No Stupid Questions

That seems like a Q3 issue for 2026 let's put the conversation off till then.

/s

Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.

Further proof of this: Climate change.

Pathogens don't really think of what will happen after the body they're abusing dies

Back in the 1980's they told me it'd trickle down.

...eventually.

Don't think of people having money as an on-off switch. It's a gradual shift, and it's already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.

Capitalism doesn't look that far ahead.

I agree it's going to be problem. It's already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn't pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that's why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is relatively more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that used to be expensive but are now cheap) and don't understand how life is more expensive.

Ever heard of the everlasting sustainable war? https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Sustainable_War

If robots generate all of productivity and human labor is no longer needed, the economy would not be able to sustain itself. Instead, in trying to cope with the unneeded human labor and to ensure continued productivity, the only area where productivity would be ensured is by means of war using human resources, namely destroying things in order to be rebuild, thus generating a sustaining feedback loop. The rich will get richer and everyone else will only be employed as soldiers in a continuing war economy.

Even though this is a sci-fi concept, i believe it's not a stretch to say we are headed to this direction.

This is a common question in economics.

It's called technological unemploymemt and it's a type of structural unemployment.

Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.

An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there's like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.

There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.

Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.

There's been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there's not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.

Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.

One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn't as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.

The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.

In theory, UBI.

In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.

If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it's not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.

They won't, they'll simply die and the market will slowly adjust to those with capital.

This is all happening because we shot a gorilla in 2016 btw.

Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, can't think past their quarterly reports. The ones that are private are competing with the public ones and think following trends by companies that are "too big to fail" will work out for them.

I'm an optimist, so I'll believe one day we'll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don't criticize me too harshly

In a better world machines would do the work and humans just would share the wealth and live life in peace.

AI owners will.

And if you then go around wandering "oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want", "that's way too few people to fill a market", or "and what about all the rest?"... Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).

As stated, the companies that push AI aren't concerned with the long-term consequences. But if you want to know how the individuals who run those companies personally feel, do a search for billionaire doomsday preppers.

TL;DR: They've got a vision for the future. We're not in it.

The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we'll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.

Why would we need anyone to buy things? Remember that money is an abstraction for resources. If you can do everything with AI, then you already have all the resources you need. Whether or not someone else needs what you produce is irrelevant when you already have access to everything you could want.

I see three possibilities if AI is able to eliminate a significant portion of jobs:

1. Universal basic income, that pays out based on how productive the provider side was per person. Some portion of wealth is continually transferred to the owners.
2. Neofeudalism, where the owners at the time of transition end up owning everything and allow people to live or not live on their land at their whim. Then they can use them for labour where needed or entertainment otherwise. Some benevolent feudal lords might generally let people live how they want, though there will always be a fear of a revolution so other more authoritarian lords might sabotage or directly war with them.
3. Large portions of the population are left SOL to die or do whatever while the economy doesn't care for them. Would probably get pretty violent since people don't generally just go off to die of starvation quietly. The main question for me is if the violence would start when the starving masses have had enough of it or earlier by those who see that coming.

I'm guessing reality will have some combination of each of those.

That's the neat part. No one.

If the rich can hire a handful of the middle class to build and maintain their robots, then they can just cut the poor and working poor out of the economy entirely, and they will be willing to accept any conditions for food and shelter.

We can arrange the economy anyway we choose. Taking all of the decision making for themselves is part of the plan.

That, my friend, is the problem for whichever schmuck is in charge after me, a C Suite executive. By then I will be long gone on my private island, having pulled the rip cord on my golden parachute.

Look at empires of the past.

Things were so bad in Dickens' London that living in sewers to live off whatever scraps you could find was an actual occupation.

Wealth creates its own reality.

Everyone will be working multiple shitty service jobs that robots are not cost effective to automate. Our miserable wages will be just sufficient to keep the wheels on the cart from falling off.

You're describing the end goal of monopoly

Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.

You’re implying AI has the intelligence to remotely achieve this. It doesn’t. It is all venture capitalist porn for over glorified keyword copy paste. Thats it.

That's the cool part, you won't. If everything crucial is automated, people can drive things forward for passion rather than for money. Of course, this would effectively collapse capitalism, which won't happen painlessly.

Well here's a story written in 2003 about exactly that, that I find myself thinking about more and more often

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

The whole increasing concentration of wealth and fall in median quality of life can be traced back to basically each individual of the Owner Class thinking that somebody else will keep the system going by employing people and paying them well enough so that they keep on buying stuff.

The whole think is pretty much a Tragedy Of The Commons as defined in Games Theory, only instead of a shared grazing commons that would be fine if just one person had a few more sheep than they should (but gets overgrazed and then everybody looses if more people have a few more sheep than they should), we have the Economic system.

Historically one of the big reasons for the invariable appearance of some kind of social construct above the individual with the ability to make decisions for the group and force individuals to comply (from the "council of elders" all the way to the modern Democracy) is exactly to stop people from, driven by pure selfishness, "overgraze" in the various "commons" we have and ending up destroying the whole thing for everybody - if you have one or two doing it the "commons" can handle it, but too many and you get a tragedy.

And here we are after 4 decades of Neoliberalism whose entire purpose was to reduce the power of entities making decisions for the good of the group to overseeing the commons and force individuals from overexploiting it, so it's not at all surprising that we are seeing various common systems starting to collapse due to over-exploitation.

I'm pretty certain that whatever societies will be dominant next are not those which embraced Neoliberalism the most as those will be the ones with the most collapsed systems and that stuff takes a lot of time to recover, plus the very people who overexploited them to collapse will do all they can to avoid having stop what they've been doing and that gave them so much personal upside maximization and they've basically bought politics in the West, so there is no actual will to do it in the Power Elites (there's a will to get the upsides of a well functioning society but no will for they themselves to do the concessions needed, only for somebody else to do it, which is exactly the mindset that when not stamped out by some kind of oversight entity causes the problem in the first place).