5 ms·

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the p

by BirAdam 9mo ago

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down prices on products, services, and labor. Once human labor's price is low, and once many product prices are low, the overall employment level of humans will rise. The effect of AI then is actually just deflationary pressure on all prices over time. The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move quickly enough and unrest is what happens.

kelseyfrog 9mo ago
Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.
- p1esk 9mo ago
  The best educator I’ve ever had is ChatGPT.
  - kelseyfrog 9mo ago
    How scalable is that in the sense that teachers have been obsoleted and we can run zero-staff schools?
- onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago
  One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.
  - kelseyfrog 9mo ago
    Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods, technology, food, and clothing has already produced this effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more. That's how the effect works. The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibrium, and that's ok"?
    - oops 9mo ago
      Healthcare, education and childcare are either free or affordable in almost all developed countries. Even in places where these services are expensive, it does not seem to be because the workers are highly paid.
      - swexbe 9mo ago
        They are not free, they are paid for by taxes. And in pretty much all countries, irrespective of funding model, these services have increased in price much faster than general inflation. This is the Baumol effect in action.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- oops 9mo ago
  I imagine personal trainers and childcare workers would see a drop in demand and perhaps also an increase in supply if a bunch of people suddenly lost their jobs to AI.
- ben_w 9mo ago
  There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's there to educate for, and how would the prospective students pay? Social work, childcare, for now I agree: My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level of FSD and androids.
- danaris 9mo ago
  The big tech AI barons absolutely claim that their LLMs can replace educators, judges, lawyers, and personal trainers. I've seen some vague claims about childcare robots, but for whatever reasons anything that's not pure software appears to be currently outside their field of vision. They're unlikely to make any claims about social workers because there's not enough money in it. No; the services that seem most intractably human, at least given the current state of things, are very much those in personal care roles—nurses, elder care workers, similar sorts of on-the-ground, in-person medical/emotional care—and trades, like plumbing, construction, electrical work, handcrafts, etc. Until we start seeing high-quality general-purpose robots (whether they're humanoid or not), those seem likely to be the jobs safest from direct attempts to replace them with LLMs. That doesn't mean they'll be safe from the overall economic fallout, of course, nor that the attempts to replace knowledge work of all types will actually succeed in a meaningful way.
raincole 9mo ago
There are millions of jobs that can be fully automated with 20th century technology but are still done by humans today because 1) third world labor is just too cheap 2) unions and other job protection policies. Therefore the scenario where 'all jobs being replaced in a short time span' is simply impossible.
- ben_w 9mo ago
  Sometimes that delays it. But when the tech is good enough and cheap enough then the picketing unions find their only barganing chip, that of witholding their labor, has become a toothless threat: no matter how long and hard a person of the profession "computer"* refuses to work for me for daring to have an unauthorised "electronic brain"**, the absense of that labour will not cause me any loss. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) ** https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up
brewdad 9mo ago
We are already at a point where the richest 10% of Americans represent half of total consumer spending. A lot of companies would fail but plenty of them would survive just fine if we assume AI won't take literally ALL of the jobs. As for the civil unrest, I see Minneapolis as a bit of a dry run of what it would take to remove large numbers of presumably poor minorities along with anyone else who objects. The job is clearly more than the leadership expected but it still seems within the realm of possibility given the fact the minority party leaders are barely saying no to those in power.
AnotherGoodName 9mo ago
Also just to be clear on the outcome of what you said: Humans will be cheaper than AI in order to compete. AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a hole? You'd better do it for less human! I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while competing against machines optimised to do a job.
- tim333 9mo ago
  In the UK 10litres of water and 10kwh of power cost about £2.50. Hiring someone to dig holes probably runs 50x that.
ASalazarMX 9mo ago
If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival. Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse. IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We started to automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to automate whole humans (or better) eventually. Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to ignore this.
- myrmidon 9mo ago
  "Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO. The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them. All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and spending it themselves). AI does neither.
  - ef2efe 9mo ago
    Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it... Lol as if you really believe that a bunch of people will actually control everything and the govt wont? Think harder.
    - funkyfiddler369 9mo ago
      of course they can, but that's a process, and a reactive one at that. the government won't control uptime, ever.
    - myrmidon 9mo ago
      > Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it Do you think the government is going to react with mass nationalisation of private companies to fight wealth inequality? What would the threshold be? The top 1% owning half of everything? 70%? I share no such optimism. The wealthy already have their interests much better represented in politics than their share of votes should allow (and this is a really difficult problem to tackle!), this is only gonna get worse and any government action against rich people interests is going to be increasingly difficult to trigger and sustain. Even if such mass nationalisation happened, why would you expect a better final outcome than every attempt at communism got (while doing the same thing): Namely, government just splitting up those spoils with their cronies?
Veedrac 9mo ago
> the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs What do you think money is...? Money is a way to indirectly trade labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.
mannanj 9mo ago
> If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs I think The companies would go out of business if the government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or national security interest. Do you think that would not be the case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a study of our history would reveal this as the more likely scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any amount of it.
- ef2efe 9mo ago
  The end game is nationalisation lmao. How people cant see this is mad... It wouldnt be the first time in history a govt has taken into their hands an organisation that is deemed too powerful.
  - funkyfiddler369 9mo ago
    if the government is owned by corporations via the stock markets than governments taking over organisations is privatization via a majority shareholdership and not nationalization.
    - ef2efe 9mo ago
      Are you seriously this delusional? THe leaders of tech firms operate at the behest of Trump. Not the other way round.
      - mannanj 9mo ago
        Who funds those tech firms? It's not Trump. His power is mostly theater to his constituents and those who funded Trump: spoiler: he's not entirely self funded, and some of his funding is at least from others so he's conflicted in his self interests to others. We call this a classic conflict of interest.
ericmcer 9mo ago
We might just keep making more jobs and coming up with more busy work to keep people grinding away for 40 hours a week. If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years. If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.
- morkalork 9mo ago
  That example doesn't hold up once you expand your view to other countries. Where are all these jobs that magically materialize in labour surplus economies like Brazil or Bangladesh?
  - cal_dent 9mo ago
    Yes, i do feel that many people woho talk about jevon's paradox element of employment have not spent much time in developing economies. You can have a lot of people doing absolutely nothing, economically, day to day and still have a functioning state
    - tim333 9mo ago
      In the UK we have approx 22 million adults doing not much so you can see it in developed places too.
  - tim333 9mo ago
    Googling Bangladesh unemployment seems to be 4.7% and GDP growth has averaged about 7% so not so different to elsewhere apart from faster growth from a low base?
cyanydeez 9mo ago
I think you arn't paying attention: AS long as there's 1 seller and 1 buyer, Capitalism will happily burn the rest of the population. Sure there's some other limits on social cohesion, but the idea that we can't squeeze upward and leave a bunch of poor people destitute is optimistic. It's also how you ensure no one thinks: Hey, maybe capitalism isn't an optimal distribution of social good.

by BirAdam 9mo ago

kelseyfrog 9mo ago

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers. Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

p1esk 9mo ago
The best educator I’ve ever had is ChatGPT.
- kelseyfrog 9mo ago
  How scalable is that in the sense that teachers have been obsoleted and we can run zero-staff schools?
onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago
One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.
- kelseyfrog 9mo ago
  Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods, technology, food, and clothing has already produced this effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more. That's how the effect works. The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibrium, and that's ok"?
  - oops 9mo ago
    Healthcare, education and childcare are either free or affordable in almost all developed countries. Even in places where these services are expensive, it does not seem to be because the workers are highly paid.
    - swexbe 9mo ago
      They are not free, they are paid for by taxes. And in pretty much all countries, irrespective of funding model, these services have increased in price much faster than general inflation. This is the Baumol effect in action.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
oops 9mo ago
I imagine personal trainers and childcare workers would see a drop in demand and perhaps also an increase in supply if a bunch of people suddenly lost their jobs to AI.
ben_w 9mo ago
There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's there to educate for, and how would the prospective students pay? Social work, childcare, for now I agree: My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level of FSD and androids.
danaris 9mo ago
The big tech AI barons absolutely claim that their LLMs can replace educators, judges, lawyers, and personal trainers. I've seen some vague claims about childcare robots, but for whatever reasons anything that's not pure software appears to be currently outside their field of vision. They're unlikely to make any claims about social workers because there's not enough money in it. No; the services that seem most intractably human, at least given the current state of things, are very much those in personal care roles—nurses, elder care workers, similar sorts of on-the-ground, in-person medical/emotional care—and trades, like plumbing, construction, electrical work, handcrafts, etc. Until we start seeing high-quality general-purpose robots (whether they're humanoid or not), those seem likely to be the jobs safest from direct attempts to replace them with LLMs. That doesn't mean they'll be safe from the overall economic fallout, of course, nor that the attempts to replace knowledge work of all types will actually succeed in a meaningful way.

raincole 9mo ago

There are millions of jobs that can be fully automated with 20th century technology but are still done by humans today because 1) third world labor is just too cheap 2) unions and other job protection policies. Therefore the scenario where 'all jobs being replaced in a short time span' is simply impossible.

ben_w 9mo ago
Sometimes that delays it. But when the tech is good enough and cheap enough then the picketing unions find their only barganing chip, that of witholding their labor, has become a toothless threat: no matter how long and hard a person of the profession "computer"* refuses to work for me for daring to have an unauthorised "electronic brain"**, the absense of that labour will not cause me any loss. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) ** https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up

brewdad 9mo ago

We are already at a point where the richest 10% of Americans represent half of total consumer spending. A lot of companies would fail but plenty of them would survive just fine if we assume AI won't take literally ALL of the jobs. As for the civil unrest, I see Minneapolis as a bit of a dry run of what it would take to remove large numbers of presumably poor minorities along with anyone else who objects. The job is clearly more than the leadership expected but it still seems within the realm of possibility given the fact the minority party leaders are barely saying no to those in power.

AnotherGoodName 9mo ago

Also just to be clear on the outcome of what you said: Humans will be cheaper than AI in order to compete. AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a hole? You'd better do it for less human! I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while competing against machines optimised to do a job.

tim333 9mo ago
In the UK 10litres of water and 10kwh of power cost about £2.50. Hiring someone to dig holes probably runs 50x that.

ASalazarMX 9mo ago

If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival. Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse. IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We started to automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to automate whole humans (or better) eventually. Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to ignore this.

myrmidon 9mo ago
"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO. The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them. All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and spending it themselves). AI does neither.
- ef2efe 9mo ago
  Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it... Lol as if you really believe that a bunch of people will actually control everything and the govt wont? Think harder.
  - funkyfiddler369 9mo ago
    of course they can, but that's a process, and a reactive one at that. the government won't control uptime, ever.
  - myrmidon 9mo ago
    > Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it Do you think the government is going to react with mass nationalisation of private companies to fight wealth inequality? What would the threshold be? The top 1% owning half of everything? 70%? I share no such optimism. The wealthy already have their interests much better represented in politics than their share of votes should allow (and this is a really difficult problem to tackle!), this is only gonna get worse and any government action against rich people interests is going to be increasingly difficult to trigger and sustain. Even if such mass nationalisation happened, why would you expect a better final outcome than every attempt at communism got (while doing the same thing): Namely, government just splitting up those spoils with their cronies?

Veedrac 9mo ago

> the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs What do you think money is...? Money is a way to indirectly trade labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.

mannanj 9mo ago

> If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs I think The companies would go out of business if the government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or national security interest. Do you think that would not be the case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a study of our history would reveal this as the more likely scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any amount of it.

ef2efe 9mo ago
The end game is nationalisation lmao. How people cant see this is mad... It wouldnt be the first time in history a govt has taken into their hands an organisation that is deemed too powerful.
- funkyfiddler369 9mo ago
  if the government is owned by corporations via the stock markets than governments taking over organisations is privatization via a majority shareholdership and not nationalization.
  - ef2efe 9mo ago
    Are you seriously this delusional? THe leaders of tech firms operate at the behest of Trump. Not the other way round.
    - mannanj 9mo ago
      Who funds those tech firms? It's not Trump. His power is mostly theater to his constituents and those who funded Trump: spoiler: he's not entirely self funded, and some of his funding is at least from others so he's conflicted in his self interests to others. We call this a classic conflict of interest.

ericmcer 9mo ago

We might just keep making more jobs and coming up with more busy work to keep people grinding away for 40 hours a week. If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years. If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.

morkalork 9mo ago
That example doesn't hold up once you expand your view to other countries. Where are all these jobs that magically materialize in labour surplus economies like Brazil or Bangladesh?
- cal_dent 9mo ago
  Yes, i do feel that many people woho talk about jevon's paradox element of employment have not spent much time in developing economies. You can have a lot of people doing absolutely nothing, economically, day to day and still have a functioning state
  - tim333 9mo ago
    In the UK we have approx 22 million adults doing not much so you can see it in developed places too.
- tim333 9mo ago
  Googling Bangladesh unemployment seems to be 4.7% and GDP growth has averaged about 7% so not so different to elsewhere apart from faster growth from a low base?

cyanydeez 9mo ago

I think you arn't paying attention: AS long as there's 1 seller and 1 buyer, Capitalism will happily burn the rest of the population. Sure there's some other limits on social cohesion, but the idea that we can't squeeze upward and leave a bunch of poor people destitute is optimistic. It's also how you ensure no one thinks: Hey, maybe capitalism isn't an optimal distribution of social good.