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?
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.
I believe the French got there once and they managed to solve the issue
I really wouldn’t want to get to that point and I honestly don’t really understand why the rich class just continues this course because I do believe it’s playing with fire at this point
I don’t think the ai and data centres are for us.
The billionaires who want to survive this upcoming apocalypse need ai to be functional in order to survive in their bunkers.
Everyone else till then is basically free labour, training material and collateral.
Now that’s a username!
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No one knows. Not a single person kn Earth
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.
It’ll just be a corprate circle jerk of companies paying each other for “products and services”. People will work for food an be shelter, provided by the company you work for. I believe the kids are calling it “techno-feudalism”.
K shaped economy. They don’t care if we can afford anything. Its Versailles. The peasants starve while the aristocrats move the “economy”.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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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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.
Eh, the US gov’t has a pretty solid track record of “bailing out” with “loans” and then “forgiving” them, aka free money for the C-suite.
Yes, but historically companies that receive bailouts pay them back at a minimum in part. But very often they are completely repaid.
Can’t be bailed out of noones got money for taxes
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 perfect comic doesn’t exi—
