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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?

#271

Post by skybrian »

einrealist wrote: post #96
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…

I strongly doubt it will even provide us with a roof over our heads. In an unconstrained market, the pressure to extract as much as possible from the UBI will be enormous. The amount of UBI will probably always lag years behind the actual amount required to create a liveable situation, and increasing its amount will be a constant political struggle. UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement. Fai…

UBI could be done a lot of different ways, but it's a natural fit with progressive taxes. A UBI funded by taxes makes taxes more progressive. It's somewhat like the standard tax deduction, except you still get it if you don't pay any tax.

It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on.

The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out automatically? For the employed, the government check and increased paycheck withholding (if the standard deduction were removed) would largely cancel out. But if you lose your job, you still get the government check.

You could also see this as a reworking of unemployment benefits so that everyone always qualifies for them and they don't run out.

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

#272

Post by buu700 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #270
buu700 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle. Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x mo…

It probably won't be a straight up cash, but something like what Cuba does: Cuba does not have a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead, the Cuban government guarantees basic survival through a socialist welfare system, consisting of state-controlled employment, heavily subsidized utilities, free universal healthcare and education, and a monthly ration book (Libreta de Abastecimiento) for basic food items. For UBI to…

Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to UBI, but what I'd rather see is a system of guaranteed jobs and educational/training stipends (with part-time and/or remote options). The reason for that is primarily fault tolerance: in the event that a major disaster renders our AI/computational infrastructure inoperable (or adversarial), it's imperative that humanity itself act as a redundant store of all the information necessary to preserve or reboot civilization.

That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.

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

#273

Post by stevepotter »

kypro wrote: post #152
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 revolu…

This is a good take. I’d like to know how you think this is going to shake out over the next few decades

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

#274

Post by stevepotter »

metalliqaz wrote: post #119

Farmers won't be fired. AI won't replace plumbers. Hairstylists, chefs, landscapers, escorts, nurses, fisherman, etc. There are and will be plenty of people with jobs that AI can't do.

Maybe not at first. Regardless of when they get replaced by tech, you’ll see those jobs get saturated and wages go down. Which sucks because they are already low

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

#275

Post by skeledrew »

It's interesting how people stubbornly remain locked into the existing systems. Every time something about automating jobs comes up there's the inevitable "how will people afford X??", and then one of the responses is usually "UBI" or similar. It's like people are literally unable to see beyond some system based on getting money. And AI will ultimately push the status quo beyond that. Even though UBI might be helpful, it's just a stopgap in the face of 100% of human labour eventually having 0 economic value. But the very concept of money, on which income is based, is rooted in the idea that human labour has positive economic value.

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

#276

Post by hackable_sand »

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.

That sounds very nice. I would finally be able to work full time.

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

#277

Post by windexh8er »

jamiequint wrote: post #245
elevatortrim wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had chatgpt draw a table of wealth distribution by year based on best data sources it can find. It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%. What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3%…

Yes, envy is a bitch. There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 years ago.

Spoken like a true partner of a capital management firm! Making money off of money. What a productive part of society as a whole.

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

#278

Post by LarsDu88 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #224
marcocampos wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things some people on HN believe leaves me baffled.

“It’s totally fine guys, if we give billionaires even more money it will totally all work out and be fine! Everything is ok and our benevelont overlords will take earnest care of us, despite literally never having shown the merest inclination to do that ever before”.

You jest, but the wonderful thing is billionaires are mortal.

The known anti-semite and Hitler admirer Henry Ford's chartiable foundation added DEI to its mandate in 2021.

Andrew Carnegie, an infamous monopolist and strike crusher...his charitable foundations helps fund science education to this day, and his university has graduated countless engineers.

The point is... billionaires will die... their capital can continue to work both in the economy and society.

I mean... unless someone figures out immortality. I dread the thought of Jeff Bezos invoking prima noctae

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

#279

Post by Spartan-S63 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #266
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #24

We’ve seen this before when the mines and factories closed. Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.

> reskill find new work except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed neither of these conditions are happening this time around so we have not "been there before"

> except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge

I think it's worse than that. The frontier labs are purporting that there won't be any "new work" required in the future—starting with knowledge workers and then eventually snaking down into more manual labor jobs via robotics.

The irony is that these same labs are still hiring engineers to build the machinery they're so convinced will make engineers obsolete. It's so paradoxical it's not true.

The only true things are that AI is a bubble, the current technology is unsustainable given the amount of compute required, and LLMs are overhyped in what they can do well versus what they need to be closely supervised with.

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

#280

Post by hackable_sand »

tombert wrote: post #143
ryeights wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator? Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.

Idk. They're trying to manifest their weird cyber-dystopia head-canon

Why? Idk

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