I think the billionaire class will expand BNPL type products so everyone will stay in-debt forever. And expand gig economy so everyone can stay "employed" forever.
Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
11–20 of 340 posts
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#12This is one of the biggest questions as the singularity compresses the deployment of capital and material resource allocation: if the majority of people aren't competitive with machines, who provides for them and how is that structured?
History provides the same answer every time this question arises
...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history.
If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'.
That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#13The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
Yeah, reading this, my first thought was: "that's the neat part - nobody!"
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#14Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
History provides the same answer every time this question arises
...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history. If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'. That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
Historically it has fit reality, but yes, this time may well actually be different...
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
History provides the same answer every time this question arises
...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history. If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'. That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
I think his answer is just even more work. In this case it could be services where in general and for historical reasons people want to interact with people.
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#17One of the theses of JM Keynes (of "Keynesianism" fame) in his General theory was that the rich save and the poor spend. That's been an ongoing assumption of state policy for a while now. One factor to consider is that today we seem to have a mid-level consumer sector - a group of people with high ($100K+) incomes who still spend nearly all that income. This group may provide the demand to support the investments of the super rich while still allowing a large percentage of people to sink to the underclass.
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#18The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
At some point a AI that maximises paperclips and one that consumes resources to achieve a few people self interested desires starts to look the same.
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#19Who will vote against seizing your assets if you fire us all?
Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
History provides the same answer every time this question arises
...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history. If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'. That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.
CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time.
For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist.
We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys for the wealthy.
The question is if labor will follow the same path.