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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?

#81

Post by throw310822 »

FuckButtons wrote: post #54
vanuatu wrote: post #27

I'm not sure I follow Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth? In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs do…

You assume that the people who are at the top of the organizations generating said wealth will have any incentive to do that. Look around the world at the petro states for examples of a highly capital intensive industry generating money that subsidizes the rest of the economy.

If you think that people won't have work and therefore no money to buy anything, there will be no wealth- not for the people and not for the riches. The value of Google or Tesla go to zero without masses of people paying for their products.

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

#82

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

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.

There's no point being the whale in a P2W mobile game if there are no free to play players to stomp over. I think this translates at least somewhat to the real world.

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

#83

Post by booleandilemma »

windexh8er wrote: post #31
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.

I'd like to think that, if it comes to this scenario, the wealthy will have many things to worry about. Everyone will know, at that point, that *they" are the one who destroyed the global economy for short term wealth. I'm not sure they've actually thought any of this through because they will be in a prison of their own making at that point.

[flagged]

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

#84

Post by bediger4000 »

WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #60
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.

> What will happen is they will leave us to die. Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.

Yeah! Bones, no matter how young, do not make decent concubines.

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

#85

Post by kjs3 »

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?"

I don't think anyone seriously believes 'labor' in the abstract is going away (well...I'm sure some people do, but not the people at the core of "use our AI product it'll be awesome trust us..."). The issue (IMHO) is that it will be "the labor opportunities left to you will suck way, way more than the ones that have been obsoleted/eliminated".

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

#86

Post by tremon »

morkalork wrote: post #35
theonemind wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limit…

Must be why they're all hot for humanoid robots: security that doesn't get paid or have families to worry about

Or might have their own opinion about certain orders.

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

#87

Post by greenavocado »

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 goal of automation is to end humanity

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

#88

Post by isomorphic »

morkalork wrote: post #35
theonemind wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limit…

Must be why they're all hot for humanoid robots: security that doesn't get paid or have families to worry about

This is just Terminator with extra steps.

They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).

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

#89

Post by fancyfredbot »

jdiff wrote: post #29
fancyfredbot wrote: post #19

Who will vote against seizing your assets if you fire us all?

The same crowd who always vote against their own interests. To paraphrase, "give them somebody to look down on, and they'll empty their pockets for you."

It's going to get a lot harder to convince people that $outgroup took your job when $outgroup are all obviously unemployed too.

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

#90

Post by winter_blue »

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?

In India, you've got lots of relatively-speaking well-off people. And extreme poverty that would shock and boggle the mind. Poverty worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of the "middle class" (which is just making over $12k USD a year) literally drive their cars through impoverished streets into their homes.
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