of scraps.
- stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
  Or maybe the type of labor desired will be more comple, interesting, and valuable as it was when we gave up hunting and gathering for farms and as we mechanized farming and left for factories and factories and offices.
cedws 11mo ago
I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. Social media is driving society apart, making people selfish, jealous, and angry. Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. It will just be used to stomp on ordinary people and create even more inequality.
- Avicebron 11mo ago
  What's crazy is that people will jump all over themselves to say "well you could totally live like that at a 1960s level" like that's even a viable possibility today (in the US). What's that about the falcon and the falconer? The center cannot hold..
  - Retric 11mo ago
    People do make it work in the US with tiny incomes and a better standard of living than you’d see in a typical 1960’s household. I know people raising a family of 4 on 1 income well below the median wage without a collage degree. They do get significant help from government assistance programs for healthcare, but their lifestyle is way better off than what was typical in the 1960’s. Granted they aren’t doing this in a ultra expensive US city, but on the flip side they’re living in a huge for 1960’s 3 bedroom house with a massive backyard.
    - crossbody 11mo ago
      Finally a rational comment and not blind hating-complaining. Thank you
- FloorEgg 11mo ago
  To me this all just looks like a big frothy chemical reaction playing out far beyond any one person's control. With that view, many things oscillate over time, including game theory patterns (average interaction intentions of win-win, win-lose, lose-lose), and integration / mitosis (unions, international treaties, civil wars),etc. So my optimistic view is that inevitably we will get more tech whether we want it or not, and it will probably make things worse many for a while, but then it will simultaneously enable and force a restructuring at some level that starts a new cycle of prosperity. On the other side it will be clear that all this tech directly enables a better (more free, more diverse, more rewarding, more sustainable) way of life. I believe this because from studying history it seems this pattern plays out over and over and over again to varying degrees.
RajT88 11mo ago
> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. At least one sci-fi author has gamed this out: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? We have no basis for seriously considering this hypothetical when it comes to LLMs.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  Depends how absolute one takes the statement "no-one has money to throw around". Taken loosely, we have seen previous developments which make a large fraction of a population redundant in short periods, and it goes really badly, even though the examples I know of are nowhere near the entire population. I'm not at all sure how much LLMs or other GenAI are "it" for any given profession: while they impress me a lot, they are fragile and weird and I assume that if all development stopped today the current shinyness would tarnish fast enough. But on the other hand, I just vibe coded 95% of a game that would have taken me a few months back when I was a fresh graduate, in a few days, using free credit. Similar for the art assets. How much money can I keep earning for that last 5% the LLM sucks at?
rozap 11mo ago
Realistically I think there are two outcomes: AGI succeeds and there are mass layoffs, money is concentrated further in the hands of those who own compute. OR AI bubble pops and there are mass layoffs, with bailouts going to the largest players to prevent a larger collapse, which drives inflation and further marginalizes asset-less people. I honestly don't see a third option unless there is government intervention, which seems extremely far fetched given it's owned by the group of people who would benefit from either scenario presented above.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  If the AI bubble pops it's just another bubble like the many ones that have occurred throughout history and the market eventually recovers. In the AGI Succeeds scenario, the situation is unprecedented and it's not clear how it ever gets better.
  - throwacct 11mo ago
    Tbh, the answer is simple: if we truly get AGI, the government would nationalize it because it's a matter of national security and prosperity for that matter. Everything will change forever. Agriculture, Transportation, Health... Breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough. The country would hold the actual key to solve almost any problem.
    - jimbokun 11mo ago
      Looking at the current state of politics around the world...you really think that would be the outcome?
      - throwacct 11mo ago
        AGI? Absolutely. If your country gets there, would anyone relinquish that type of power and knowledge?
    - gizajob 11mo ago
      The government only nationalises losses, not wins.
nostrademons 11mo ago
"All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet." Duh, if they reduce headcount then they will have fewer people in their department, which will negatively affect their chances for promotion and desirability of their resume. That's why they actually offshore the jobs to India and Southeast Asia; it lets them have 3x+ the headcount for the same budget. If you want to have them actually reduce headcount, make org size the denominator in their performance reviews, so a director with 150 people needs to be 15x more productive than a manager with 10, who needs to be 10x more productive than the engineer IC. I guarantee that you will see companies collapse from ~150,000 employees to ~150, and profit/employee numbers in the millions (and very likely, 90% unemployment and social revolution). This is an incentive issue, not a productivity issue. Most employees and their employers are woefully unproductive because of Parkinson's Law. You'll never see a manager or even a managing-CEO propose this, though, because it'll destroy their own marketability in the management job market. Only an owner-CEO would do it - which some have, eg. Valve, Nintendo, Renaissance Technologies. But by definition, these are minority employers that are hard to get into, because their business model is to employ only a few hundred people and pay them each millions of dollars.
tharne 11mo ago
> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. > Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? I've wondered about this myself. People keep talking about the trades as a good path in the post-AI world, but I just don't see it. If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be hiring all these tradesmen? If I were unemployed long-term, the one upside is that I would suddenly have the time to a do a lot of the home repairs that I've been hiring contractors to take care of. The other thing I worry about is the level of violence we're likely to see if a significant chunk of the population is made permanently unemployed. People bring up Universal Basic Income as a potential, but I think that only address a part of the issue. Despite the bluster and complaints you might hear at the office, most want to have the opportunity to earn a living; they want to feel like they're useful to their fellow man and woman. I worry about a world in which large numbers of young people are looking at a future with no job prospects and no real place for them other than to be made comfortable by government money and consumer goods. To me that seems like the perfect recruiting ground for all manner of extremist organizations.
- janalsncm 11mo ago
  UBI correctly identifies the problem (people can’t afford housing/clothing/food without money) but is an inefficient solution imo. If we want people to have those things, we should simply give them to them.
  - JoshTriplett 11mo ago
    How much of them, which ones, to who, at what price, who is forced to provide them, how much do they get, what about other needs... Or we could just give people money and let them do as they wish with it, and trade off between their needs and wants as they see fit (including the decision of whether they want to work to obtain more of their wants).
    - janalsncm 11mo ago
      How much money should everyone get?
janalsncm 11mo ago
Intuitively, the whole economy cannot be B2B SAAS companies funded by VCs. At some point you need to provide value to consumers or the government. If those consumers don’t have any money and/or aren’t willing to spend a paycheck making studio ghibli profile pics, you have a problem. I guess Sam Altman has been asking for a government bailout so maybe he is going for the b2g option in a backwards sort of way.
- saxenaabhi 11mo ago
  These consumers will have to stop being entitled salaryman and show some entrepreneurship to survive. I think that's good thing.
  - LtWorf 11mo ago
    And to whom do you sell stuff if nobody else has money either?
  - janalsncm 11mo ago
    Sure, maybe the majority will go back to being peasants or serfs, which I would argue is the default state of humanity. It might be that the last 300 years, where individuals have the ability to sell useful services back to society, were an anomaly and things will go back to the way they were before that.
tim333 11mo ago
> problem ... laid off are not going to find new roles Not necessarily. If AI improves productivity, which it hasn't very much yet, there is the option to make more stuff rather than the same output with less people. The Luddites led on to Britain being the workshop of the world, not to everyone sitting around unemployed, at least not for a while.
bluefirebrand 11mo ago
> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? Here's hoping we figure that out soon otherwise we're going to see how long it takes the poor to reinvent the guillotine Personally I'm kind of hoping for sooner than later. The greed and vice of the upper stratosphere in society is wildly out of control and needs to be brought to heel
amy_petrik 11mo ago
>Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? Let me answer your question with another question - if the population pyramid is inverted and birth rate is like 1.1 babbies per 2 adults.. then how is any market going to grow? Seems to me all markets with halve. On top of what you pointed out. Or I suppose it's a happy accident if our workforce halves as our work halves - but still the consumer market has halved. It does make me wonder under what reality one would fathom that the stock market would go up long term.
- corv 11mo ago
  When AI and robots take care of everything there is more time to make babbies
Ferret7446 11mo ago
The same could be said for the nuclear arms race. The problem is that you can't afford to let a competitor/foreign country own this technology. You must invest. The problems have to be figured out later.
kjkjadksj 11mo ago
Its not even about reducing headcount but offshoring too. I see that in my industry. Major orgs are all hiring in bangalore now. Life is good if you are in bangalore or hyderabad. Ai is seen as something to smooth over the previous language/skill/culture gaps that may have been plugging the dam so far.
WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
The narrative going around in AI skeptic circles at least is that these layoffs are not tied to AI but to covid-era over-hiring, and that companies have an incentive to blame the layoffs on AI rather than admit underperformance/bad planning.
popcorncowboy 11mo ago
Tax AI.
cm2187 11mo ago
The economy has never worked like that. When you increase productivity, you create wealth and you enable other industries to appear. We have gone through numbers of those cycles. The industrialisation of agriculture, then machines in manufacturing, then introduction of computers (think of all the secretarial jobs, computers - as in engineers making calculations, accountants that have disappeared), then outsourcing of the industry to China. But somehow unemployment is low in most western countries. So what makes you think this time it will be different?
- Pingk 11mo ago
  Western employment has survived because automating and outsourcing labour has pushed people to take up knowledge/services work. If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body? Services like healthcare and plumbing aren't going away of course, but there's not enough demand to support an economy on those jobs. In my opinion the whole economy needs a rethink regarding what our actual goals are as a society, and maybe AI will force that conversation to happen, but I'm sceptical if it'll be a well-considered consensus.
  - saxenaabhi 11mo ago
    > If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body? Very few office jobs in bigcos, but it does mean that you'll not need as much capital as before to start a business and compete with existing incumbents.
    - bossyTeacher 11mo ago
      In a world where AI automates jobs, arguably any business services you could offer would likely have no customers because those potential customers can automate the services you offer themselves just like AI automates the employment skills employees offer. Not sure why people keep bringing up entrepreneurship as if that couldn't be automated.
croes 11mo ago
AI and robots have the same problem. If they work they will ruin a any society where income is based on labor. So AI either destroys capitalism or society.
pessimizer 11mo ago
> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? Nobody. It's a joke. The reason China could do this is because they were selling to the world. Our idiot elites don't even believe that it's bad to run massive trade deficits every year, while watching the gradually increasing strength of every exporting country. A great movie about this that I watched recently is Der VW-Komplex (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBRIzhbTFUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBRIzhbTFUA), where I learned that in the late 80s fully 10% of Volkswagen's output was purchased by Volkswagen's employees. Bitomsky was already asking "what will the robots buy?" And watching a management that seemed to think of human needs and desires as an annoying complication of machine and product design. > The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. I will note again that middle class people are completely unsympathetic to this problem until it affects them. They're like "Just learn Spanish!" "Just become programmers!" i.e. just be like me, who planned ahead and was quiet in class and is exactly where I belong. Complete idiot answers given by somebody who isn't worried about their own position in society at all. Almost every independent retail business closed down because the US wouldn't tax imports or Amazon purchases, every small town in the US was wrecked and every Front Street filled with boarded up storefronts or rotating unprofitable boutiques run by the wives and children of rich men, and the upper middle class just laughed, looked down their noses and complained about their taxes. I suggest gig work. The people who own the machines will send you tips through your phone if you pick up the leaves and trash around the gates of their homes.
wongarsu 11mo ago
In the magical fairy land of Economics 101 a lower headcount reduces costs, and because both their and their competitors' costs are reduced market forces drive the price of their products down by an equivalent amount. That leaves people with more spending power. Which leads to either more consumption of existing products and services, or creation of new types of products or services. Either way making those will employ additional people Of course in reality this does not work like that for large parts of the economy. But even if it was true companies woulnd't gain anything from AI beyond the ability to be briefly more competitive by being ahead of the curve in AI adoption
ceroxylon 11mo ago
The top 10% is already propping up half of consumer spending[0]. People will have money to throw around, but the amount of people doing so is shrinking until we figure out a way to balance the income disparity and reverse that trend. [0]https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/wealthy-americans-account-half-consumer-spending https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/wealthy-americans-accoun...
lumost 11mo ago
Many industries are stuck in either prisoner dilemmas, all payer auctions, or other game theoretic environments that make it impossible to pull back spend. If the army was 1000x more “productive” on a dollar basis- would you cut back military spending? No, because everyone else will be 1000x as productive soon. Spend may even rise with efficiency gains unlocking new capabilities/risks.

jmkni 11mo ago

There's a karma element too Maybe I can make things more efficient by getting rid of you and replacing you with AI, but how long until my boss has the same idea?

thewebguyd 11mo ago

> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? The same people who are buying products and services right now. Just 10% of the US population is responsible for nearly 50% of consumption. We are just going to bifurcate even more into the haves and have-nots. Maybe that 10% now becomes responsible for 70+% of consumption and everyone else is fighting for scraps. It won't be sustainable and we need UBI. A bunch of unemployed, hungry citizens with nothing left to lose is a combo that equals violent revolution.

Eisenstein 11mo ago
I posit that the consumption is the problem.
ben_w 11mo ago
The top 10% income bracket of the US is broad enough to include basically all US software developers, isn't it? If all jobs evaporate, what does the economy look like when just based on interest and dividend payments?
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  It looks like Mad Max.
- thewebguyd 11mo ago
  Pretty much yeah, I believe it's around $200k/year puts you in that bracket. If all jobs evaporate, then only asset owners will have money to spend, everyone else is left to fight for scraps so we either all die off or we get mad max.
- stackskipton 11mo ago
  Top 10% of households are 212k. Plenty of software developers don't make that but if they have a spouse with 70k job, they are in top 10%. However, many software jobs are starting to be in HCOL so they probably don't feel like they are in top 10%.
- coffeecat 11mo ago
  > The top 10% income bracket of the US is broad enough to include basically all US software developers, isn't it? I wish! My salary is a bit below the median US household income.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
tharne 11mo ago
> Maybe that 10% now becomes responsible for 70+% of consumption and everyone else is fighting for scraps. Or everyone else starts fighting that 10% once they get tired of scraps.
stocksinsmocks 11mo ago
Or maybe the type of labor desired will be more comple, interesting, and valuable as it was when we gave up hunting and gathering for farms and as we mechanized farming and left for factories and factories and offices.

cedws 11mo ago

I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. Social media is driving society apart, making people selfish, jealous, and angry. Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. It will just be used to stomp on ordinary people and create even more inequality.

Avicebron 11mo ago
What's crazy is that people will jump all over themselves to say "well you could totally live like that at a 1960s level" like that's even a viable possibility today (in the US). What's that about the falcon and the falconer? The center cannot hold..
- Retric 11mo ago
  People do make it work in the US with tiny incomes and a better standard of living than you’d see in a typical 1960’s household. I know people raising a family of 4 on 1 income well below the median wage without a collage degree. They do get significant help from government assistance programs for healthcare, but their lifestyle is way better off than what was typical in the 1960’s. Granted they aren’t doing this in a ultra expensive US city, but on the flip side they’re living in a huge for 1960’s 3 bedroom house with a massive backyard.
  - crossbody 11mo ago
    Finally a rational comment and not blind hating-complaining. Thank you
FloorEgg 11mo ago
To me this all just looks like a big frothy chemical reaction playing out far beyond any one person's control. With that view, many things oscillate over time, including game theory patterns (average interaction intentions of win-win, win-lose, lose-lose), and integration / mitosis (unions, international treaties, civil wars),etc. So my optimistic view is that inevitably we will get more tech whether we want it or not, and it will probably make things worse many for a while, but then it will simultaneously enable and force a restructuring at some level that starts a new cycle of prosperity. On the other side it will be clear that all this tech directly enables a better (more free, more diverse, more rewarding, more sustainable) way of life. I believe this because from studying history it seems this pattern plays out over and over and over again to varying degrees.

RajT88 11mo ago

> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. At least one sci-fi author has gamed this out: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? We have no basis for seriously considering this hypothetical when it comes to LLMs.

ben_w 11mo ago
Depends how absolute one takes the statement "no-one has money to throw around". Taken loosely, we have seen previous developments which make a large fraction of a population redundant in short periods, and it goes really badly, even though the examples I know of are nowhere near the entire population. I'm not at all sure how much LLMs or other GenAI are "it" for any given profession: while they impress me a lot, they are fragile and weird and I assume that if all development stopped today the current shinyness would tarnish fast enough. But on the other hand, I just vibe coded 95% of a game that would have taken me a few months back when I was a fresh graduate, in a few days, using free credit. Similar for the art assets. How much money can I keep earning for that last 5% the LLM sucks at?

rozap 11mo ago

Realistically I think there are two outcomes: AGI succeeds and there are mass layoffs, money is concentrated further in the hands of those who own compute. OR AI bubble pops and there are mass layoffs, with bailouts going to the largest players to prevent a larger collapse, which drives inflation and further marginalizes asset-less people. I honestly don't see a third option unless there is government intervention, which seems extremely far fetched given it's owned by the group of people who would benefit from either scenario presented above.

jimbokun 11mo ago
If the AI bubble pops it's just another bubble like the many ones that have occurred throughout history and the market eventually recovers. In the AGI Succeeds scenario, the situation is unprecedented and it's not clear how it ever gets better.
- throwacct 11mo ago
  Tbh, the answer is simple: if we truly get AGI, the government would nationalize it because it's a matter of national security and prosperity for that matter. Everything will change forever. Agriculture, Transportation, Health... Breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough. The country would hold the actual key to solve almost any problem.
  - jimbokun 11mo ago
    Looking at the current state of politics around the world...you really think that would be the outcome?
    - throwacct 11mo ago
      AGI? Absolutely. If your country gets there, would anyone relinquish that type of power and knowledge?
  - gizajob 11mo ago
    The government only nationalises losses, not wins.

nostrademons 11mo ago

"All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet." Duh, if they reduce headcount then they will have fewer people in their department, which will negatively affect their chances for promotion and desirability of their resume. That's why they actually offshore the jobs to India and Southeast Asia; it lets them have 3x+ the headcount for the same budget. If you want to have them actually reduce headcount, make org size the denominator in their performance reviews, so a director with 150 people needs to be 15x more productive than a manager with 10, who needs to be 10x more productive than the engineer IC. I guarantee that you will see companies collapse from ~150,000 employees to ~150, and profit/employee numbers in the millions (and very likely, 90% unemployment and social revolution). This is an incentive issue, not a productivity issue. Most employees and their employers are woefully unproductive because of Parkinson's Law. You'll never see a manager or even a managing-CEO propose this, though, because it'll destroy their own marketability in the management job market. Only an owner-CEO would do it - which some have, eg. Valve, Nintendo, Renaissance Technologies. But by definition, these are minority employers that are hard to get into, because their business model is to employ only a few hundred people and pay them each millions of dollars.

tharne 11mo ago

> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. > Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? I've wondered about this myself. People keep talking about the trades as a good path in the post-AI world, but I just don't see it. If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be hiring all these tradesmen? If I were unemployed long-term, the one upside is that I would suddenly have the time to a do a lot of the home repairs that I've been hiring contractors to take care of. The other thing I worry about is the level of violence we're likely to see if a significant chunk of the population is made permanently unemployed. People bring up Universal Basic Income as a potential, but I think that only address a part of the issue. Despite the bluster and complaints you might hear at the office, most want to have the opportunity to earn a living; they want to feel like they're useful to their fellow man and woman. I worry about a world in which large numbers of young people are looking at a future with no job prospects and no real place for them other than to be made comfortable by government money and consumer goods. To me that seems like the perfect recruiting ground for all manner of extremist organizations.

janalsncm 11mo ago
UBI correctly identifies the problem (people can’t afford housing/clothing/food without money) but is an inefficient solution imo. If we want people to have those things, we should simply give them to them.
- JoshTriplett 11mo ago
  How much of them, which ones, to who, at what price, who is forced to provide them, how much do they get, what about other needs... Or we could just give people money and let them do as they wish with it, and trade off between their needs and wants as they see fit (including the decision of whether they want to work to obtain more of their wants).
  - janalsncm 11mo ago
    How much money should everyone get?

janalsncm 11mo ago

Intuitively, the whole economy cannot be B2B SAAS companies funded by VCs. At some point you need to provide value to consumers or the government. If those consumers don’t have any money and/or aren’t willing to spend a paycheck making studio ghibli profile pics, you have a problem. I guess Sam Altman has been asking for a government bailout so maybe he is going for the b2g option in a backwards sort of way.

saxenaabhi 11mo ago
These consumers will have to stop being entitled salaryman and show some entrepreneurship to survive. I think that's good thing.
- LtWorf 11mo ago
  And to whom do you sell stuff if nobody else has money either?
- janalsncm 11mo ago
  Sure, maybe the majority will go back to being peasants or serfs, which I would argue is the default state of humanity. It might be that the last 300 years, where individuals have the ability to sell useful services back to society, were an anomaly and things will go back to the way they were before that.

tim333 11mo ago

> problem ... laid off are not going to find new roles Not necessarily. If AI improves productivity, which it hasn't very much yet, there is the option to make more stuff rather than the same output with less people. The Luddites led on to Britain being the workshop of the world, not to everyone sitting around unemployed, at least not for a while.

bluefirebrand 11mo ago

> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? Here's hoping we figure that out soon otherwise we're going to see how long it takes the poor to reinvent the guillotine Personally I'm kind of hoping for sooner than later. The greed and vice of the upper stratosphere in society is wildly out of control and needs to be brought to heel

amy_petrik 11mo ago

>Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? Let me answer your question with another question - if the population pyramid is inverted and birth rate is like 1.1 babbies per 2 adults.. then how is any market going to grow? Seems to me all markets with halve. On top of what you pointed out. Or I suppose it's a happy accident if our workforce halves as our work halves - but still the consumer market has halved. It does make me wonder under what reality one would fathom that the stock market would go up long term.

corv 11mo ago
When AI and robots take care of everything there is more time to make babbies

Ferret7446 11mo ago

The same could be said for the nuclear arms race. The problem is that you can't afford to let a competitor/foreign country own this technology. You must invest. The problems have to be figured out later.

kjkjadksj 11mo ago

Its not even about reducing headcount but offshoring too. I see that in my industry. Major orgs are all hiring in bangalore now. Life is good if you are in bangalore or hyderabad. Ai is seen as something to smooth over the previous language/skill/culture gaps that may have been plugging the dam so far.

WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago

The narrative going around in AI skeptic circles at least is that these layoffs are not tied to AI but to covid-era over-hiring, and that companies have an incentive to blame the layoffs on AI rather than admit underperformance/bad planning.

popcorncowboy 11mo ago

Tax AI.

cm2187 11mo ago

The economy has never worked like that. When you increase productivity, you create wealth and you enable other industries to appear. We have gone through numbers of those cycles. The industrialisation of agriculture, then machines in manufacturing, then introduction of computers (think of all the secretarial jobs, computers - as in engineers making calculations, accountants that have disappeared), then outsourcing of the industry to China. But somehow unemployment is low in most western countries. So what makes you think this time it will be different?

Pingk 11mo ago
Western employment has survived because automating and outsourcing labour has pushed people to take up knowledge/services work. If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body? Services like healthcare and plumbing aren't going away of course, but there's not enough demand to support an economy on those jobs. In my opinion the whole economy needs a rethink regarding what our actual goals are as a society, and maybe AI will force that conversation to happen, but I'm sceptical if it'll be a well-considered consensus.
- saxenaabhi 11mo ago
  > If AI is somewhat successful at automating knowledge work, what feasible job could exist that doesn't require your mind or body? Very few office jobs in bigcos, but it does mean that you'll not need as much capital as before to start a business and compete with existing incumbents.
  - bossyTeacher 11mo ago
    In a world where AI automates jobs, arguably any business services you could offer would likely have no customers because those potential customers can automate the services you offer themselves just like AI automates the employment skills employees offer. Not sure why people keep bringing up entrepreneurship as if that couldn't be automated.

croes 11mo ago

AI and robots have the same problem. If they work they will ruin a any society where income is based on labor. So AI either destroys capitalism or society.

pessimizer 11mo ago

> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around? Nobody. It's a joke. The reason China could do this is because they were selling to the world. Our idiot elites don't even believe that it's bad to run massive trade deficits every year, while watching the gradually increasing strength of every exporting country. A great movie about this that I watched recently is Der VW-Komplex (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBRIzhbTFUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBRIzhbTFUA), where I learned that in the late 80s fully 10% of Volkswagen's output was purchased by Volkswagen's employees. Bitomsky was already asking "what will the robots buy?" And watching a management that seemed to think of human needs and desires as an annoying complication of machine and product design. > The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles. I will note again that middle class people are completely unsympathetic to this problem until it affects them. They're like "Just learn Spanish!" "Just become programmers!" i.e. just be like me, who planned ahead and was quiet in class and is exactly where I belong. Complete idiot answers given by somebody who isn't worried about their own position in society at all. Almost every independent retail business closed down because the US wouldn't tax imports or Amazon purchases, every small town in the US was wrecked and every Front Street filled with boarded up storefronts or rotating unprofitable boutiques run by the wives and children of rich men, and the upper middle class just laughed, looked down their noses and complained about their taxes. I suggest gig work. The people who own the machines will send you tips through your phone if you pick up the leaves and trash around the gates of their homes.

wongarsu 11mo ago

In the magical fairy land of Economics 101 a lower headcount reduces costs, and because both their and their competitors' costs are reduced market forces drive the price of their products down by an equivalent amount. That leaves people with more spending power. Which leads to either more consumption of existing products and services, or creation of new types of products or services. Either way making those will employ additional people Of course in reality this does not work like that for large parts of the economy. But even if it was true companies woulnd't gain anything from AI beyond the ability to be briefly more competitive by being ahead of the curve in AI adoption

ceroxylon 11mo ago

The top 10% is already propping up half of consumer spending[0]. People will have money to throw around, but the amount of people doing so is shrinking until we figure out a way to balance the income disparity and reverse that trend. [0]https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/wealthy-americans-account-half-consumer-spending https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/wealthy-americans-accoun...

lumost 11mo ago

Many industries are stuck in either prisoner dilemmas, all payer auctions, or other game theoretic environments that make it impossible to pull back spend. If the army was 1000x more “productive” on a dollar basis- would you cut back military spending? No, because everyone else will be 1000x as productive soon. Spend may even rise with efficiency gains unlocking new capabilities/risks.