Ideal : Universal Basic Income where everybody receives a set amount to live on, and if you can find a job on top of that then good for you.

Probable : 2 tier society where the poors are left to fend for themselves in increasingly feral ghettos

Almost certain : WW3. Kill off lots and lots and lots of poors. You see how many people were killed at an industrial scale in WW2. That’ll be nothing.

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.

There will be other jobs.

I think a lot more people need to read “The Naked Sun” by Isaac Asimov for the answer to this.

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.

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.

“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.

Remember back when almost every scholar was employed copying books by hand? And then this jerk invents the print press.

The economy didn’t collapse and everyone suddenly had access to more books for cheap. Scholars could spend their time reading books for the sake of reading, not just copying them. They could spend time writing their own books.

Going forward we’ll just have the means to get more done.

There will still be jobs to do. We just don’t have titles for them yet. If I told my grandma back when she was alive that I’m a web developer, she’d think I’d lost my mind and become a spider.

We’re in a slightly better spot now where we have the means to feed and pay everyone without them necessarily having a job. There needs to be a political to do so, though.