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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?

#151

Post by tuatoru »

malfist wrote: post #149
thinkingkong wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living. We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres…

Something that drove this home to me is that there is more vacant housing than there are unhoused people in the US. We could solve homelessness tomorrow, but we'd rather confiscate their camping equipment and throw them in prison than help. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am and what about mental illness and drug use. As if those people don't deserve our compassion too.

Nurse Ratched was not a sufficient argument for ceasing to protect the mentally ill from themselves, it turns out.

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

#152

Post by kypro »

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?"

This time isn't different.

History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.

The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.

This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.

However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.

Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.

Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?

The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.

Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.

Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?

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

#153

Post by phainopepla2 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #70
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.

If the rich have control over the communication networks and over highly intelligent AI systems then it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps.

This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the golden apple to shame.

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

#154

Post by luke5441 »

thinkingkong wrote: post #92
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.

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living. We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres…

We cannot all live like Americans because we do not have enough crude oil -- even not taking into account the consequences for the climate.

So given there are constraints, resources must be rationed/allocated somehow.

Maybe we now have the technologies to remove this resource constraint. We'll see.

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

#155

Post by tuatoru »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #150
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.

And, as we know, hungry desperate people just lie down and die. Maybe nibble at a piece of cake if they have some.

This is true surprisingly often.

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

#156

Post by andai »

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.

No, the incentives are aligned. Bread and circus reduces the number of data centers getting bombed and the number of heads rolling. The good AI and the evil AI both point to UBI.

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

#157

Post by bodge5000 »

wmf wrote: post #102
bodge5000 wrote: post #57

The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently. The same could be s…

Going green is much cheaper now than it was. That may invert at some point but it's hard to predict when that might be.

Thats certainly true, but to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change we also need to do much more now than before (its debatable at this point whether its even reversible, that wasn't always the case). I suppose the point is that what was enough a decade ago costed more then than it does now, but thats no longer enough

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

#158

Post by fwipsy »

bellowsgulch wrote: post #147

I think the whole, “If we all lose our jobs who will buy things?” Question is like the nuclear scare of the 1950s or the concerns of environmental collapse and the end of the world of the ‘60s and ‘70s. No, it can and will get so, so much worse. I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA. Except instead of thick pollu…

Why do you think that physical labor will become incredibly expensive if nobody has jobs? Do you think tools are that hard to get? Chinese tools are cheaper than ever.

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

#159

Post by paulhebert »

enochthered wrote: post #139
jamiequint wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.

Things aren’t perfect therefore they’re terrible.

Things aren’t terrible therefore they’re perfect

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

#160

Post by talkingtab »

We have an economy like this:

producer => provider => consumer.

What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?

1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00

This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.

The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.

Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.

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