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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?

#301

Post by frm88 »

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…

We still have a much smaller number of horses for the few economically viable roles a horse can fill and as toys for the wealthy.

Yes, but those were horses. Now substitute the word 'human'.

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

#302

Post by Joeboy »

dyauspitr wrote: post #257
einrealist wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly doubt it will even provide us with a roof over our heads. In an unconstrained market, the pressure to extract as much as possible from the UBI will be enormous. The amount of UBI will probably always lag years behind the actual amount required to create a liveable situation, and increasing its amount will be a constant political struggle. UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement. Fai…

> UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement. How? It’s going to be a better situation than the current situation where people just become homeless and live on the streets. Yes, rent and food will cost more but there will always be vendors willing to make a reasonable margin.

If you're talking about introducing it somewhere where there's currently no social safety net, sure. Where I live if you were to replace the existing safety net with say £1k a month (the level of our state pension, which is widely considered a time bomb of unaffordability), that's like a million instant homeless people.

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

#303

Post by malfist »

selectodude wrote: post #282
ropetin wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly this is a few years old: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/61000-homes-are-empty-in... 61,000 empty houses in San Francisco, 10,000 unhoused people. Even if the unhoused population is under reported by an order of magnitude, there is more than enough housing available to house everyone where they currently are.

I mean, if we’re going to expropriate real estate then that’s a different discussion.

No, that is literally this discussion.

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

#304

Post by tsoukase »

The old genius of Ford, I think, said that "I raise the salaries of my workers so that they can buy my cars". That's forward thinking.

The ultimate goal of these "tech elites" is to concentrate all wealth to one person (themself each) and leave the rest of the people with 0. It's the extreme of capitalism, which by the way is the same as the extreme communism. By advocating an UBI, paid of course by the state, they feel they make us a favour and we should thank them.

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

#305

Post by IAmGraydon »

munksbeer wrote: post #294
bobsmooth wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN used to be even more libertarian than it currently is.

I don't think HN is libertarian at all. In fact, I can barely tell the difference between reddit and HN now. Anti-capitalism is the dominant sentiment here now.

There is a small group of people who are quite openly attempting to make you, me, and everyone else obsolete. They’re doing it while blatantly lying that they’re not. Surprisingly, people aren’t receiving it well. Anti-capitalism is the dominant sentiment everywhere.

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

#306

Post by IAmGraydon »

Why is everyone having eschatological dreams these days? The entire zeitgeist seems to be in mass psychosis/delusion. The idea of compressing concepts into statistical models with a human language interface is very interesting and even useful, but we have seen zero evidence that this can reliably, broadly replace human thought and skill. The idea that it could eventually work is scary, but it’s important not to let scary turn into lived reality before it’s objectively real.

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

#307

Post by svieira »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #242
emehex wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

UBI in a world where everyone makes roughly the same amount of money per year would be a wash. You'd just be redistributing money to people in roughly the same percent that is was taxed from them. But we do not live in that world. And even if it does end up as a complete wash, that still seems like it would lead to a better economic outcome. You'd end up with trickle- up economics. The kind that has incentives for co…

> The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.

Note that this presumes a functioning market (free or otherwise). The company store knows it is the only game in town, so it doesn't have to appeal to anyone.

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

#308

Post by pllbnk »

emehex wrote: post #202
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?

Not necessarily. The government controls prices, the government assigns _everyone_ some work no matter how meaningless it is; so instead of one street sweeper we would get 10. Everybody is paid just enough to live and have work assigned to not slack (I don't believe in utopia where money is paid for doing nothing because this utopia sounds extremely dystopian). I know just a place where people lived like that for 40-something years - Soviet Union! It wasn't terrible for majority, it wasn't great either. Also, it didn't last that long because it was unsustainable.

Our AI overlords think that they will be able to just prompt their LLMs to optimize this regime and make it last but their stupid LLMs can't yet figure out whether to take a car to the carwash or to go by foot, so they are not even close to that.

What's bad for us is that they are now wealthy enough to keep dragging us into this dystopia for a while until something changes.

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

#309

Post by pllbnk »

marcocampos wrote: post #161
LarsDu88 wrote: post #100

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here goes... The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy. It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital? For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumpt…

The things some people on HN believe leaves me baffled.

> capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI

I guess it's a metaphor for the "hugely successful" trickle-down economics we have been witnessing.

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

#310

Post by LarsDu88 »

pllbnk wrote: post #309
marcocampos wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things some people on HN believe leaves me baffled.

> capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI I guess it's a metaphor for the "hugely successful" trickle-down economics we have been witnessing.

Never said it would trickle down. Just that the economy wouldnt collapse
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