Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

carette.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 340 posts

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

#131

Post by jamiequint »

thinkingkong wrote: post #92
Apreche wrote: post #3

The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living. We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres…

And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.

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

#132

Post by svachalek »

thewebguyd wrote: post #113
Apreche wrote: post #3

The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

> wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die. It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing." It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI…

In the US, the government only answers to the wealthy class.

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

#133

Post by tombert »

krupan wrote: post #114
tombert wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample size of one, so take this for what it is, but I was initially kind of depressed when I started using Codex and Claude Code, because it did kind of feel like I was being automated away. However, more recently I have been having fun by having three concurrent projects going at once. Instead of having less work to do, I just broadened the scope of what I was going to do. Suddenly, it became so much more interesti…

Are you getting paid to do any of these? Do you feel like porting projects from one language to another is actually that productive? Like, that's fine if you are having fun, but that has no bearing on this overall discussion about automating all the useful work so that we are no longer needed

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 going to be a point where we say “shit, there is literally nothing left to do”.

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

#134

Post by alexanderdmitri »

rvz wrote: post #74
Apreche wrote: post #3

The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

> The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale. > What will happen is they will leave us to die. That is the hard truth. Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when…

why 2030?

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

#135

Post by AnimalMuppet »

Apreche wrote: post #3

The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

If that's what happens, and "leaving us to die" results in very many people actually dying, then we'll start killing rich people until they realize that this isn't the world that they want to live in either.

When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them.

Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...

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

#136

Post by mrbungie »

ori_b wrote: post #55
cube00 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Altman theorized a system where society has "an ownership share in whatever AI creates." In this "universal basic wealth system," people can barter their share of the world's AI capacity. [1] It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock. Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs…

Sam Altman is too stupid to realize he's arguing for nationalizing the AI companies.

He is saying that while holding Worldcoin as THE solution behind his back. He hopes to show it when the time comes.

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

#137

Post by fwipsy »

interstice wrote: post #72
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you have to do is look at the state of the world today to see this is the endgame. Huge swaths of humanity live on basically subsistence level agriculture, and it's not like we're all sending UBI to them. The top .001% can see the rest of us fall a lot further before they have to worry about who will buy their products.

I don't really get this, you still have to go outside once in a while as an ultra rich person surely? Why not spend some relatively tiny amount of resources on fixing terrible roads + picking up trash + healthcare for the homeless? Does this happen and I just don't know about it?

Because "wealthy" is relative. Because the sort of people who do that stop at just "rich;" they don't make it to "super-rich."

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

#138

Post by copx »

Here is the answer:

Why You Don't Matter Anymore (Economically Speaking) https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY

Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.

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

#139

Post by enochthered »

jamiequint wrote: post #131
thinkingkong wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living. We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres…

And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history. It's almost as if the system is working.

Things aren’t perfect therefore they’re terrible.

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

#140

Post by wcfrobert »

"If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?" - Henry George in 1879

It's a frightening thing to realize that utopian abundance and abject poverty can co-exist in perfect harmony. One does not contradict the other. Heaven and hell are next-door neighbors. If anything, this is the default state of affairs for most civilizations throughout history.

Post reply on HN