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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?

#201

Post by slopinthebag »

EGreg wrote: post #175

I'm going to say something that triggers people on HN (because it involves creating our own currencies, like berkshares, bristol pounds, etc.) Here goes. Our towns and cities need to create our own money supply, especially to survive the coming depression (Both Keynes and Hayek would agree). The vast majority of our money is currently issued by banks, which have exactly the opposite incentives, they will issue less c…

So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.

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

#202

Post by emehex »

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…

I don't understand UBI.

Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right?

Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?

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

#203

Post by nico_h »

phainopepla2 wrote: post #153
bluefirebrand wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries. And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.

If the rich have control over the communication networks and over highly intelligent AI systems then it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps. This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the…

The rich already have control over the government, as exemplified by the fact that it’s impossible to tax them. Amd also over large part of the media (as they own it and are concentrating the outlets). The poor (all of us HN reader) have some control over small to mid sized towns and somehow new york, except where someone wants a data center constructed and the city can’t afford the lawyer to defend against it.

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

#204

Post by fennec-posix »

This is a good article with good historical context, my only issue with it is where does this UBI come from? It sure as hell isn't gonna be taxes from large corporations given how things are going.

But yeah, once the buying power dries up, who is left keeping the lights on?

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

#205

Post by barchar »

joe_the_user wrote: post #17

One of the theses of JM Keynes (of "Keynesianism" fame) in his General theory was that the rich save and the poor spend. That's been an ongoing assumption of state policy for a while now. One factor to consider is that today we seem to have a mid-level consumer sector - a group of people with high ($100K+) incomes who still spend nearly all that income. This group may provide the demand to support the investments of…

The saying is "workers spend what they earn and capitalists earn what they spend".

Capitalists don't need worker demand to support their own consumption; spending out of profits directly supports profits overall.

It would be something of a consumption race to the bottom, however. They wouldn't be any better off vs if we supported adequate demand for everyone, but they might control a bigger slice of the (much) smaller pie.

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

#207

Post by tombert »

ryeights wrote: post #180
tombert wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator? Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.

You saw something kinda analogous in a movie once, therefore it's impossible? Am I the one basing my views off of science fiction?

It just seems like people are asserting that AI will enslave humanity without any reason to actually think that outside of speculative fiction.

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

#208

Post by EGreg »

slopinthebag wrote: post #201
EGreg wrote: post #175

I'm going to say something that triggers people on HN (because it involves creating our own currencies, like berkshares, bristol pounds, etc.) Here goes. Our towns and cities need to create our own money supply, especially to survive the coming depression (Both Keynes and Hayek would agree). The vast majority of our money is currently issued by banks, which have exactly the opposite incentives, they will issue less c…

So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.

No. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/

I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin, and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised about $1M, and built the system, but we couldn't compete with the zero-sum games and scams in crypto, because investors and even "crypto VCs" wanted to just 10x at the expense of everyone else. And also regulators don't actually allow creating fake volume, which is table stakes to be listed on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and taken "seriously" by crypto investors, so it instead became a business where we go town by town, community by community, influencer by influencer: https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf

I've interviewed lots of economists from different schools of thought, such as community currency economists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo

I've also interviewed regulators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0

And also founders of decentralized networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

And there's a lot more resources on https://community.intercoin.org that discusses this stuff. But Intercoin kind of failed as a "crypto" project, because we were unwilling to stoop to what projects did in order to attract capital.

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

#209

Post by claytongulick »

So much of the conversation here has a shared premise that AI stuff can and will replace human labor.

There are certain types of AI that will, and they are amazing: weed identification and laser zapping as a replacement for toxic pesticides, for example.

LLMs? I'm skeptical. I think we're in the middle of a mass delusion that stochastic parrot token extruding machine slop somehow equals "productivity".

From what I've seen it's just making the age old "activity over achievement" problem worse, while degrading skills.

One of two things is going to happen. Either we collectively find ways to recognize the limits of these things and use them in appropriate, limited ways or we devolve to Idocracy.

There's a third option that everyone seems to be breathlessly betting on, that the models improve to the point of human reasoning, but that seems like the most improbable outcome to me.

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

#210

Post by fennec-posix »

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…

This, 100%
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