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Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

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

#61

Post by philipkglass »

Apreche wrote: 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.

Mamdani was elected in New York despite (or perhaps because of) explicitly running against the interests of rich people. Let the frontier AI labs and their investors burn billions in the R&D phase, then vote for governments to use the Magic Everything Machines for the interests of ordinary people. If today's LLMs don't actually evolve into Magic Everything Machines then UBI probably isn't the right solution anyhow; some jobs will be lost but many others will stick around. In that case just vote for Scandinavian style social safety nets.

The franchise in developed countries is much broader now than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.

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

#62

Post by DangitBobby »

windexh8er wrote: post #31
Apreche wrote: 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.

I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.

Not sure I agree. Things are looking kinda shit already, yet we can't even get people to agree there is a problem, let alone who is to blame. In a poorer, less informed society where the wealthy have an even larger megaphone I don't see it becoming any more obvious.

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

#63

Post by CharlieDigital »

didip wrote: post #11

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.

Employed doing what? At some point, we'll have autonomous tractors, autonomous techs to fix those tractors, autonomous cars and delivery vehicles, robot plumbers, AI doing information work.

Employed doing...what?

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

#64

Post by deadbabe »

People are confused.

The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.

Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.

NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.

The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.

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

#65

Post by bluerooibos »

Apreche wrote: 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.

So, back to the author's title - if they leave everyone to die/with no money, who buys their services and enables them to turn a profit?

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

#66

Post by dessimus »

echelon_musk wrote: post #41
windexh8er wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.

They have big guns. Good luck.

They aren't the only ones: on average there are 1.5 guns for each person in the U.S.

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

#68

Post by throw310822 »

windexh8er wrote: post #31
Apreche wrote: 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.

I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.

I don't get it, in what sense "the wealthy [will have] destroyed the global economy for short term wealth"? Do you think that if the big corporations stopped developing AI it would, like, disappear?

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

#69

Post by thewebguyd »

joe_the_user wrote: post #17

One 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…

That's already happening to some extent. Consumption in the US is very top heavy right now, and the top 40% of households by income already account for over 60% of all domestic consumption.

Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets

Those ~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption

Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.

The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.

The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.

The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.

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

#70

Post by bluefirebrand »

Aurornis wrote: post #36

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than d…

> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.

And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.

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