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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?

#191

Post by jrumbut »

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…

Yeah there has been a weird belief here for a long time that if something bad happens to us then extremely generous welfare benefits will materialize.

Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes.

No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.

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

#192

Post by quantummagic »

It seems pretty clear that the economy all of us grew up in is a historical anomaly; and it's ending. There has never been a sustained large and dominant middle-class, and ours is disappearing right before our eyes; with little chance of saving it. There will be the ultra rich, a privileged few who make a good living as their minions, and a huge majority of the underclass or serfs. The power dynamics seems unflexible and unforgiving. Most of us have to beg and hope our government will care for us and do the "right-thing", while the powerful continue to accumulate, isolate, and undermine us.

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

#193

Post by cybercatgurrl »

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…

oh for fucks sake are you making an excuse for them now so you’re not disappointed when you’re starving?

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

#194

Post by fwipsy »

bodge5000 wrote: post #145
fwipsy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can do jobs for money, so money is scarce, so nobody has/uses money, so money becomes worthless, so therefore even if jobs are available people won't do them? Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.

> Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less. It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it. The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society…

If money remains backed by AI goods and services, it will remain valuable no matter how scare it gets.

Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of economics. Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.

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

#195

Post by claytongulick »

vanuatu wrote: post #76
FuckButtons wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that the people who are at the top of the organizations generating said wealth will have any incentive to do that. Look around the world at the petro states for examples of a highly capital intensive industry generating money that subsidizes the rest of the economy.

1. AI seems different here, American AI companies doing better seems to result in the rest of the American economy doing better as intelligence is generally productivity increasing. Plus it's not bound by physical scarcity as oil. It feels more like cloud computing or electricity 2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuel…

> generally productivity increasing

Are you aware of any reputable study that supports this? Everything I've seen, coding included, has productivity at a net neutral at best, with large cost increases due to LLMs.

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

#196

Post by kilroy123 »

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…

At _current_ prices. The idea is that labor and energy prices would be close to zero before this would happen. So it wouldn't be that "expensive" to provide basic food, clothes, etc. A lot of goods and services would be automated.

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

#197

Post by treis »

tombert wrote: post #77
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…

The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career. It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so tha…

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, et al make a bajillion dollars a year. The faangs are the most profitable companies in the world (swap Nvidia for Netflix)

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

#198

Post by s5300 »

jrumbut wrote: post #191
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…

Yeah there has been a weird belief here for a long time that if something bad happens to us then extremely generous welfare benefits will materialize. Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes. No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.

[dead]

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

#199

Post by krupan »

luke5441 wrote: post #178
tombert wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am arguing, and I thought this was obvious but I guess not, that that scope of work in general increases. My personal projects don’t get paid, no, they’re just for fun, but I feel like my point was missed: instead of “having less to do”, I broadened the scope. I feel like people are making an incorrect assumption that “labor”, even white collar labor, is a fixed-size problem. I don’t agree with that: there’s never…

Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research. To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.

Right and that's something I probably shouldn't have left unsaid. Yes, AI can do these relatively simple tasks like porting from one language to another, but you can't prompt it to cure cancer in one window and prompt it to solve climate change in another and watch it go

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

#200

Post by amanaplanacanal »

yegle wrote: post #177
talkingtab wrote: post #160

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 w…

In your example, why didn't a 6000% ROI not attract enough investors and introduce competitions, eventually lower the ROI?

Regulatory capture.
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