Imagine this scenario:
- All companies start producing mostly using only AI and firing people, because people have no use anymore
- Joe spend most of his income on digital video games products
- Joe get fired because he got replaced by AI now, since AIs are taking over most jobs
- Joe has no income anymore
- Joe doesn’t have any more money to spend on video games
- Companies have no more profit, because people don’t have income, so people can’t spend on their AI produced products
In this scenario both lose, the company adopting AI and the worker. Am I missing something? Is there any possibility besides Universal Basic Income to keep the system running and not collapsing?
Why would the owners need to keep the system running if they have all the resources and tools?
One need not worry about the game not being able to continue if one already won.
K shaped economy. They don’t care if we can afford anything. Its Versailles. The peasants starve while the aristocrats move the “economy”.
You’ve hit the nail on the head.
Companies pushing for AI are playing a short game, not a long game. They have not considered the consequences of this course after a short term return (which may not materialize anyway).
The whole AI debacle is a great example of why it’s bad to have engineering developments without the philosophical conversations. We need the A in STEAM to tell the E’s when they’re opening Pandora’s Box.
People will accept lower wages to compete with AI… Up to a point… My prediction is that it’s going to make the wage gap deep enough that people will have to revolt. What frightens me is what comes after, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Especially given the fact that people don’t vote because of “both sides fallacies”.
I disagree. I actually think that it’s gonna get worse before it gets worse.
Seriously though, what comes after really depends on what faction within the revolt is more dominant and has more sway. It’s anyone’s guess.
Right, all those Democrats fighting hard to protect your jobs and put limits on AI… The two bills they are working on definitely have teeth and do anything useful at all, it’s a fallacy.
I really want to be wrong but it seems a handful of humanity believes we’re all doomed and none of this planet or society matters. Their greed and brazen disregard for the consequences of their actions is a result from the psychosis of greed and/or sociopathy, or they know something the rest of us don’t and are trying to get theirs before the end. Like the movie Don’t Look Up or Knowing.
Oh no, don’t think further or you might arrive at leftist / social conclusions 🤔.
(take with a grain of salt depending on location and understanding)
That is the question. But you’re missing one crucial element. How are the very companies employing the AI going to make money when there’s no consumer to purchase their products?
I’m sure at least some are operating under the assumption that government bailouts will be on offer (too big to fail). The industries that have received bailouts in the past are also on the AI bandwagon.
The whole system is predicated on people consuming. AI can’t take over everything to the point where people can’t buy stuff. Why would the government bailout a company that has no customers.
Bailouts help the company to become profitable so they can be repaid. Again, no customers no profit no bail out.
Can’t be bailed out of noones got money for taxes
That’s the thing. These companies are not thinking that far ahead and they don’t care about the consequences even if it hurts them too.
The only thing matters to these people is making number go up. They want more money. They want it right now. They don’t care what consequences it has for them or the world later so long as they get more money now.
There will never be a universal income. Countries will let their people starve before they give them money for nothing.
It’s like the ending of the Dinosaurs sitcom when everyone is going to die and Bob is talking to his boss on the phone. His boss is excited about all the money he’s going to make. Bob points out they’re all going to die and the boss says “well that’s a fourth quarter problem”
These companies are not thinking that far ahead and they don’t care about the consequences even if it hurts them too.
Yep. We’ve already see that with climate change so it’s not a stretch to apply it to AI.
The rich who benefit from this don’t care. They have enough wealth that it doesn’t matter. We could all be starving to death, fighting each other scraps of bread in the street, and they’d believe we deserve it.
If anything, that would drive prices down so they could build their next vacation home for pennies on the dollar.
If everyone is dead the people who fix things, grow or raise the food, transport the food, and prepare the food die too, and the stockpiles these people have become finite. We all die first but eventually everything these people have will break, supplies will all run dry, and they will die too.
They most likely know this and don’t care because they want the number to go up right now.
There’s a bunch of people who work as consultants for the rich, and in the past decade they have been talking about how many rich people were getting into disaster prep. Some of them have done interviews with various news organizations. In an article I remember they said a common question was how these rich bastards could ensure their bunker staff wouldn’t revolt and take over.
They went for control of food supply and explosives collars it seem
This is my take.
However, my husband has a very interesting theory. He feels like its going to go in the way of the Alien universe where there will be universal income in a way but provided by government/corporations and a controlled populace.
Both options aren’t great 😂
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Kill the poor, use all the products. They are intentionally collapsing the system. They have correctly realized that they can go back to feudal times without armies of peasants as the main military and economic engine.
The bourgeois will happily let the masses starve and die when unemployment soars. They don’t give a fuck about us as long as their profits rise. (The great depression began in 1929 and it was almost a decade before the implementation of the new deal to provide economic relief to the masses.) They won’t be bothered to give a fuck until the line stops going up. They will happily murder us if we dare strike for better working conditions
AI isn’t increasing productivity, it’s being used as a way to mask headcount reductions for the sake of short term profits, even though ROI is poor.
The bourgeois will happily let the masses starve and die when unemployment soars.
While simultaneously being a bunch of whiny fucking crybabies about falling fertility rates.
The perfect comic doesn’t exi—
This is not specific to AI. This has been slowly happening over decades, wealth is accumulating in smaller and smaller sets of people. Capitalism is cancer on humanity.
Those big bosses just want to take everything and give nothing, whatever that means. It doesn’t matter if it kills them in the end too.
This is unsustainable, and it will get much worse before it can get better (if ever).
Companies have no more profit, because people don’t have income, so people can’t spend on their AI produced products
In this scenario both lose, the company adopting AI and the worker. Am I missing something?
The worker-consumer is no longer a source of wealth to the company since their labor no longer has value, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing a company can do to try to acquire wealth. They just have to exclusively cater to the people who control that wealth. The business model of a media company might be spreading anti-democracy propaganda and collecting surveillance data for the use of the people who worry about what a desperate and starving Joe might do. Once Joe is gone they can spin narratives about why all this was the right moral choice.
That’s the entire elephant in the room of the future economy. Just don’t think about it, put your head down, don’t question things, and consume more short form social media slop.
Not as big as the elephant of taxable income shrinking
Peter Frase wrote an article (and soon after a book expansion of it) called “Four Futures” in which he examines this question.
According to Frase, the future we wind up with can be categorized into a Punnett square based on two questions: will essentials be abundant or scarce? And will they be distributed selfishly or universally?
If we have more than we need and we give it away universally, that’s Communism. If we have less than we need, but we share what we have and our burdens equally, that’s Socialism.
Now here’s the two you’re asking about. If we don’t have a populist revolution, we wind up with one of the bad ones.
If we have abundance, but it’s hoarded, we get Rentism. You can see outlines of this already. It’s where you pay for digital files that can be endlessly reproduced and are forced into subscriptions to continue using appliances despite the fact that their continued use is free to the company. This is the one you’re asking about. If we reached full automation, but still charged people for everything, you’d have a version of serfdom, likely with a basic income. The income would likely be based on a social credit system in which people who show the most obedience are rewarded with money to buy things that are basically free to produce. There might be a system of artificial scarcity to force people to devote a certain number of hours each day to unnecessary work or watching advertisements to receive income.
The last one is called Exterminism. You can read about it in the article. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
We become jester for the rich, communism or matrix.
