4 ms·

>Automation can, therefore, reduce the value of work before it eliminates jobs. As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses, and workers' market bar

• atomicnumber3 27d ago
  But what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do whatever money-spending thing you put on your commercial lots.
  • ArcHound 27d ago
    That sounds like a Q4 problem.
  • jdw64 27d ago
    The tenants might change in the future. Right now they are individuals, but perhaps properties will be leased to build power grids or autonomous logistics warehouses. Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI, I think most of that money will just end up going toward essential housing costs anyway. In fact, if you look at recent trends in real estate, commercial properties are where the big money is being made, aren't they?
    • mcmcmc 27d ago
      > Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI This always makes me laugh. What motivation would the oligarchs have to pay out UBI? If they can automate the labor who needs more mouths to feed? They’ll push undesirables into ghettos and start a slow genocide of starvation and disease.
      • jdw64 27d ago
        Is it because UBI is cheaper than a massacre? Since it will all end up being absorbed by the capitalists anyway.
        • mitxela 27d ago
          Every bit of money that circulates is absorbed by every part of the economy. For instance, 100% of money is used to buy cheese and flows to sellers of cheese.
      • jdw64 27d ago
        Because, think about it. Let's assume techno-feudalism is complete. Every piece of infrastructure is going to have usage fees attached anyway. Everyone is using AI, so are you going to be the only one not using it? Of course you'll use it. It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre? From a cost-benefit perspective, I think it's a terrible idea. In the case of a massacre, long-term instability makes it hard to build a supportive faction. But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. There are already plenty of people who blindly defend corporations even when they do terrible things, right? In my opinion, UBI is simply the cheaper option. Historically speaking, post-massacre recovery has always ended up costing much more.
        • asdff 27d ago
          >It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre? Isn't it obvious? Your existence is margin that they leave on the table. And for what reason if you have no real skills or anything to offer? You are a leech. You exist to consume. You create nothing in this new future. You have no value. You aren't even an asset. You are a liability. And what you think they will fear instability that we will bring upon? We will be armed with sharpened sticks and a smattering of ar15s at best case, while we are targeted from orbit by automated precision ordinance. Imagine a war between two AI controlled nation states. One has to manage a population during this war, the other opted to cull its population early in the war and maximize all its resources into the war effort. Guess who wins that war every time and likely takes control of the planet.
    • outside1234 27d ago
      Who is going to pay for UBI?
      • smallmancontrov 27d ago
        Taxing capital? Impossible! Obscene! Everyone knows that only labor can/should be taxed.
        • johnnyanmac 27d ago
          We've done such a good job the past decades of taxing capital before. Surely when corporations wield all the leverage they will finally get theirs.
  • meindnoch 27d ago
    Robots will use real estate as rain shelter after the human occupants have starved to death.
  • mitxela 27d ago
    It's speculation and high scores. Rich people trade houses to each other and see who has the most houses. It doesn't matter if the roof caved in, except insofar as that makes the house less impressive to the rich next to you.
  • est31 27d ago
    The plutonomy transition is well under way. The sardinian seafront villa will likely retain and gain value as the early anthropic employee might like it, while the house in some flyover state might not find any buyers. The economy of the future will be about yachts, supercars, hermes bags, private air travel and ozempic. Not about how you made it possible for everyone to watch a gigantic library of videos for free, or how you made cars affordable for everyone.
  • throw234234234 27d ago
    Real assets have utility of their own (i.e. a house to live in, commodity to build, etc). Money only exists to incentivize human economic actors to bother working, to relative price resources against each other and for governments to use as a tool - it isn't wealth on the aggregate scale. AI invalidates a lot of the need for money to even exist as a concept anyway in some scenarios. If only a few people have all the stuff (huge inequality) you don't really need a large money system because you no longer need most people to get what you want (i.e. most are economically irrelevant). You have a magical genie called AI instead that can transform what you have into what you want as long as you have the raw materials, space and energy. The wealthy could then negotiate in large transactions via barter - I trade that plot of land for that copper mine. Most large transactions are negotiated in any case. A very likely case (there are others) is that AI enables feudalism of some sort to come back - where the new lords are the owners of the other economic factors of production that remain scarce (capital, land, resources, social) - not intelligence and/or labor. This is the opposite of a meritocratic society. It would explain why people want to win the AI race; and are willing to burn uneconomic amounts of money to build it out. There is a race to the finish here.
• jdm2212 27d ago
  > As automation takes over, the value of labor collapses This is the reverse of how the economy actually works. You need labor and capital to turn raw materials into goods and services. If you invested a lot in capital in automation, you don't want that getting screwed up for want of labor, and so you pay a premium for workers who will do the job right and ensure you're getting full value from your capital. That's why highly automated companies pay their employees better than less automated companies, and highly automated professions pay better than less automated professions.
  • mitxela 27d ago
    The value of labor has collapsed already, so it seems their theory is right and yours is wrong.
    • deepwoods 27d ago
      Both of you are right. Individuals who manage to stay employed in the face of automation will be paid significantly more than was possible prior to automation, for the reasons the comment you're replying to pointed out. But labor as a whole will have less value. To give a simple example: if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.
      • mitxela 27d ago
        And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.
        • mjr00 27d ago
          > and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians. Which specific industries are these which currently have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians?
• deepwoods 27d ago
  There is no reason to expect capital to stop trying to squeeze labor just because inference takes the role of labor. With so much competition in the AI space, and no labor laws to protect it, why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum? And if the value of inference collapses to the bare minimum, who in their right mind would decide to serve inference? Human labor has value because it is limited. If we keep up our current pace of data center buildouts and breakthroughs in model efficiency, then artificial intellectual labor will become functionally unlimited. Unlimited resources do not tend to hold their value. In that case, there are two potential outcomes: deliberate limitations on the output of artificial intellectual labor, which would require all parties involved to decide to lock themselves into their current market shares; or financial collapse of the whole ecosystem. What happens after that collapse is anyone's guess, but you have to imagine that it's the lenders who financed the whole thing who will be deciding what happens next rather than the failed tech businessmen.
  • jdw64 27d ago
    [dead]
  • acituan 27d ago
    > why wouldn't capital drive the value of inference to the absolute bare minimum? Capital can drive the cost of inference down but the value is determined by whoever wants to pay for that inference. Therefore this question is not answered: how valuable really is these llm inferences and how much of a supply of such inference does the world really need.
  • kamarg 27d ago
    The two options dichotomy is false. There's at least a third option of the player with the deepest pockets outlasts and/or acquires the rest and then jacks up the price once they're firmly in control of a "large enough" share of the market. At that point they can go the route of all monopolies and acquire or destroy any upcoming competition to maintain their market share and begin rent-seeking behavior. This keeps human labor devalued while not allowing artificial labor's value to fall to low enough that human labor is back to being cost effective.