Marx, Keynes, and AI

Post by subw00f » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #47

scotty79 wrote: post #41

> If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. That's why we are going to get some for of government mandated UBI eventually. Because workers are optional but consumers are obligatory for any market and company to function. Rich can't get richer without consumers and tha…

Careful. A large segment of consumers could vanish overnight and the system would continue chugging along. Horses also used to be "consumers", with entire industries dedicated to filling their needs, but when horses ceased to be economically relevant, the economy did not collapse, instead it turned all those horses into glue and business continued as usual. We're already seeing economic trends whereby most economic a…

Post by kodoman » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 8:03 PM UTC

MattDamonSpace wrote: post #35

Not compelling for the basic reason laid out at the start of the article: this is just a re-phrasing of Marx The guy was telling a story about capitalist economies in the 1800s. Little, if anything, about the next 100+ years has proven his stories or concerns valid.

Post by francisofascii » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 8:12 PM UTC

paisawalla wrote: post #54

francisofascii wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the vast majority of the population goes down to the lower class. The middle class disspears. After being told to work hard in school and college, we are stuck with back breaking construction work? Is that progress? Does that really sound right to you?

"middle class" shouldn't be synonymous with "knowledge worker". And that latter itself has become conflated with "credentialed" increasingly, I'd argue. My fundamental observation is that there are a lot of people who are not particularly suited for knowledge work, but are funneled/attracted to it because it's the only viable path to a reasonable effort:outcome lifestyle ratio. Therefore, my fundamental hope is that…

Post by munificent » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

amazing_stories wrote: post #55

munificent wrote: post #39

Excellent article: > This last point is crucial: it’s not that capitalist CEOs are just evil people—well, some definitely are—no, the structural logic is coercing them to do something destructive in order to survive. They can’t help themselves. I spend a lot of time thinking about how much of the world going sideways is from bad actors and how much is from emergent behavior of complex systems. The answer is both. In…

Bad actors may have created the bad system in the first place, right? You can maybe say it's a flaw in human nature to create bad systems in the first place, but maybe the real flaw is our inability to fix them?

Post by dist-epoch » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 10:09 PM UTC

skeledrew wrote: post #64

morningsam wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would any of this be a problem from the perspective of those who will own the remaining companies? They won't sell anything to normal humans who have no income anymore, true; but they don't need to, because their machines can produce for them whatever normal humans had been producing previously. The preprint is interesting in that it predicts that on the way there, one can run into some kind of vicious cycle that…

There are 2 outcomes I think possible, both extreme due to just how transformative 100% automation will be: either A[G]I is shared (voluntarily by the "owners", or forcef via revolution) and everyone benefits sufficiently, or there will be massive death from resource deprivation to the point where only the handful with access carry on. So far the latter looks far less likely, given the profusion of open models, so we…