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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#751

Post by thomasfl »

AI will accelerate the decline in the world’s population. No job, no marriage and no kids will be the norm for most people. For many years to come. Some will say it’s good for the planet and especially for other species of vertebrates. Others will see it as a personal failure to not have any living offspring when they get old.

In ancient Greece, Diana was the goddess of hunting, wildlife and personal freedom and Venus was the goddess of love, family and domestic life. The Greeks had stories and plays about how those two goddesses never seemed to get along very well. If you feel like you’re a follower of Diana, then the future will be bright. If you feel like a follower of Venus, then rough times are ahead.

Re: The dead economy theory

#752

Post by nearbuy »

gls2ro wrote: post #725
kipchak wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are ma…

I keep reading this idea and I think something is missing. Lets take this to the extreme: only 2 people remain with capital and AI all the rest are replaced. Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant. But here is an even more interesting question: As their AI can create anything why would they pay each…

> Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant.

The money just circulating around is actually more or less how a normal economy works. If you have a two person world where one person makes food and the other makes tools, the money just bounces back and forth between the two people as they trade tools and food. It facilitates trade by acting as an IOU in case the first person doesn't need to trade tools at the exact moment the other needs to trade food.

AI and robotics will one day be able to produce food and tools without human labor. So there could be plenty of wealth created. The question is how do we distribute that wealth when humans aren't needed to make it? We need a new distribution system that isn't based on pay for labor. A lot of people suggest UBI.

Re: The dead economy theory

#753

Post by well_ackshually »

joegibbs wrote: post #742

"When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders." This is very common and has been since before AI, the market can see that the company has overhired and there are a bunch…

Oh, bullshit. Shareholders will literally always think the company overhired. Every single person on this website has lived through at least one instance of firing an employee and distributing his workload to the leftover employees who are usually already overworked.

Shareholders see you as useless meat to dispose, the ideal number of employees to them is ZERO.

Re: The dead economy theory

#755

Post by NothingAboutAny »

iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming.

why would anyone pay anyone else for anything when they could just get an AI to do it? any service would now be worthless, there will be people with hardware and people without. 3 futures:

one where the hardware is shared.

one where it is not.

one where the first person with enough of it kills everyone else.

Re: The dead economy theory

#756

Post by 152334H »

gammarator wrote: post #687
empathy_m wrote: post #684

Hrm. I plugged in the first 4000 words of this essay into my free Pangram account and it says "59% AI generated", "We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-written content". Who is the customer for this stuff?

> the text of this piece is entirely human-generated, including the infelicitous phrasings and penchant for two-dollar words.

Yeah, and the author is obviously lying. Ever since mid-2025 it has been a winning move for AI users to categorically deny all allegations & reap the labor rewards of generated content.

Re: The dead economy theory

#757

Post by momoschili »

checker wrote: post #560
iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

I agree in the short term. But in the long term, the owners of the compute will become disgustingly rich without a wealth tax, nationalization, or local AI becoming competitive and ubiquitous. There are still problems to solve; the alternative is an absolute oligarchy.

what do you mean short term? We aren't even in the short term yet (has the AI revolution truly begun?) and the owners of compute are already disgustingly rich.

Re: The dead economy theory

#758

Post by swiftcoder »

> The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel... This is ahistorical bullshit.

I think this part of your theory is unsupported. Yes, we have historical evidence that when you suddenly layoff a large percentage of the population without providing replacement income, things go very, very badly.

However we also have quite a bit of evidence at this point that if you give people no-strings-attached support, they do figure out how to fill their time with art and other hobbies (for a concrete example, Ireland's very successful UBI-for-artists pilot).

Re: The dead economy theory

#759

Post by well_ackshually »

Aurornis wrote: post #441
spondelkryp wrote: post #91

>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you…

The horse analogy fell very flat for me. Those horses were bred and maintained as single purpose machines. There isn’t really an analogy to humans with self-determination and broad abilities, other than they both have a heartbeat.

When you work at Put-Screws-In-A-Box Co. or Weld-Metal-Pipes Inc., your boss doesn't see you as a "human with self determination", you're just a meat machine that puts screws in the box and welds metal pipes. He sees you so much as this that he overworks you, breaks your body before you turn 40 and underpays you so much you get to choose between quitting and starving until you get hired at Weld-Screws-In-A-Pipe Intl, or being stuck there because you have neither the time or the energy to learn something else to leave your condition. Alienation is a real thing.

Re: The dead economy theory

#760

Post by npodbielski »

mr_toad wrote: post #55
sottol wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But these AIs need energy and GPUs data-centers ... who pays for those? I could imagine a circular mini-economy between a few companies making the bare essentials to keep AI running and not catering to 99.9% of the population because they don't have the funds to buy anything those companies could produce so they don't. In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their…

> In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not? That scenario is not really any different from having a technology advanced country (like the US) alongside some underdeveloped nation. The US could, in theory, clos…

Yeah right, it could not. US would probably would be unable to produce something really simple like electrical cables or plastic flip flops, yet alone computer chips.
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