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?
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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”
deleted by creator
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
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.
Sorry, that’s three or four quarters further out than we consider in this economy.
K shaped economy. They don’t care if we can afford anything. Its Versailles. The peasants starve while the aristocrats move the “economy”.
hint: they won’t. a flooded labor pool means the corps can pay as little as possible for the labor they do need humans for. it’s the whole point of capitalism. for a neat story about it, read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair.
You’re missing the fact that the people who run the AI companies literally want us all to die so they can take our money.
They don’t want other people to exist. Except as slaves to them.
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)
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.
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 productsFunny thing, a Scottish fellow named Adam Smith figured that an economy where people don’t have money to spend ends up stagnated and/or fucked over. Somewhat ironically, that is the piece that is most often overlooked by today’s liberal economists (the kinds that are in favor or less regulation and taxes)
Most rich assholes like the idea of lording over a bunch of dirty peasants, of feeling superior to the unwashed masses, having them offer themselves into slavery out of “free will”
thats why AI scheme is peddling to all different countries government, under the guise of verification, age, and CAMERA surveillance tech, they see them as the only source of income.
This exact scenario has been happening since the industrial revolution.
The economy will shift to serve a smaller number of people.
The people who lose their income will fall into poverty, existing on charity, begging, or scrounging, or they will die. (They will nearly all die sooner than they would have if they had maintained their income)
The CEOS and shareholders might understand this, but none of them can solve it alone, and trying to do so puts them at a disadvantage vrs their competitors.
The productive capacity will go toward ever more elaborate and esoteric projects, like Bezos wedding, or sending Musk to Mars, or building the biggest superyact, again.
And the majority will suffer.
bezos barely FUNCTIONing B.O. company for space tourism.
I suspect you left out a step: many will start going after people who DO have money before just dying.
They will, and I suspect some will succeed because the billionaires do not realize the danger of the truly desperate, and even if they do, they will cheap out on security.
Who, by then, will be surrounded by ai-powered armed drones and robots.
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.
Nah. Once Robotics catches up with AI and those who own everything can have whatever necessities and luxury goods they want produced without us, the bulk of humanity becomes redundant and unnecessary. They won’t need us to buy or build or do anything. We’ll just be cluttering up the scenery and competing for resources. It would be in their best interest for the majority of us to die off.
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.
But they are not one, when all the resources and tools are owned by the big companies that is when they fight each other, and for that they need cheap expendable ground troops, so ask yourself “which company do I want to fight for?” The Gaggles of Google, how about Amazon’s 6/7 mechanized infantry, or the SpaceX Xforx.
Oh it’s gonna all be memes and violence from then on, you will get paid in company money and live in company community’s, eventually the world will be devided into roughly country shaped chunks run exclusively by a single corporation or a consortium of smaller companies.
Gonna be just like the utopian sci-fi, you know Neromancer, Blade Runner, Cyberpunk, and my favorite Downbelow Station.
That’s not what I meant by “one”, but nvm.
Also, if we ever reach that point, I’m not fighting for any of them. And not just for moral reasons - it will be more profitable to steal from them, and since the social contract will be broken anyway…
But I’d rather fo my best now to make sure that doesn’t happen to begin with, and I thankfully live somewhere where my effort might actually might make some impact (the European Union).
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.
The Revolution eating its children is almost always messy historically. Violence as a means tends to put the wrong people in power.
Well, let’s not do that then!
It definitely didn’t work out for the Weather Underground.
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.
No, it’s a fallacy that not voting is the right move because both sides.
Both sides are against me, I’m voting for a third almost always.
Which is basically the same as not voting in places like the US.
Yeah, you’re missing the point where both sides are against me and I’m not voting for the “lesser evil” for your comfort.
It has nothing to do with others comfort. Voting third party in a first past the post two party system helps the existing two parties maintain control. It is an unfortunate reality.
No, that’s twisting of reality. My vote for X didn’t help A or B as opposed to voting for A or B directly, as you want me to do.
I don’t want either party to win, because they’re both evil. You insisting on voting for the “lesser evil” because their evil doesn’t effect you enough is throwing me under the bus, so getting the “greater evil” is on you.
