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?
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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 😂
You didn’t read the Epstein email about him saying he has a plan on how to kill off the poor?
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.
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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
Ehh, I fear the companies know that perfectly well but a single company notdoing it will just get bancrupt…so all companies are playing chicken to see which will survive the longest
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.
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”
Is there any possibility besides Universal Basic Income to keep the system running and not collapsing?
Do you know the saying “Soylent Green is people”? Well, …
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.
If you ask that in a company meeting, they’ll shot you in the head. Two times, above each eyebrow, just to be sure.
They are contractually obligated to by the investors.
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).
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
There will be other jobs.
Not being a troll. I’m genuinely curious. What do you see as the new jobs/careers in 10 - 15+ years?
prostitution i would imagine.
Services across industries might make a human-centered comeback. People tired of robots and want to talk to real humans. Medical field (including mental health) will probably still be dominated by humans. Any maintenance jobs that AI and robots can’t really do well and consistently. I’m not a fortune teller, I just know a tiny bit of history and enough to know AI is not at a place to end humanity yet.
I think a lot more people need to read “The Naked Sun” by Isaac Asimov for the answer to this.
I swear I got so used to bots, I thought you were one, till I remembered this is Lemmy 😂
Sorry, that’s three or four quarters further out than we consider in this economy.
We’re already seeing a slow shift to more goods and services aimed at the rich and very rich. It’s what you expect to see as fewer people get control of more of the money. The rich are fine with whatever number of people being out on the street, as long as they aren’t one of them. The same reasoning goes for who’s business will fail because the middle and working class can’t sustain them anymore. As long as it isn’t my business, whatever.
Pretty much. We don’t matter to them at all.
If AI works like tech guys say it will (of which I have my doubts) it’ll basically work like another Industrial Revolution. Back then it was supposedly a similar issue: people used to weave fabric by hand, but when the spinning jenny and electric loom came around they weren’t needed anymore so they were out of a job and turned destitute. Companies started selling the products internationally in the colonies and employed differently qualified workers to handle the new machines. So the hand weavers got replaced by loom operators and knowledge workers. If you believe the Silicon Valley class, this transition will be the same.
The issue is that the traditional weavers stayed destitute, because they weren’t equipped for the new labour market and so a lot of them were driven into poverty and radicalisation. As always capitalists don’t really care about that though
No, you aren’t missing anything. You’re right that some sort of basic income is inevitable (universal or not). Even if you are a raging capitalist, you still need the plebs to have SOME income to be able to purchase goods and services.
However, for this to happen, it must be demonstrable that AI is actually causing high unemployment. Right now, while economic productivity is kinda increasing due to AI, unemployment isn’t. When it happens:
- Capitalists will advocate for BI.
- Market socialists will advocate for BI combined with government/coop ownership over some or all means of production.
- Socialists that prefer planned economics could advocate for an expansion of universal basic services.
- Primitivists will advocate for bans on AI or whatever, I dunno.
Massive unemployment is bad for everyone including the ruling class, as that leads to pitchforks, guillotines and chopped off heads.
The system will collapse on itself.
Either the super concentration of wealth triggers governments to enact heavy taxation on fortunes or the system simply gets reset by the large majority that will simply ignore what is considered valuable today in detriment of something else.
Regardless, how things go today is not a sustainable route
“How do we spend with no income?”
The oligarchs will give us just enough UBI to not riot. It’s going to be used as a bribe to keep them in power. That’s my issue with calls for UBI; they permanently entrench class dynamics. Our only (peaceful) leverage as workers to improve our conditions is to withhold our labor. If AI actually succeeds in mass unemployment, we lose that and we’ll be forever at their mercy.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
-JFK
they permanently entrench class dynamics
how?
By allowing oligarchs to continue owning the means of production (and wealth, control of the state, etc.), whereas workers will have lost labor to withhold.
