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If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

news.ycombinator.com

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If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#1

Post by babua »

AI agents are getting rolled into everything. Companies will use them because they’re fast and cheap. But if agents replace a lot of paid work, people lose income. Less income → less spending → businesses push even harder on automation. Feels like a loop.

Cheaper prices help, sure, but not if folks don’t have paychecks. New jobs might show up, but I’m not convinced the timing works. Also, if most gains go to a few owners, their extra spending won’t replace everyone else’s demand.

So what actually keeps demand up? Profit-sharing so workers own a piece? Some kind of income floor from “automation dividends”? Totally new markets that soak up all this output? Or maybe real-world limits (energy, compute, regulation) slow things down. I might be missing something—what’s the concrete mechanism here?

Re: If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#2

Post by PaulHoule »

This Fred Pohl book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagonist of the story gets his robots to consume his good and fears that he'll get in trouble for this but instead he gets a medal. The original version of the short story as it appeared in the April 1954 Galaxy magazine is linked from the Wikipedia article.

Re: If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#3

Post by jaggs »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

This Fred Pohl book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagon…

Brilliant story and so clever. The despair at having to consume is excellent.

Re: If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#4

Post by mikewarot »

jaggs wrote: post #3
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

This Fred Pohl book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagon…

Brilliant story and so clever. The despair at having to consume is excellent.

I've despaired at having consumed too much. It's commonly called hoarding, and it ruins your life.

Never pay to store your stuff somewhere else.

Re: If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#5

Post by babua »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

This Fred Pohl book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagon…

abundance without incomes stalls demand— what’s our real-world “robot consumer” to keep the loop running.

Re: If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#7

Post by PaulHoule »

mikewarot wrote: post #4
jaggs wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant story and so clever. The despair at having to consume is excellent.

I've despaired at having consumed too much. It's commonly called hoarding, and it ruins your life. Never pay to store your stuff somewhere else.

The strangest thing is that a lot of the people I know who pay a lot for multiple storage lockers are poor and the content of the storage lockers is not valuable at all.

Re: If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#8

Post by atmosx »

You're reaching from another, very narrowly scoped angle, but that's a wider problem with technology and automation. The economists since mid-20th century are talking about the UBI (universal basic income) to fight this problem:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income (wikipedia link)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22eQ9iLBfY4 (Varoufakis explains the concept very well)

Of course, that's easier said than done a non-fully, air-gaped controlled economy.

Re: If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

#9

Post by markus_zhang »

The concept of "purchase", or monetary transaction may not exist in the future dystopian world.

For people who live low lives, barter is going to be good enough. For overlords, they can also barter with each other, because who cares about money when you can grab real stuffs? There are a handful of skilled human servants who serve the overlords, but they are not numerous enough for a mature market -- their overlords will provide them with whatever they need anyway.

I have long realized that monetary transaction is just one abstraction for the elites to buy human resources and nature resources. Some currency, like the USD, also serves as "entry ticket" for some transactions (like you cannot purchase X in bulk without USD).

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