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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?

#321

Post by fuzzzerd »

kjs3 wrote: post #85
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?"

I don't think anyone seriously believes 'labor' in the abstract is going away (well...I'm sure some people do, but not the people at the core of "use our AI product it'll be awesome trust us..."). The issue (IMHO) is that it will be "the labor opportunities left to you will suck way, way more than the ones that have been obsoleted/eliminated".

This is exactly the concern folks I talk with have. With all of the force reductions in the last few years attributed (real or not its how they're marketed) to AI gains, It's hard not to see that as a trend.

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

#322

Post by pojzon »

Im surprised ppl still think the elite “needs” us for anything.

If work can be offloaded to machines and thinking to agents.. there is no need to keep this thing we call society.

Its way way cheaper and faster to build highly guarded enclaves to fance off from worse part of humans.

Ppl at the top dont even think about us as real humans. We are sub spieces to them.

Elyzium is more probable future for us. This or civil war and big reset. Depends who wins.

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

#323

Post by glaslong »

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…

> "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

> That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

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

#324

Post by joquarky »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #148
Sol- wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think people's imaginations are overfitting on current reality or the past 20 years where people's vision of technology is something like Facebook (a multibillion dollar college yearbook app) or Netflix (TV, but on the internet), and the economy needs a horde of subscriber consumers binging on a buffet of digital mind slop to keep the whole system running. The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer neve…

> Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens

Do you have anything resembling a source on that claim?

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

#325

Post by ryeights »

krupan wrote: post #319
ryeights wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense is an LLM analogous (much less reducible to) a search engine?

Search engine: crawl the entire Internet and create an index. When you ask it a question it uses that index to point you to an answer among all the information it crawled. LLM: crawl the entire Internet and train a model. When you ask it a question, it uses that model to spit out an answer. Worse than a search engine though, if it can't come up with a good answer it just makes shit up Both use the same sources of inf…

I think you need a stronger analogy than "they both take questions and produce answers," especially since search engines don't answer questions.

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

#326

Post by greycol »

joquarky wrote: post #324
LarsDu88 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people's imaginations are overfitting on current reality or the past 20 years where people's vision of technology is something like Facebook (a multibillion dollar college yearbook app) or Netflix (TV, but on the internet), and the economy needs a horde of subscriber consumers binging on a buffet of digital mind slop to keep the whole system running. The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer neve…

> Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens Do you have anything resembling a source on that claim?

He's roughly wrong if you're pedantic, a pc with 4mb of ram in 1993 cost about $1125 (bottom of the premium market as only premium pc's had 4mb of ram) which has about the same value as $2600 usd today. Really though considering the development speed at the time (going back even a year and you'd pay a higher price for similar specs) and that someone buying a "premium pc" when doom was realeased could easily spend twice as much without being able to blow away dooms requirements I wouldn't argue the point they made.

Plenty of stories about doom on a vape pen. Here's one:

https://www.thegamer.com/doom-running-vape-usb-connection-pc...

Other notables include doom on a pregnancy test, and doom on a sbc powered by a potato battery.

Some actual pc prices in 1993 if that's what your after, look at premium pcs for 4mb ones https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/1993.php

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

#327

Post by LarsDu88 »

danaris wrote: post #290
LarsDu88 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conti…

Billionaires are mortal. Money isn't. When Jeff Bezos dies, someone is going to inherit his money. There's no particular reason to believe that whoever he chooses as his heir(s) will be less disposed toward funding fascism and destroying the ability of regular people to have a voice in the world. You invoke Carnegie, but the current generation of robber barons have shown no real propensity toward philanthropy—they do…

I would argue that Gates, Buffet, Mackenzie, and (yes) Zuckerberg do actually have philanthropic foundations setup that will outlast their mortal lives. Chan-Zuckerberg Institute + Biohub, Gates Foundation, giving pledge... Gates at least was directly inspired by Carnegie's example.

Elon Musk definitely does not fall in that category and instead dumps wealth endlessly into moonshot ventures and into his own political and social power.

There are also efforts by more rightwing billionaires to put their money in education/social engineering type ventures like the right wing leaning libertarian University of Austin.

The real problem was issues like Citizen's United, the rampant insider trading that is going on in Congress, and efforts to destroy the Estate Tax.

The assumption that right wing facist billionaires will automatically spawn political clones just does not hold up if you look into the families of the robber barons though. More often than not, the wealth gets diluted, the children become more liberal, or the following generations simply become feckless and squander the wealth. After 100 years typically the only thing that lasts will be names on buildings.

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

#328

Post by LarsDu88 »

joquarky wrote: post #324
LarsDu88 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people's imaginations are overfitting on current reality or the past 20 years where people's vision of technology is something like Facebook (a multibillion dollar college yearbook app) or Netflix (TV, but on the internet), and the economy needs a horde of subscriber consumers binging on a buffet of digital mind slop to keep the whole system running. The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer neve…

> Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens Do you have anything resembling a source on that claim?

Look up DOOM Esp32 for numerous examples of doom running on a $2 microcontroller.

Also see this article on the types of arm cortex chips actually found in a disposable vape pen: https://blog.jgc.org/2026/01/theres-ridiculous-amount-of-tec...

If someone hasn't gotten native doom to run in a vape, I think I have my next weekend project.

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

#329

Post by peyton »

danaris wrote: post #290
LarsDu88 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conti…

Billionaires are mortal. Money isn't. When Jeff Bezos dies, someone is going to inherit his money. There's no particular reason to believe that whoever he chooses as his heir(s) will be less disposed toward funding fascism and destroying the ability of regular people to have a voice in the world. You invoke Carnegie, but the current generation of robber barons have shown no real propensity toward philanthropy—they do…

> funding fascism

What are you talking about? The point of fascism is to circumvent the need for funding.

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

#330

Post by danaris »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #327
danaris wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Billionaires are mortal. Money isn't. When Jeff Bezos dies, someone is going to inherit his money. There's no particular reason to believe that whoever he chooses as his heir(s) will be less disposed toward funding fascism and destroying the ability of regular people to have a voice in the world. You invoke Carnegie, but the current generation of robber barons have shown no real propensity toward philanthropy—they do…

I would argue that Gates, Buffet, Mackenzie, and (yes) Zuckerberg do actually have philanthropic foundations setup that will outlast their mortal lives. Chan-Zuckerberg Institute + Biohub, Gates Foundation, giving pledge... Gates at least was directly inspired by Carnegie's example. Elon Musk definitely does not fall in that category and instead dumps wealth endlessly into moonshot ventures and into his own political…

Again, you're trying to take the Gilded Age as a prime example, when there's already evidence that shows it's not going to be that way.

Gates and Zuckerberg are, to my understanding, giving away only tiny fractions of their wealth to charity. A far cry from Carnegie.

Their foundations remain powerful engines for them, and their heirs, to control the money and how it gets spent.

And the norms have changed since the Gilded Age: at that time, there was still a very strong culture of honor, dignity, and genuine service even among what were then the "nouveau riche" that is utterly absent today. Indeed, one of the primary hallmarks of today's right-wing movement is the aggressive denial that dignity and respect are things that should even exist. (Except, of course, for them.)

For children raised in that kind of environment, the very best we can realistically expect is that they will simply squander the wealth and have little direct impact on the political sphere.

Here's hoping that after 100 years, the only thing that lasts about this crop of robber barons is their names as a cautionary tale in history, about what happens to the wealthy when they forget that they are few, and we are many.

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