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> They want to replace workers A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
by bcjdjsndon 5mo ago
> They want to replace workers
A simple question none of the ai-doomsayers can answer... who buys anything when nobody has a job cos robots do everything?
- actionfromafar 5mo agoThe robots will tell you what to do, you will own nothing, and you will be happy. I think that is the plan?
- chihuahua 5mo agoAlmost, but also don't forget the part where "you vill eat ze bugs."
- isx726552 5mo agoWhy would the doomsayers be the ones who need to answer that? That’s kind of their point! It’s the AI boosters who need to answer that, and so far it’s just a big collective shrug + silence.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoIf you have a magic robot that builds everything you want you don’t need anyone to buy anything. Jfc this site is the worst. Use your words instead of drive by downvoting.
- lorecore 5mo agoWhere do the raw materials for the thing it's building (or the robot itself for that matter) come from?
- bluecheese452 5mo agoFrom the earth. Maybe in the future space.
- lorecore 5mo agoFinite natural resources are by their very nature, limited.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoYes finite things are finite. Glad we cleared up it.
- lorecore 5mo agoFinite means not free. Who will pay?
- bluecheese452 5mo agoIf your magic robot is magic enough you own anything you want. You pay with the oldest currency in the world. Might.
- lorecore 5mo agoI don’t think pillaging the earth’s natural resources (even more than we already do) is going to go down well.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoAgreed.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoHow have you gone from Transformer based AI to a magic robot that can fabricate absolutely anything (somehow)?
- pelotron 5mo agoThen all you have to do is magically convince the owners of the magic robot to give all their products away for free.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoThey already have way more than they could ever use and still try to take more.
- dijit 5mo agoNobody can answer that? There are jobs AI can't easily come for... not always nice ones, but either too physically fiddly or too cheap to bother automating. But jobs go "extinct" all the time. My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now. The pattern seems pretty consistent: raise the floor (dishwashers, CNC machines, laundry), and people tend to climb to higher levels of abstraction. The real question is who captures those productivity gains; and historically, it isn't the workers. Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone. Then, once the market was captured, mid-tier became the ceiling and anything above it got expensive again. Nobody won except the owners.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> My ancestors going back generations were sugarhouse labourers. That job's gone, but the lineage isn't: we just do different things now. Same will happen with the jobs AI takes > Shoes are the classic example. Automation made them cheaper and accessible to everyone Like you said, cobblers just do different things now
- ryaniscool 5mo agoIt's bizarre that some of the doomsayers are AI stakeholders. It's like they don't realize that most people don't have net worth in the 7-8 figures. I console myself with the fact that without a functioning economy, AI will implode since capital will dry up. Then all of the investment in data centers, R&D, etc. will never be recovered. Then we'll be back to rational thinking? Maybe?
- mrhottakes 5mo agoThey realize it, and they don't care.
- dlev_pika 5mo agoYeah, but it doesn’t implode all at once - it’s not distributed evenly. Something like over half of the US consumption is done by the top 10%, or something insane like that. This leads me to believe that a lot more people will eat shit, before enough feel real pain.
- ryaniscool 5mo agoYes, it will take longer but all value comes from labor, so the consumption of the wealthy is literally produced by the working class. The rich can't eat money. Also, data centers, chips, and energy require massive working-class supply chains, and enterprise AI revenue depends on customers whose own revenue depends on regular consumers.
- thomascgalvin 5mo agoYou're asking a question that only applies to rational actors. Corporations exist for one purpose: to get as much money as possible. Side concerns, which can range from "not destroying the environment" or "not destroying the economy," are objectively not their goal, nor do they consider them their responsibility. Those are things "someone else" should worry about. AI destroying all jobs is similar to a nuclear arms race; these companies don't want to eliminate everyone's ability to buy things, but they don't want to be the only entity without that ability, so ...
- bluecheese452 5mo agoThat is mostly true but a bit of a simplification. They exist to do what the people who have power want them to do which is not always strictly profit maximization. A ceo may realize rto will decrease profits but do it anyway because it increases the power delta between him and the workers.
- nervousvarun 5mo ago"not always strictly profit maximization." Maybe in the short-term but public companies with shareholders won't allow this in any sort of long-term way right?
- bluecheese452 5mo agoNot allow it? They insist upon it! The controlling votes are all part of the same social class. They would gladly give up a small amount of profit to keep the distance between them and the workers as large as possible.
- nervousvarun 5mo agoTo the extent it doesn't negatively impact the stock price sure but you would agree the CEO and any sort of power-trip they have is ultimately beholden to that right?
- pelotron 5mo agoWe shouldn't be surprised people have a negative view of AI when Altman et al. have stated on stage that the goal is to replace everyone.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoBecause it's not even logically possible, let alone practically
- mrhottakes 5mo agoMaybe the Altmans and Amodeis should stop saying otherwise all the time then.
- ndsipa_pomu 5mo agoWhen a sizeable percentage of people are replaced, who buys all the products that A.I. produces? The whole system just collapses.
- Krssst 5mo agoThere will still be jobs. Manual jobs, the kind that break our backs and have us breath various stuff we shouldn't (dust, fumes). Robots are difficult and maybe not so economically viable when everyone is desperate for any job at any cost.
- tux3 5mo agoThe true AI doomsayers believe in some sort of technological singularity, which means a point after which things become so strange that the world is radically transformed. Things like "jobs" and "careers" are so integral to society that we can't really imagine what society would be like in a world where people don't have any clear purpose. That's why you won't get a definitive answer. The whole idea of a singularity is that people don't have the faintest clue what day to day life would look like after. We often to choose to believe that a singularity can't happen, because we don't know what that even means. We can't answer the simple question. So it definitely better not happen, that would be very inconvenient.
- garciasn 5mo agoI’m always amazed that when I tell people I intend to retire in my 50s, they tell me that I can’t possibly mean that and actively wonder how I could possibly fill my time. It’s as if we could not possibly function as humans without meaningless shifting of tangible/intangibles from one place to another. Society is so hellbent on the idea that we need our job to be our identity, they lack the imagination for another other reality. It’s ridiculous.
- bachmeier 5mo agoIt is indeed ridiculous. People saying they're going to let someone else tell them what to do with their time, energy, and calendar, even if they hate doing it. The only explanation I have is that they have been letting the wrong people program them.
- ryaniscool 5mo agoSure working sucks, but have you tried not working? I think this is from lived experience because I've gone for stretches of not working (intentionally). It can be challenging to find a sense of fulfillment. I know it seems counter-intuitive but if you do succeed in your dream of retiring in your 50's I think you'll understand what I mean when you get there.
- JohnFen 5mo ago
- hamdingers 5mo agoFully automated luxury space fascism doesn't really need buyers. A risk of high automation/post-scarcity is that abundance exists but remains under the control of people who are not interested in justice or equality or freedom. Lots of people feel that describes the leadership of most AI tech companies. If they don't need your labor, and they don't need you as a customer, and they don't care about you as a person... where does that leave you? [to be clear, I think post-scarcity, even in knowledge work, is a lot further off than most ai-doomsayers or ai-worshipers who take statements from people like Altman and Musk at face value]
- general1465 5mo agoBut that also assume that peasants do not have agency and won't trigger another French Revolution.
- bluecheese452 5mo agoThey may they may not. The nobility has learned a lot in the past 200+ years. Powerful propaganda machines, powerful weaponry, and a small group of loyalists have proven extremely effective at controlling large populations.
- archagon 5mo agoThey won’t say it in public, but I imagine they’re betting on swarms of automated slaughterbots protecting them when things truly go to shit.
- wolvesechoes 5mo ago> But that also assume that peasants do not have agency and won't trigger another French Revolution Look at the median age of French society during the French Revolution and the current one. Who is going to trigger another French revolution? Old people coughing their lung out?
- lbrito 5mo agothe answer to every question: Agents, of course! With GPU-collaterized credit or some other idiocy.
- zombot 5mo agoIf you paint it rose-colored enough, you can even eat hot air. And rose-colored hot air will shelter you from the cold.
- gypsy_boots 5mo agoTake any econ 101 course, and you'll realize that this isn't a factor in the capitalist system. Capitalism is simply concerned with maximizing profit, and in this case, returning shareholder value. It's just simply not in the purview of the system to think about what happens when you completely get rid of your labor force. Envisioned another way, the future of labor might look the way it did for laborers over 100 years ago, before major industries unionized; making 'Amazon-bucks' that can only be redeemed at the 'Amazon company store'.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- general1465 5mo agoNo wages -> Nobody buys stuff and services -> Companies are going bankrupt -> No taxable income from consumers nor companies -> States are going bankrupt. You can either go through UBI taxing automated work by 90%+ and pretend that capitalism is still a thing, or just nationalize everything and go with communism. Henry Ford understood this problem with his Model T and realized that if he wants to sell it, he also needs to pay workers to be able to afford it.
- zombot 5mo ago> States are going bankrupt. States (or their rule-of-the-strongest successors) always have means to not go bankrupt. They will simply pillage the survivors.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> what happens when you completely get rid of your labor force. Youre hysterical
- variadix 5mo agoThe consumer economy only exists to extract value from common people and funnel it up the wealth ladder. If robots and AI take over all the production, you don’t need a consumer economy, the robots produce and their output directly goes to the top. The rest of us are left to starve.
- general1465 5mo agoEh, no? If everything goes to top, then economy of scale just don't work and whole automation is pointless, because you can make the goods in artisan way.
- pugworthy 5mo agoI saw a talk by Brian Merchant (https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/ https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/) a while back where he talked a lot about the Luddites and their revolts against automation. He's definitely not a fan of AI, but it was very interesting to hear the comparisons of AI resistance now to Luddite resistance to automation in the 1800's. There was unfortunately no Q&A in the lecture, as probably the one question I would have asked him was this: What if the Luddites had gotten their way? What do you imagine our society and world would be like right now? It's not meant to be a trick question or a "gotcha" question. Society would indeed have been different. Maybe it would be all wonderfully Star Trek utopia and we'd have found a win-win for everyone. Or maybe we'd just be not nearly as technically advanced as a society as we are now.
- zombot 5mo agoThere's one important difference: Automation worked and was affordable. Whether slop generation by LLMs is a useful instance of automation and how any productivity achieved stacks up against real, non-subsidized costs is currently a matter of (highly propagandized) opinion at best.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo ago> Automation worked and was affordable. Steam engines weren't affordable to the average person when they were invented. Same as ai And like steam, AI does some types of work quicker and easier than was previously possible. Ai produces slop no doubt, but at the very minimum I can safely say it's here to stay for agentic coding, and I suspect it's the same for quite a few other industries as well. I won't lose my job to an AI agent, but I will lose to it to a human using an AI agent. That's technology,deal with it