Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

Post by pj_mukh » Mon, May 18, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #98

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?"

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…

Post by fwipsy » Mon, May 18, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #2

This is one of the biggest questions as the singularity compresses the deployment of capital and material resource allocation: if the majority of people aren't competitive with machines, who provides for them and how is that structured?

Post by ku-man » Mon, May 18, 2026, 11:06 PM UTC

grogg wrote: post #120

bluerooibos wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, back to the author's title - if they leave everyone to die/with no money, who buys their services and enables them to turn a profit?

The genuine answer is that the workers will rise up. If you want to be a pessimist, we could say the rich will be dragged down with us. But this doesn’t take into account the rapid increase of class consciousness and organizing that is already happening and only gaining momentum. If you’re asking what the logic of the rich is, they couldn’t care less. “Power corrupts” has become a phrase, so perhaps people don’t thin…

Post by barchar » Mon, May 18, 2026, 11:08 PM UTC

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…

Post by fwipsy » Mon, May 18, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

ihumanable wrote: post #20

Night_Thastus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...it does? This level of automation is recent, and industrialization is the blink of an eye in human history. If we're talking shorter scale, people have traditionally hand-waived it with 'Oh, these jobs will go away, but they'll be replaced with other, higher-skilled jobs!'. That's an economist's idealism and doesn't fit reality.

CGP Grey has an older video now about what happened to horses over time. For a while every economic advance seemed to mean more and better jobs for horses. But then the automobile comes along and there's no more need for horses and we can see what happens to an animal that has no economic reason to exist. We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys…