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?
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)
We become jester for the rich, communism or matrix.
the only products ai will be produced, is the ones being peddled to ceos, and csuites. people are aware of the difference of AI produced movies, shows, and scripts. already several shows have been accused of using AI as part of thier scripts already. even now, tech conferences near me are solely on showcasing AI products and nothing else.niche AI products tend to be much smaller and not for commercial use, like testing/diagnositcs for medical industries, even that is subject to alot of scrutiny.
i dont think its being replaced, more than likely its just an excuse to record profits after laying of tons of people at once. they will keep doing it til nothing is left, or they get desperate enough hire a few back.
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.
This exact scenario has been happening since the industrial revolution.
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—
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.
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 😂
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
deleted by creator
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.
Yes you exterminate the now surplus population everyone in charge is a schmittian so people who aren’t them is inherently violent against them to them and reducing that is an existential good have you never met a wealthy
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
Sorry, that’s three or four quarters further out than we consider in this economy.
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.
This is to a degree already a problem. Not because of AI, but because of stagnating wages and an increasing wealth gap.
It used to be that a company designing and selling was limited by funding, but now we’re increasingly seeing companies with all the money in the world who are seeing sales going down due to the simple fact that people cannot afford to buy what they’re selling. The supply is there, but modern corporate effectively eradicate their own market.
I think we tend to forget that companies are not “people” or a thinking thing. They are run by people. All the current CEOs only care about getting money to themselves. By the time things are close to collapsing, these people will have made more than enough money for themselves and pass off the CEO seats to someone else for that to be their problem.
