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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?

#111

Post by tw04 »

theonemind wrote: post #28
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.

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 limit…

You’re assuming they care what happens to their children when they’re gone. We’re talking about sociopaths. Sure they care more about their children than the random plebe walking down the street, but they definitely don’t care more about their children than their own personal desires. That’s empathy, and empathy is for the weak.

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

#112

Post by cgio »

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.

They will pay us to colonise Mars! One way trip.

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

#113

Post by thewebguyd »

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.

> wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing."

It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.

(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)

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

#114

Post by krupan »

tombert wrote: post #98
bensyverson wrote: post #40

Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"

Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away. However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do. Suddenly, it became so much more interesti…

Are you getting paid to do any of these?

Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive?

Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed

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

#115

Post by baby_souffle »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46
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.

Any fantasies of that sort went out the window for me when Trump got elected, largely on the base of "left behind" voters who have done very poorly economically over the past 30 or so years. What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly"…

Exactly.

It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.

Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.

Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable

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

#116

Post by greenavocado »

winter_blue wrote: post #90
interstice wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this, you still have to go outside once in a while as an ultra rich person surely? Why not spend some relatively tiny amount of resources on fixing terrible roads + picking up trash + healthcare for the homeless? Does this happen and I just don't know about it?

In India, you've got lots of relatively-speaking well-off people. And extreme poverty that would shock and boggle the mind. Poverty worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of the "middle class" (which is just making over $12k USD a year) literally drive their cars through impoverished streets into their homes.

[flagged]

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

#117

Post by Sol- »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #100

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here goes... The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy. It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital? For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumpt…

Thanks for this post. I am always amazed on how people only ever look at nominal wages (which might collapse for the "obsolete" class) but ignore the wealth being generated in the process.

What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.

A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.

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

#118

Post by ryeights »

bensyverson wrote: post #40

Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"

The cynical conclusion of AGI is that most humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't be forced to continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.

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

#120

Post by grogg »

bluerooibos wrote: post #65
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?

The genuine answer is that the workers will rise up. If you want to be a pessimist, we could say the rich will be dragged down with us. But this doesn’t take into account the rapid increase of class consciousness and organizing that is already happening and only gaining momentum. If you’re asking what the logic of the rich is, they couldn’t care less. “Power corrupts” has become a phrase, so perhaps people don’t think too deeply about it. I often hear people confused about the Epstein class, wondering how so much power ended up in the hands of so few depraved people. The truth is that we’re living I a system that not only rewards psychopathy, but nurtures it. Anybody under the delusion that they would behave any differently under the same conditions hasn’t thought deeply enough about how their environment shapes their thinking. The amount of power that the Epstein/ruling class has accumulated has corrupted them to the point that their plan is literally to violently force people to serve them. They already do this and have no problem ramping up the violence as needed to keep living like gods.
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