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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

• carlosjobim 5mo ago
  That's when you whip up a war to kill off as many young men of your own people as possible. Why do you think war has always been with us?
• deleted 5mo ago
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• datadrivenangel 5mo ago
  This is one of the biggest questions as the singularity compresses the deployment of capital and material resource allocation: if the majority of people aren't competitive with machines, who provides for them and how is that structured?
  • awakeasleep 5mo ago
    History provides the same answer every time this question arises
    • Night_Thastus 5mo ago
      ...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history. If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'. That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
      • jacobn 5mo ago
        Historically it has fit reality, but yes, this time may well actually be different...
      • DanielVZ 5mo ago
        I think his answer is just even more work. In this case it could be services where in general and for historical reasons people want to interact with people.
      • ihumanable 5mo ago
        CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time. For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist. We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys for the wealthy. The question is if labor will follow the same path.
        • clarle 5mo ago
          Population in developed countries is already decreasing, so who knows what happens after that? Unfortunately a lot of the foundations of our economy are built on top of an ever-increasing populace.
        • BuyMyBitcoins 5mo ago
          At the risk of invoking “but this time it’s different”, AI hasn’t produced a new job sector. A farrier who can’t make a living off of horseshoes could at least go work at the Ford assembly plant. In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.
          • deleted 5mo ago
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          • svachalek 5mo ago
            Prompt engineering of course.
        • fwipsy 5mo ago
          Domesticated horses are chattel. They existed for the needs of humans. When the needs went away the horses did too. Many of the world's poorest already exist without anyone's tolerance, even though their economic contributions are a rounding error. I suppose it's possible that the world's wealthiest will decide to commit genocide (maybe to create nature preserves?) but it feels like a very far-fetched outcome. If they do not, the price of commodity goods and human wages will decrease in tandem. Massive inequality, perhaps homelessness and lack of healthcare if those sectors remain captured by special interests, but I do not think most people will literally starve or die of exposure. More likely unregulated housing and healthcare will expand.
    • TFNA 5mo ago
      > History provides the same answer every time this question arises You mean that after some popular discontent arises, the top authorities will simply be overthrown by a competing faction within the ruling class, but that competing faction will fool the masses into thinking that “people power” won out and things are any better? That is, after all, how most “successful” revolutions have played out. Other revolutions that end with the ruling class being completely overthrown often cause the country to collapse into instability that is terrible for quality of life, until a strongman manages to cement his authority.
      • mrbungie 5mo ago
        Well, we were overall better for a couple of centuries after abolishing all-powerful kings + some welfare laws here and there (ymmv, maybe serfdom sounds nice to you). So those changes can work for a while, big emphasis on can and for a while. Greedy accumulators always end up ruining things for societies when it gets into ridiculous extremes (and there is a part of society that notices and gets fed up).
  • ajb 5mo ago
    If we are outdone in intelligence, diligence, and creativity, humanity will have to fall back on its weakest talents - integrity, fairness, and compassion. What a nightmare.
  • Gigachad 5mo ago
    You will starve to death while Musk gets a luxury space yacht.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • fwipsy 5mo ago
    New technology doesn't eradicate what came before. It only replaces what's profitable. There are still some people in the world subsistence farming. A tech worker is many orders of magnitude more productive in monetary terms, but hasn't replaced them. In the worst case, automation (including physical) may drive the cost of labor far down, but it cannot drive it to zero, and as it does so commodity goods will become cheaper as well. (Housing, education, and healthcare prices are inflated for policy reasons. Expect to see increase in unregulated alternatives for housing and especially healthcare.) Net effect: huge inequality, many people buying very cheap goods for tiny wages. Middle class destroyed. Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying. History zombies on.
    • FridgeSeal 5mo ago
      > Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying I don’t know, what you’re outlining there is pretty grim. Especially as we could elect to just…not destroy people’s livelihood’s en masse?
      • fwipsy 5mo ago
        All of us? All over the world? Elect not to do something that would make us individually rich and powerful, and instead accept the risk of being left behind if someone else does it? I don't know, I don't think many nations/organizations would go for that. If we had that level of trust, it feels like there's a lot of other bad stuff that wouldn't be going on right now.
  • SmirkingRevenge 5mo ago
    There's a darkly simple answer - they won't be provided for, they'll be culled.
• Apreche 5mo ago
  The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • ivraatiems 5mo ago
    Yeah, reading this, my first thought was: "that's the neat part - nobody!" The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
    • ku-man 5mo ago
      [dead]
  • ospray 5mo ago
    At some point a AI that maximises paperclips and one that consumes resources to achieve a few people self interested desires starts to look the same.
    • cgannett 5mo ago
      What people dont understand is we already invented Roko's Basilisk in the 1600s. It just doesnt have the power to torment you for more than 1 human lifetime yet.
  • SubiculumCode 5mo ago
    When clankers become the new consumer, we won't even be needed :)
  • cube00 5mo ago
    > Altman theorized a system where society has "an ownership share in whatever AI creates." In this "universal basic wealth system," people can barter their share of the world's AI capacity. [1] It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock. Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI? > Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1] I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered. [1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-085901000.html https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...
• loyukfai 5mo ago
  They can get rid of non billionaires next?
• luizfzs 5mo ago
  That's the greatest contradiction in our current system. Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.
• zaik 5mo ago
  > who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. Very optional consumption.
• didip 5mo ago
  I think the billionaire class will expand BNPL type products so everyone will stay in-debt forever. And expand gig economy so everyone can stay "employed" forever.
  • CharlieDigital 5mo ago
    Employed doing what? At some point, we'll have autonomous tractors, autonomous techs to fix those tractors, autonomous cars and delivery vehicles, robot plumbers, AI doing information work. Employed doing...what?
    • thewebguyd 5mo ago
      If we reach a point where all labor is automated, then realistically we should have achieved post scarcity utopia at that point. If not, the only realistic options are some form of UBI, or state sponsored make-work. Grow the bureaucracy, the state employs people to do BS fake jobs. Audits, compliance, oversight. Middle-management type work just to continue the illusion of a work for income social contract.
      • HDBaseT 5mo ago
        Some may argue we have already reached the point of nonsensical compliance, audits and middle-management propping up the illusion of work.
• a_e_k 5mo ago
  Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?
  • junga 5mo ago
    > how am I to make heavy use of frontier AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on? You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.
    • a_e_k 5mo ago
      Yes, I get that and meant to imply it with "frontier". But my question was more about how my biggest uses by far of data center-provided AI in terms of tokens have been in things like experimenting with agentic coding on my desktops. If I'm just tapping away at my phone with some questions in a chat window, my AI needs are much lower. Compete with me for the HW resources that I need to make full use of your data center-provided AI supply, and I'll just drop my demand accordingly. (I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)
• joe_the_user 5mo ago
  One of the theses of JM Keynes (of "Keynesianism" fame) in his General theory was that the rich save and the poor spend. That's been an ongoing assumption of state policy for a while now. One factor to consider is that today we seem to have a mid-level consumer sector - a group of people with high ($100K+) incomes who still spend nearly all that income. This group may provide the demand to support the investments of the super rich while still allowing a large percentage of people to sink to the underclass.
  • thewebguyd 5mo ago
    That's already happening to some extent. Consumption in the US is very top heavy right now, and the top 40% of households by income already account for over 60% of all domestic consumption. Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt. The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket. The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system. The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.
  • barchar 5mo ago
    The saying is "workers spend what they earn and capitalists earn what they spend". Capitalists don't need worker demand to support their own consumption; spending out of profits directly supports profits overall. It would be something of a consumption race to the bottom, however. They wouldn't be any better off vs if we supported adequate demand for everyone, but they might control a bigger slice of the (much) smaller pie.
• fancyfredbot 5mo ago
  Who will vote against seizing your assets if you fire us all?
  • jdiff 5mo ago
    The same crowd who always vote against their own interests. To paraphrase, "give them somebody to look down on, and they'll empty their pockets for you."
    • fancyfredbot 5mo ago
      It's going to get a lot harder to convince people that $outgroup took your job when $outgroup are all obviously unemployed too.
• schnitzelstoat 5mo ago
  We’ve seen this before when the mines and factories closed. Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.
  • insane_dreamer 5mo ago
    > reskill find new work except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed neither of these conditions are happening this time around so we have not "been there before"
    • Spartan-S63 5mo ago
      > except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge I think it's worse than that. The frontier labs are purporting that there won't be any "new work" required in the future—starting with knowledge workers and then eventually snaking down into more manual labor jobs via robotics. The irony is that these same labs are still hiring engineers to build the machinery they're so convinced will make engineers obsolete. It's so paradoxical it's not true. The only true things are that AI is a bubble, the current technology is unsustainable given the amount of compute required, and LLMs are overhyped in what they can do well versus what they need to be closely supervised with.
      • schnitzelstoat 5mo ago
        Perhaps - there is a massive gulf between the LLMs and the sort of models required by robotics though so I'm not convinced progress will be quick there. I have a young son and I intend to teach him robotics as a hobby partly because it is where I believe the high-paying jobs will be in 20 years.
    • tim333 5mo ago
      One minor data point. I've got a friend who worked as a translator. That's slacked off a bit and she's retrained as a tour guide. I think there will be a trend towards humans doing more human facing work.
• mistic92 5mo ago
  We need global UBI but it's not going to happen.
  • hsuduebc2 5mo ago
    Not before violence takes the place. People are semi-developed selfish tribal monkeys and it sadly looks like that.
• vanuatu 5mo ago
  I'm not sure I follow Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth? In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those
  • FuckButtons 5mo ago
    You assume that the people who are at the top of the organizations generating said wealth will have any incentive to do that. Look around the world at the petro states for examples of a highly capital intensive industry generating money that subsidizes the rest of the economy.
    • vanuatu 5mo ago
      1. AI seems different here, American AI companies doing better seems to result in the rest of the American economy doing better as intelligence is generally productivity increasing. Plus it's not bound by physical scarcity as oil. It feels more like cloud computing or electricity 2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela
      • claytongulick 5mo ago
        > generally productivity increasing Are you aware of any reputable study that supports this? Everything I've seen, coding included, has productivity at a net neutral at best, with large cost increases due to LLMs.
        • vanuatu 5mo ago
          https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/ https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/ This is probably the best one for coding? The two main findings are that developers didn't want to do tasks without AI (implication being that they would find it too tedious) and for the tasks that were measured, there was a speedup (and more of a speedup if you had more experience with AI tools) Unfortunately "productivity" is very hard to measure directly. I prefer looking at how much money companies are paying Applied AI companies (a lot) because in aggregate, that meant these companies justified ROI vs. OpenAI/Anthropic directly, and sufficiently enough that large enterprises are willing to go through the time and money to spend on a vendor. It's not foolproof but it dampens the effect of companies tokenmaxxing their Codex/Claude Code to look productive.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• stavros 5mo ago
  Wait, if I had a company, why would I want to pay my workers more so they'd buy more? That just sounds like I'm keeping my money with extra steps?
  • deleted 5mo ago
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• Aurornis 5mo ago
  > The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services. UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries. It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?
  • bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    > It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries. And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.
    • phainopepla2 5mo ago
      If the rich have control over the communication networks and over highly intelligent AI systems then it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps. This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the golden apple to shame.
      • FridgeSeal 5mo ago
        People will just… form communities and communicate offline?
        • phainopepla2 5mo ago
• desireco42 5mo ago
  I think this is legitimate concern that a lot of well paying jobs will essentially ruin prospects of more upscale services.
• bensyverson 5mo ago
  Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"
  • kjs3 5mo ago
    I don't think anyone seriously believes 'labor' in the abstract is going away (well...I'm sure some people do, but not the people at the core of "use our AI product it'll be awesome trust us..."). The issue (IMHO) is that it will be "the labor opportunities left to you will suck way, way more than the ones that have been obsoleted/eliminated".
    • fuzzzerd 5mo ago
      This is exactly the concern folks I talk with have. With all of the force reductions in the last few years attributed (real or not its how they're marketed) to AI gains, It's hard not to see that as a trend.
  • tombert 5mo ago
    Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away. However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do. Suddenly, it became so much more interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things. I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.
• kittikitti 5mo ago
  The comparison to slavery is apt. With increased surveillance and austerity measures, workers are being turned into underpaid labor with the constant threat of losing their livelihoods. Coupled with anti-union departments like Human Resources, there is no better way to describe the job market in 2026. Simply put, it's techno feudalism and we are the new slaves. The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.
• Havoc 5mo ago
  Society has managed a transition from gold to fiat and also towards a world where the majority live paycheque to paycheque and still diligently work ever harder. ...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion
• rvz 5mo ago
  "Agents" Humans will be cut off from work and will be on a forever UBI system that you will have to be spending tokens as currency for basic services /s.
• bodge5000 5mo ago
  The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently. The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going
  • tombert 5mo ago
    The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career. It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it. But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
    • treis 5mo ago
      Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, et al make a bajillion dollars a year. The faangs are the most profitable companies in the world (swap Nvidia for Netflix)
      • tombert 5mo ago
        Even with those companies, the stock prices are stupidly inflated, but even granting them being profitable that’s still only like six companies. Thats like 1% of the s&p 500. A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especially startups are not profitable.
  • wmf 5mo ago
    Going green is much cheaper now than it was. That may invert at some point but it's hard to predict when that might be.
• SimianSci 5mo ago
  Wealth and Power are linked, but power is the goal for the wealthy, not the wealth itself. The moment the relationship of wealth and power is uncoupled, they will discard it in favor of whatever comes next in their accumulation of power. It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them. On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.
  • maerF0x0 5mo ago
    > participate in traditional economics Nor in recent patterns of "democracy".
• deadbabe 5mo ago
  People are confused. The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers. Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out. NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve. The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.
• dwa3592 5mo ago
  No one. Wouldn't it be better if they let the population of the world drop to say a 100 million? they don't need the human resources like they used to; they will have robots doing the work.
• TrackerFF 5mo ago
  The real danger is that many humans never learned how to justify their existence except through labor.
• LarsDu88 5mo ago
  This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here goes... The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy. It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital? For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all. The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers). It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science. During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines. These are all overall good things for the world. By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.
  • Sol- 5mo ago
    Thanks for this post. I am always amazed on how people only ever look at nominal wages (which might collapse for the "obsolete" class) but ignore the wealth being generated in the process. What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today. A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.
• gyanchawdhary 5mo ago
  You can almost map each comment to a kubler ross stage
• metalliqaz 5mo ago
  Farmers won't be fired. AI won't replace plumbers. Hairstylists, chefs, landscapers, escorts, nurses, fisherman, etc. There are and will be plenty of people with jobs that AI can't do.
  • amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    It does sound like the end of the middle class though.
  • stevepotter 5mo ago
    Maybe not at first. Regardless of when they get replaced by tech, you’ll see those jobs get saturated and wages go down. Which sucks because they are already low
  • HDBaseT 5mo ago
    10 years ago we said "Technology cannot replace programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, etc" and here we are, potentially on a cusp of replacing all of those in a decade. We can keep moving the goal posts all we want, but eventually things will get automated. Why can't we have automated farm land, automatic harvesting, automatic sorting, delivered automatically via robotic trucks to your door? It's not that far fetched.
• TuahaJawaid 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• watersb 5mo ago
  Tesla sold lots of Cybertrucks to SpaceX. SpaceX sold lots of xAI capacity to Anthropic. They don't need us.
  • GeoAtreides 5mo ago
    Where did Anthropic get money to buy (rent, actually) capacity from SpaceX?
• copx 5mo ago
  Here is the answer: Why You Don't Matter Anymore (Economically Speaking) https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.
• wcfrobert 5mo ago
  "If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?" - Henry George in 1879 It's a frightening thing to realize that utopian abundance and abject poverty can co-exist in perfect harmony. One does not contradict the other. Heaven and hell are next-door neighbors. If anything, this is the default state of affairs for most civilizations throughout history.
• quater321 5mo ago
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• bellowsgulch 5mo ago
  I think the whole, “If we all lose our jobs who will buy things?” Question is like the nuclear scare of the 1950s or the concerns of environmental collapse and the end of the world of the ‘60s and ‘70s. No, it can and will get so, so much worse. I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA. Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere. This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents. And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get. You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory. Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected. You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy. Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class. And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing. And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget. And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.
  • fwipsy 5mo ago
    Why do you think that physical labor will become incredibly expensive if nobody has jobs? Do you think tools are that hard to get? Chinese tools are cheaper than ever.
• talkingtab 5mo ago
  We have an economy like this: producer => provider => consumer. What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers? 1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00 This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians. The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business. Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.
  • hnav 5mo ago
    it's stunning to me that in most verticals the middlemen seem to be eating the whole pie.
  • yegle 5mo ago
    In your example, why didn't a 6000% ROI not attract enough investors and introduce competitions, eventually lower the ROI?
    • amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
      Regulatory capture.
• SilentM68 5mo ago
  I don't believe that shared ownership of AI, though a noble idea, is an attainable goal, no matter how much anyone wishes for it to happen. It's naive to believe it will happen when there is just too much money involved. I do believe that an UBI plan should be, at least, prepared, ready to be implemented, in case the situation arises. It never hurts to be prepared. Thank you for letting me in! Sol Roth PS: Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
• oxag3n 5mo ago
  Totally, that's what history teaches us /s Not from so distant past - Soviet Union collapse caused mass unemployment and similar socioeconomic scenarios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wild_nineties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wild_nineties Mass poverty and skyrocketing crime levels (mugged for sneakers was common), while ultra rich grabbed money and power.
  • somewhatgoated 5mo ago
    What does history teach us in this context and how is the current situation comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union? Not sure if I get your point
    • oxag3n 5mo ago
      <sarcasm>History teaches us that rich and powerful think about consequences of their actions and optimize for balanced, non-violent outcomes</sarcasm> In this context, I argue that if a significant sector of economy goes fully AI, it is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union where within few months most people lost their jobs. The wikipedia link above shows how similar scenarios unfolded in many eastern block countries, specifically mass unemployment, poverty and crime.
• EGreg 5mo ago
  I'm going to say something that triggers people on HN (because it involves creating our own currencies, like berkshares, bristol pounds, etc.) Here goes. Our towns and cities need to create our own money supply, especially to survive the coming depression (Both Keynes and Hayek would agree). The vast majority of our money is currently issued by banks, which have exactly the opposite incentives, they will issue less credit and on worse terms the more you need it. In fact the banks love to lend to the ultra-rich (including the guys who pay $0 in taxes and use their shares as collateral, while having their corporations buy back the stocks). If you want to tinker around the edges, keep using their money. But in a world where AI makes everything cheap, why not have communities roll out their own money, and pay UBI in it? Waiting for the federal government to issue UBI is a fool's errand (not even Nixon was able to get it done, as president, much less someone like Andrew Yang who I supported and built campaign apps for, http://yang2020.app http://yang2020.app). The community acts as the source and the sink of the money. And since we don't want to "trust" any given member of the community to operate the database, we need... a blockchain. I know, this is where I will get heavily downvoted for mentioning that (I have a feeling that there is even keyword matching to do it automatically). But... what is the alternative? https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basic-income-in-communities/1069 https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi... The alternative is that people keep relying on giant corporations to give us jobs, and on giant banks to issue our money supply, while they just siphon more and more money to the rich. But any time someone says "hey, we have the technology to self-organize and serve each other" there are people frothing at the mouth angry at this person. Frankly, towns could build socialist cooperatives for everything, e.g. their own Uber without the shareholder class taking most drivers' salaries. AI makes it easy. But the main thing is making our own money supply, and giving it out as UBI to each citizen to spend on food, robots, etc.
  • slopinthebag 5mo ago
    So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.
    • EGreg 5mo ago
      No. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/ I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin, and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised about $1M, and built the system, but we couldn't compete with the zero-sum games and scams in crypto, because investors and even "crypto VCs" wanted to just 10x at the expense of everyone else. And also regulators don't actually allow creating fake volume, which is table stakes to be listed on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and taken "seriously" by crypto investors, so it instead became a business where we go town by town, community by community, influencer by influencer: https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf I've interviewed lots of economists from different schools of thought, such as community currency economists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo I've also interviewed regulators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0 And also founders of decentralized networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ And there's a lot more resources on https://community.intercoin.org https://community.intercoin.org that discusses this stuff. But Intercoin kind of failed as a "crypto" project, because we were unwilling to stoop to what projects did in order to attract capital.
• cyanydeez 5mo ago
  1 billionaire. Pure capitalism only needs 1 xonsumer.
• quantummagic 5mo ago
  It seems pretty clear that the economy all of us grew up in is a historical anomaly; and it's ending. There has never been a sustained large and dominant middle-class, and ours is disappearing right before our eyes; with little chance of saving it. There will be the ultra rich, a privileged few who make a good living as their minions, and a huge majority of the underclass or serfs. The power dynamics seems unflexible and unforgiving. Most of us have to beg and hope our government will care for us and do the "right-thing", while the powerful continue to accumulate, isolate, and undermine us.
  • EMIRELADERO 5mo ago
    Things aren't as hopeless as you assume. I read this essay a few months ago which calmed those doomsday theories for me somewhat: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/second-thoughts-on-james-burnham/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
  • cindyllm 5mo ago
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• fennec-posix 5mo ago
  This is a good article with good historical context, my only issue with it is where does this UBI come from? It sure as hell isn't gonna be taxes from large corporations given how things are going. But yeah, once the buying power dries up, who is left keeping the lights on?
• michaelbarton 5mo ago
  There’s an alternative not mentioned: company scrips. Historically Such as in coal mines, workers were “paid” in tokens they could only use at the company store.
• claytongulick 5mo ago
  So much of the conversation here has a shared premise that AI stuff can and will replace human labor. There are certain types of AI that will, and they are amazing: weed identification and laser zapping as a replacement for toxic pesticides, for example. LLMs? I'm skeptical. I think we're in the middle of a mass delusion that stochastic parrot token extruding machine slop somehow equals "productivity". From what I've seen it's just making the age old "activity over achievement" problem worse, while degrading skills. One of two things is going to happen. Either we collectively find ways to recognize the limits of these things and use them in appropriate, limited ways or we devolve to Idocracy. There's a third option that everyone seems to be breathlessly betting on, that the models improve to the point of human reasoning, but that seems like the most improbable outcome to me.
• closeparen 5mo ago
  Average American workers provide in-person services that don't scale and can't get much leverage from technology. Retail, hospitality, construction, care work, etc. They have not seen the kind of wage growth that accrued to the laptop class, but for the same reasons they are not as vulnerable. Probably we will end up alongside them. Plenty of demand growth coming in the elder-care sector.
• mohamedkoubaa 5mo ago
  Are we still doing labor theory of value in 2026?
• theSherwood 5mo ago
  This article seems unreasonably optimistic. If AI can truly replace human labor at a lower price point, then that's more or less the end for your median human. The economy will work by much the same principles as ever: those who can provide value will trade with others who can provide value. If that's not your median human, too bad for them. There may be some initial efforts by government to cushion people's irrelevance with UBI or other welfare schemes, but they won't be stable. Human rights and the political power of the median citizen are historically downstream of the value of the average citizen's labor.
• Haven880 5mo ago
  UBI gives 100 to John. John original subsidies as handicap of 2000 USD removed. You think this will work? Or corporations will obediently stay and pay more taxes instead of just do the corporate inversion? Or maybe you keep John subsidies and then on top of that give the UBI too. So where you get the extra funding given USA already 1.5T deficit every year? Fed print more free money? And if everyone get the UBI, you think the OLED TV is still 1000USD? UBI is a fanfic by people who don't know how economy works. EVERY SINGLE UBI failed to date. Yeah sure let's try again.
• insane_dreamer 5mo ago
  by the time that shows up in corporate earnings the current CEOs will be long gone with their golden parachutes from making their stock price go up they'll have enough to live the rest of their lives in lux so why should they care what happens to their former company, or to the plebs Welch literally destroyed GE and but by then was long gone and laughing his way to the bank; this is just next-level Welch that's the unfortunate reality
• skeledrew 5mo ago
  It's interesting how people stubbornly remain locked into the existing systems. Every time something about automating jobs comes up there's the inevitable "how will people afford X??", and then one of the responses is usually "UBI" or similar. It's like people are literally unable to see beyond some system based on getting money. And AI will ultimately push the status quo beyond that. Even though UBI might be helpful, it's just a stopgap in the face of 100% of human labour eventually having 0 economic value. But the very concept of money, on which income is based, is rooted in the idea that human labour has positive economic value.
  • rottingchris 5mo ago
    So what would a new system based on this new reality look like? Most people sustain themselves using the money they get in exchange for their labor. Based on history and growing income inequality, no one seems to believe the next step is a Star Trek-like post-scarcity economy. The "how will people afford X??" is an existential question. If human labor has no value and UBI is not an option, then what is going to happen to the people?
    • skeledrew 4mo ago
      > no one seems to believe the next step is a Star Trek-like post-scarcity economy Why wouldn't it be exactly like that (without the space travel, replicators and other extremely advanced tech)? There would no longer be income, so income equality can no longer be a thing. Any inequality caused by ownership of the means of production would disappear because there would be no value in "owning" (ie maintaining exclusive access to) anything beyond personal items. With everything automated, there would quite literally no longer be scarcity of anything that people need to survive and live a decent life.
    • skeledrew 4mo ago
      Everyone necessarily will have access to robots that produce X, which means their "ownership" will have to disappear. Of course there will be a huge upheaval with the change to the system, but there isn't another outcome ultimately.
• classified 5mo ago
  Nobody will sell anything anymore when nobody can afford to buy. Which is great because those with the money will simply demand slavery in exchange for survival.
• tasuki 5mo ago
  I'm confused. Is the article arguing that UBI leads to more inequality rather than less? What would then lead to less inequality? > modern citizens under this system are freed from work only to be permanently trapped as captive consumers. Wat? Trapped in what? This makes zero sense to me. > The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations. What is the proposed alternative? The (rather bad) alternative I see is no UBI and let the masses starve...
• tsoukase 5mo ago
  The old genius of Ford, I think, said that "I raise the salaries of my workers so that they can buy my cars". That's forward thinking. The ultimate goal of these "tech elites" is to concentrate all wealth to one person (themself each) and leave the rest of the people with 0. It's the extreme of capitalism, which by the way is the same as the extreme communism. By advocating an UBI, paid of course by the state, they feel they make us a favour and we should thank them.
• IAmGraydon 5mo ago
  Why is everyone having eschatological dreams these days? The entire zeitgeist seems to be in mass psychosis/delusion. The idea of compressing concepts into statistical models with a human language interface is very interesting and even useful, but we have seen zero evidence that this can reliably, broadly replace human thought and skill. The idea that it could eventually work is scary, but it’s important not to let scary turn into lived reality before it’s objectively real.
• JohnMakin 5mo ago
  > The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations. This is the reality we lived in already pre-AI.
• pojzon 5mo ago
  Im surprised ppl still think the elite “needs” us for anything. If work can be offloaded to machines and thinking to agents.. there is no need to keep this thing we call society. Its way way cheaper and faster to build highly guarded enclaves to fance off from worse part of humans. Ppl at the top dont even think about us as real humans. We are sub spieces to them. Elyzium is more probable future for us. This or civil war and big reset. Depends who wins.