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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

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21–30 of 340 posts

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#21

This 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

> History provides the same answer every time this question arises

You mean that after some popular discontent arises, the top authorities will simply be overthrown by a competing faction within the ruling class, but that competing faction will fool the masses into thinking that “people power” won out and things are any better?

That is, after all, how most “successful” revolutions have played out. Other revolutions that end with the ruling class being completely overthrown often cause the country to collapse into instability that is terrible for quality of life, until a strongman manages to cement his authority.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#22
post #3

The 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.

When clankers become the new consumer, we won't even be needed :)

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#23
post #3

The 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.

> Altman theorized a system where society has "an ownership share in whatever AI creates." In this "universal basic wealth system," people can barter their share of the world's AI capacity. [1]

It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock.

Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?

> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]

I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.

[1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#26
post #3

The 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.

FDR created the US welfare system which destroyed socialism in the US. I'm not predicting the future but it has basically happened before.

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#27
I'm not sure I follow

Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth?

In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#28
post #3

The 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.

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits

Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy

Re: Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

#30
post #14

Analogous 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?

> how am I to make heavy use of frontier AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?

You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.

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