If AI can truly replace human labor at a lower price point, then that's more or less the end for your median human. The economy will work by much the same principles as ever: those who can provide value will trade with others who can provide value. If that's not your median human, too bad for them. There may be some initial efforts by government to cushion people's irrelevance with UBI or other welfare schemes, but they won't be stable. Human rights and the political power of the median citizen are historically downstream of the value of the average citizen's labor.
> 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 double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services.
UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?
Yeah there has been a weird belief here for a long time that if something bad happens to us then extremely generous welfare benefits will materialize.
Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes.
No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.
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.
Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.
If they've eliminated all the jobs then presumably the economy has the idle productive capacity required to either produce the goods demanded by ubi recipients or produce the (real) capital required
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?
If you have robust supply and real competition, the ask should trend towards cost plus some profit, not whatever maximum price people will pay out of desperation.
I think of it as closer to $500/month, with supply-side government subsidies of food and housing, and then increasing taxes such that the mean person nets 0$.
It could perhaps work economically if AI automation also reduces the price of goods. What about automation-backed universal basic necessities? Mass-produced tract housing in the Midwest? Sounds awful but better than spending 90% of income on rent. Bread and circuses; subsidized mobile homes and Netflix.
But it won't work if necessities are captured by special interests, e.g. doctors ban AIs giving any medical info, even if it is technically capable of replacing them, so they can keep their own jobs.
At _current_ prices. The idea is that labor and energy prices would be close to zero before this would happen. So it wouldn't be that "expensive" to provide basic food, clothes, etc. A lot of goods and services would be automated.
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 golden apple to shame.
One might think so, but looking at the trajectory of human communities and communication under current technologies, I'm guessing that it will be a niche-enough phenomenon that the surveillance state (or corporation) will easily be able to crush any IRL dissent.
People are already struggling to form offline communities as easily as was done in the past, I can only imagine it will get harder as more AI-powered entertainment seeps into the cracks of the social mind.
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.
The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently.
The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going
Thats certainly true, but to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change we also need to do much more now than before (its debatable at this point whether its even reversible, that wasn't always the case). I suppose the point is that what was enough a decade ago costed more then than it does now, but thats no longer enough
The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career.
It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.
But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, et al make a bajillion dollars a year. The faangs are the most profitable companies in the world (swap Nvidia for Netflix)
It seems pretty clear that the economy all of us grew up in is a historical anomaly; and it's ending. There has never been a sustained large and dominant middle-class, and ours is disappearing right before our eyes; with little chance of saving it. There will be the ultra rich, a privileged few who make a good living as their minions, and a huge majority of the underclass or serfs. The power dynamics seems unflexible and unforgiving. Most of us have to beg and hope our government will care for us and do the "right-thing", while the powerful continue to accumulate, isolate, and undermine us.
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?
If we are outdone in intelligence, diligence, and creativity, humanity will have to fall back on its weakest talents - integrity, fairness, and compassion. What a nightmare.
New technology doesn't eradicate what came before. It only replaces what's profitable. There are still some people in the world subsistence farming. A tech worker is many orders of magnitude more productive in monetary terms, but hasn't replaced them. In the worst case, automation (including physical) may drive the cost of labor far down, but it cannot drive it to zero, and as it does so commodity goods will become cheaper as well. (Housing, education, and healthcare prices are inflated for policy reasons. Expect to see increase in unregulated alternatives for housing and especially healthcare.)
Net effect: huge inequality, many people buying very cheap goods for tiny wages. Middle class destroyed. Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying. History zombies on.
> History provides the same answer every time this question arises
You mean that after some popular discontent arises, the top authorities will simply be overthrown by a competing faction within the ruling class, but that competing faction will fool the masses into thinking that “people power” won out and things are any better?
That is, after all, how most “successful” revolutions have played out. Other revolutions that end with the ruling class being completely overthrown often cause the country to collapse into instability that is terrible for quality of life, until a strongman manages to cement his authority.
Well, we were overall better for a couple of centuries after abolishing all-powerful kings + some welfare laws here and there (ymmv, maybe serfdom sounds nice to you). So those changes can work for a while, big emphasis on can and for a while.
Greedy accumulators always end up ruining things for societies when it gets into ridiculous extremes (and there is a part of society that notices and gets fed up).
...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 for the wealthy.
The question is if labor will follow the same path.
At the risk of invoking “but this time it’s different”, AI hasn’t produced a new job sector. A farrier who can’t make a living off of horseshoes could at least go work at the Ford assembly plant.
In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.
Population in developed countries is already decreasing, so who knows what happens after that? Unfortunately a lot of the foundations of our economy are built on top of an ever-increasing populace.
Domesticated horses are chattel. They existed for the needs of humans. When the needs went away the horses did too. Many of the world's poorest already exist without anyone's tolerance, even though their economic contributions are a rounding error. I suppose it's possible that the world's wealthiest will decide to commit genocide (maybe to create nature preserves?) but it feels like a very far-fetched outcome. If they do not, the price of commodity goods and human wages will decrease in tandem. Massive inequality, perhaps homelessness and lack of healthcare if those sectors remain captured by special interests, but I do not think most people will literally starve or die of exposure. More likely unregulated housing and healthcare will expand.
I think his answer is just even more work. In this case it could be services where in general and for historical reasons people want to interact with people.
What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?
1. A producer grows a potato
2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10
3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00
This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.
The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.
Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.
Average American workers provide in-person services that don't scale and can't get much leverage from technology. Retail, hospitality, construction, care work, etc. They have not seen the kind of wage growth that accrued to the laptop class, but for the same reasons they are not as vulnerable. Probably we will end up alongside them. Plenty of demand growth coming in the elder-care sector.
Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?
Yes, I get that and meant to imply it with "frontier". But my question was more about how my biggest uses by far of data center-provided AI in terms of tokens have been in things like experimenting with agentic coding on my desktops. If I'm just tapping away at my phone with some questions in a chat window, my AI needs are much lower. Compete with me for the HW resources that I need to make full use of your data center-provided AI supply, and I'll just drop my demand accordingly.
(I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)
Wealth and Power are linked, but power is the goal for the wealthy, not the wealth itself. The moment the relationship of wealth and power is uncoupled, they will discard it in favor of whatever comes next in their accumulation of power.
It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them.
On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.
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 presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all.
The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers).
It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science.
During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines.
These are all overall good things for the world.
By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.
“It’s totally fine guys, if we give billionaires even more money it will totally all work out and be fine! Everything is ok and our benevelont overlords will take earnest care of us, despite literally never having shown the merest inclination to do that ever before”.
I feel there are like 50 load bearing assumptions in this piece of fiction that are dubious at best, definitely speculation. When you put all of them together and chain them in a product of probabilities it becomes tech bro wish fulfilling fantasy. But as usual this is expressed with total confidence and inevitability. This is a perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with rationalists, TPOT, etc. IMHO.
I'll just suggest that you track your predictions and "update your priors" once they start domino falling.
Thanks for this post. I am always amazed on how people only ever look at nominal wages (which might collapse for the "obsolete" class) but ignore the wealth being generated in the process.
What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.
A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.
I think people's imaginations are overfitting on current reality or the past 20 years where people's vision of technology is something like Facebook (a multibillion dollar college yearbook app) or Netflix (TV, but on the internet), and the economy needs a horde of subscriber consumers binging on a buffet of digital mind slop to keep the whole system running.
The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer never had most of the wealth in the first place. Not since the 1970s at least.
Just like Nvidia makes a lot more money selling GPUs to megacorps rather than to people playing games on their XBox, future corps can make plenty of money serving each other rather than retail consumers.
An autonomous fleet of delivery vehicles needs an autonomous fleet of vehicle service robots, etc, etc. At some point the entire stack will be automated.
Will the working classes be at the bottom of the pyramid and wealth inequality skyrocket. Absolutely. It's practically inevitable. But will the economy collapse? No way.
Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens, at some point armies of robot servants built by the "tech companies" will be integrated into every facet of human life, from the lowest plebians to the wealthiest patricians.
I think the whole, “If we all lose our jobs who will buy things?” Question is like the nuclear scare of the 1950s or the concerns of environmental collapse and the end of the world of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
No, it can and will get so, so much worse.
I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA.
Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere.
This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents.
And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get.
You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory.
Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected.
You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy.
Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class.
And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing.
And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget.
And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.
Why do you think that physical labor will become incredibly expensive if nobody has jobs? Do you think tools are that hard to get? Chinese tools are cheaper than ever.
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?
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 don't consist of those
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.
1. AI seems different here, American AI companies doing better seems to result in the rest of the American economy doing better as intelligence is generally productivity increasing. Plus it's not bound by physical scarcity as oil. It feels more like cloud computing or electricity
2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela
Are you aware of any reputable study that supports this? Everything I've seen, coding included, has productivity at a net neutral at best, with large cost increases due to LLMs.
There’s an alternative not mentioned: company scrips. Historically Such as in coal mines, workers were “paid” in tokens they could only use at the company store.
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 interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things.
I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.
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”.
Is the scope is actually increasing, that would be the question. Are we re-allocating the labor from the work that got easier (let's assume SaaS) and reallocating it to something that needs doing, e.g. cancer research.
To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.
I wasn’t going to be curing cancer regardless so I am not sure I fully understand your point. Like most people reading this forum I am a relatively normal person who has a comfortable life but will be doomed to obscurity with no notable achievements when I die.
I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing.
Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity.
For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.
Right and that's something I probably shouldn't have left unsaid. Yes, AI can do these relatively simple tasks like porting from one language to another, but you can't prompt it to cure cancer in one window and prompt it to solve climate change in another and watch it go
Seriously. The AI psychosis that has people actually believing this stuff is far scarier to me than what might maybe possibly could happen if AI somehow actually performs to the level that the people selling it say it will.
The antidote to AI psychosis is not denial. We owe it to ourselves to be humble and consider the possibility that LLM technology leads to general intelligence. The capabilities of coding agents today are certainly outside my wildest imagination circa GPT-3 launch in 2020.
For many of us the release of GPT-3 appeared like a huge step function, a gigantic leap forward, but the fact is, it wasn't that huge. We've been researching computers and AI for around 70 years now. We had productive "machine learning" and pattern completion for a good what, 10 or 15 years before GPT-3 was released. Your phone could auto complete. Computers could win at chess. I worked on working autonomous flying drones back in 2008. In 2020 I joined an autonomous car company that had been slowly grinding for 10 years beforeI joined. The growth is there but not at the blinding rate you think.
One thing I have seen no evidence of is AI being smarter than the smartest humans. It's still just a search engine (with an impressive human language UI) of existing human knowledge. It cannot do anything it has not been trained on.
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".
The cynical conclusion of AGI is that most humans will be enslaved or disposed of. We won't be forced to continue working for pay despite being slower, less intelligent, and more expensive than machines.
History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.
The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.
This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.
However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.
Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.
Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?
The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.
Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.
Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?
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.
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."
No one. Wouldn't it be better if they let the population of the world drop to say a 100 million? they don't need the human resources like they used to; they will have robots doing the work.
Society has managed a transition from gold to fiat and also towards a world where the majority live paycheque to paycheque and still diligently work ever harder.
...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion
"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.
Farmers won't be fired. AI won't replace plumbers. Hairstylists, chefs, landscapers, escorts, nurses, fisherman, etc. There are and will be plenty of people with jobs that AI can't do.
The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.
Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.
NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.
The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.
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 super rich while still allowing a large percentage of people to sink to the underclass.
That's already happening to some extent. Consumption in the US is very top heavy right now, and the top 40% of households by income already account for over 60% of all domestic consumption.
Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets
Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption
Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.
The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.
The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.
The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.
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.
I don't believe that shared ownership of AI, though a noble idea, is an attainable goal, no matter how much anyone wishes for it to happen. It's naive to believe it will happen when there is just too much money involved. I do believe that an UBI plan should be, at least, prepared, ready to be implemented, in case the situation arises. It never hurts to be prepared.
Thank you for letting me in!
Sol Roth
PS:
Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
I think the billionaire class will expand BNPL type products so everyone will stay in-debt forever. And expand gig economy so everyone can stay "employed" forever.
Employed doing what? At some point, we'll have autonomous tractors, autonomous techs to fix those tractors, autonomous cars and delivery vehicles, robot plumbers, AI doing information work.
If we reach a point where all labor is automated, then realistically we should have achieved post scarcity utopia at that point. If not, the only realistic options are some form of UBI, or state sponsored make-work. Grow the bureaucracy, the state employs people to do BS fake jobs. Audits, compliance, oversight. Middle-management type work just to continue the illusion of a work for income social contract.
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.
The comparison to slavery is apt. With increased surveillance and austerity measures, workers are being turned into underpaid labor with the constant threat of losing their livelihoods. Coupled with anti-union departments like Human Resources, there is no better way to describe the job market in 2026. Simply put, it's techno feudalism and we are the new slaves.
The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.
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 credit and on worse terms the more you need it. In fact the banks love to lend to the ultra-rich (including the guys who pay $0 in taxes and use their shares as collateral, while having their corporations buy back the stocks).
If you want to tinker around the edges, keep using their money. But in a world where AI makes everything cheap, why not have communities roll out their own money, and pay UBI in it? Waiting for the federal government to issue UBI is a fool's errand (not even Nixon was able to get it done, as president, much less someone like Andrew Yang who I supported and built campaign apps for, http://yang2020.app).
The community acts as the source and the sink of the money. And since we don't want to "trust" any given member of the community to operate the database, we need... a blockchain. I know, this is where I will get heavily downvoted for mentioning that (I have a feeling that there is even keyword matching to do it automatically). But... what is the alternative?
The alternative is that people keep relying on giant corporations to give us jobs, and on giant banks to issue our money supply, while they just siphon more and more money to the rich. But any time someone says "hey, we have the technology to self-organize and serve each other" there are people frothing at the mouth angry at this person. Frankly, towns could build socialist cooperatives for everything, e.g. their own Uber without the shareholder class taking most drivers' salaries. AI makes it easy. But the main thing is making our own money supply, and giving it out as UBI to each citizen to spend on food, robots, etc.
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
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.
There used to be a ton of competing currencies in the US. Banks regularly went bankrupt taking everybody's savings with them. Your suggestion doesn't really sound like anything new.
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 too much money to be made otherwise.
Exactly. And this is why ideas like post-scarcity or universal-high-income are not realistic. Because we can already make life heaven on earth for everyone alive. But we won't. Not because we do not have the resources or means of production, but because we do not have the willingness and systems in place. If we do not fix these first, AI-abundance will bring more suffering, not more prosperity.
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
Something that drove this home to me is that there is more vacant housing than there are unhoused people in the US. We could solve homelessness tomorrow, but we'd rather confiscate their camping equipment and throw them in prison than help. And I'm sure someone will be along shortly to tell me how wrong I am and what about mental illness and drug use. As if those people don't deserve our compassion too.
The true horrific realization I had with Colossus: The Forbin Project was how equally scared and accepting of the AI's message I was.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
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.
I just had chatgpt draw a table of wealth distribution by year based on best data sources it can find.
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
>And yet somehow, magically, all of these things are better than they have been ever at any point throughout human history
Nope, many things are worse than the past 3-4 decades and getting worse still. Especially precious things like access to jobs and good-job-qualyfing education and healthcare and housing and food.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
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 limits
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Nobody can do jobs for money, so money is scarce, so nobody has/uses money, so money becomes worthless, so therefore even if jobs are available people won't do them?
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
> Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
Or it's just shares in companies (productive or otherwise). People get mad over how much Bezos has, but if it's all Amazon shares who cares? It's spending, not saving that consumes scarce resources. Get mad about his jet, sure, but not his paper wealth.
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).
They have their bunkers but it's not plan A. Even a psychotic oligarch doesn't want to live in a hole in the ground while the world collapses around them. They want to own the world, perhaps remake it in their image, but not destroy it.
Yes! This is something that I have been saying or thinking about too but the rich people contrary to popular belief that they themselves sometimes believe in, but the best way for them to achieve growth is by improving the conditions of people in general.
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
It's a race to get robot servants and warriors before the working classes rise up. They'll build their walled cybercities while everyone else is busy scavenging and sustenance farming.
You’re assuming they care what happens to their children when they’re gone. We’re talking about sociopaths. Sure they care more about their children than the random plebe walking down the street, but they definitely don’t care more about their children than their own personal desires. That’s empathy, and empathy is for the weak.
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.
Hmm I share your concern but we do regularly develop new economies? The EU pumped a ton of money into eastern Europe, the west collectively did the same by outsourcing to Asia which is now the largest market for very significant industries.. Latin America and Africa have been abused and hollowed out for centuries but seeing decent growth now, so I'm more optimistic
This is such an odd take, when the percent of the world doing subsistence farming has never been lower at any point in human history, and a mixture of capitalism and technological innovation is the primary driver of that.
To clarify, I'm not arguing that capitalism is inherently bad or that it hasn't pulled huge swaths of people out of poverty.
What I'm pushing back against (which I often see in discussions of UBI) is that powerful people will give out free money just out of the goodness of their heart or because "they'll need people to buy their products". We're transitioning out of an era where labor has held (historically) a lot of power, but now technology is heading us down a path where capital will hold the vast majority of the cards. And a lot of the discussion around stuff like UBI just feels like hopium to me: "Surely with an abundance of riches we won't just let people die in the street!" But yes, we actually do let people die in the street already, especially if they're kinda far away.
The powers behind tech and AI are not going to give up that power willingly, or from the good of their hearts.
> 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 is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.
(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
In many places in the world, the only interests of government are those of the rich. I do not think the rich will be petitioned so much as they will be … persuaded.
> It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens.
As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
What people dont understand is we already invented Roko's Basilisk in the 1600s. It just doesnt have the power to torment you for more than 1 human lifetime yet.
> 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, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?
> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]
I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.
I see it more as a mix of grandiose promotion (to investors) and and vague empty promise (to everyone else.)
"We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
Yeah, reading this, my first thought was: "that's the neat part - nobody!"
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
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.
But in this "Elysium"-like scenario, that same class would have automated protection in place that makes them ~untouchable and capable of keeping the rest of humanity incapable of pushing back.
I don't believe this to be true. Sure, for a short period of time they may be "untouchable". Long term, nope. Most of them can't do anything for themselves in terms of real world skills at this point. They are, literally, the most vulnerable without the protection and production of others.
Not sure I agree. Things are looking kinda shit already, yet we can't even get people to agree there is a problem, let alone who is to blame. In a poorer, less informed society where the wealthy have an even larger megaphone I don't see it becoming any more obvious.
We're already there and no one is doing anything about it. A data center the size of Manhattan is being planned. Have the people proposing this being lynched? No. Soon everyone's going to be arguing about who they're voting for in 2028, like it even fucking matters.
I don't get it, in what sense "the wealthy [will have] destroyed the global economy for short term wealth"? Do you think that if the big corporations stopped developing AI it would, like, disappear?
Any fantasies of that sort went out the window for me when Trump got elected, largely on the base of "left behind" voters who have done very poorly economically over the past 30 or so years.
What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly" blame the people responsible is laughable at the point.
It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.
Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.
Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable
No, the incentives are aligned. Bread and circus reduces the number of data centers getting bombed and the number of heads rolling. The good AI and the evil AI both point to UBI.
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.
No, they’ll jail those unable to pay into prisons where workers are required to labor without a reasonable wage, and only let the rebellious workers die. The end goal is generally to replace the lost unpaid labor of now-illegal slavery with the more indirect enslavements of debtors prison labor and corp-indentured servitude. They don’t want to reduce the size of the worker pool, they want to reduce the demands of it — otherwise they end up vulnerable to organized labor by the few workers left.
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 think too deeply about it. I often hear people confused about the Epstein class, wondering how so much power ended up in the hands of so few depraved people. The truth is that we’re living I a system that not only rewards psychopathy, but nurtures it. Anybody under the delusion that they would behave any differently under the same conditions hasn’t thought deeply enough about how their environment shapes their thinking. The amount of power that the Epstein/ruling class has accumulated has corrupted them to the point that their plan is literally to violently force people to serve them. They already do this and have no problem ramping up the violence as needed to keep living like gods.
Mamdani was elected in New York despite (or perhaps because of) explicitly running against the interests of moneyed elites. Let all the frontier AI labs and their investors burn billions in the R&D phase, then vote for governments to use the Magic Everything Machines for the interests of ordinary people. If today's LLMs don't actually evolve into Magic Everything Machines then we probably don't need UBI anyhow; some jobs will be lost but many others will stick around. In that case just vote for Scandinavian style social safety nets.
The franchise is much more inclusive now in every developed country than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
No. The French Revolution was a revolution of lawyers, writers, and administrators, the elite who were shut out of the very highest positions. And it was unstable. The great majority of people were just cannon fodder for Napoleon.
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...
If nothing will change and overhelming majority of wealth in time become owned by the marginal piece of society I wouldn't ruled out that in some future there will be another revolution against the so called ruling class by basically same reasons it was before.
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
> 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 a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
If AI can truly replace human labor at a lower price point, then that's more or less the end for your median human. The economy will work by much the same principles as ever: those who can provide value will trade with others who can provide value. If that's not your median human, too bad for them. There may be some initial efforts by government to cushion people's irrelevance with UBI or other welfare schemes, but they won't be stable. Human rights and the political power of the median citizen are historically downstream of the value of the average citizen's labor.
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 double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services.
UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?
Ask the people who used to work in the auto plants if that's how it goes.
No one will get a dime unless they organize and fight for it. Otherwise things are more likely to go in the other direction, what safety net exists now gets reduced.
UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
Fair and progressive taxation and proper social systems are far more efficient. UBI is just an excuse to get rid of social systems and leave everyone individually stranded with problems no one can solve alone.
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?
If you have robust supply and real competition, the ask should trend towards cost plus some profit, not whatever maximum price people will pay out of desperation.
But it won't work if necessities are captured by special interests, e.g. doctors ban AIs giving any medical info, even if it is technically capable of replacing them, so they can keep their own jobs.
As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.
And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.
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 golden apple to shame.
People are already struggling to form offline communities as easily as was done in the past, I can only imagine it will get harder as more AI-powered entertainment seeps into the cracks of the social mind.
The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going
It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.
But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
I read this essay a few months ago which calmed those doomsday theories for me somewhat: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.
Net effect: huge inequality, many people buying very cheap goods for tiny wages. Middle class destroyed. Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying. History zombies on.
I don’t know, what you’re outlining there is pretty grim. Especially as we could elect to just…not destroy people’s livelihood’s en masse?
You mean that after some popular discontent arises, the top authorities will simply be overthrown by a competing faction within the ruling class, but that competing faction will fool the masses into thinking that “people power” won out and things are any better?
That is, after all, how most “successful” revolutions have played out. Other revolutions that end with the ruling class being completely overthrown often cause the country to collapse into instability that is terrible for quality of life, until a strongman manages to cement his authority.
Greedy accumulators always end up ruining things for societies when it gets into ridiculous extremes (and there is a part of society that notices and gets fed up).
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.
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 for the wealthy.
The question is if labor will follow the same path.
In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.
producer => provider => consumer.
What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?
1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00
This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.
The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.
Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.
You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.
(I know, I know... the answer is probably that they expect me to just move my software development to the cloud, too. Joy!)
It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them.
On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.
Nor in recent patterns of "democracy".
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 presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all.
The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers).
It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science.
During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines.
These are all overall good things for the world.
By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.
I'll just suggest that you track your predictions and "update your priors" once they start domino falling.
What do I care if I don't earn money if the robot builds my house and customized medicine better than what we have today is available in abundance? I will be much poorer than the elites, but perhaps still much better off than today.
A very idealized scenario for sure, though. Personally I am still on the "AI as a normal technology" track with the various bottlenecks. Productivity will be a bit higher and that's it, no mass unemployment.
The (sad fucked up) reality is that Joe Schmo consumer never had most of the wealth in the first place. Not since the 1970s at least.
Just like Nvidia makes a lot more money selling GPUs to megacorps rather than to people playing games on their XBox, future corps can make plenty of money serving each other rather than retail consumers.
An autonomous fleet of delivery vehicles needs an autonomous fleet of vehicle service robots, etc, etc. At some point the entire stack will be automated.
Will the working classes be at the bottom of the pyramid and wealth inequality skyrocket. Absolutely. It's practically inevitable. But will the economy collapse? No way.
Just like how DOOM used to require a luxury scale $5,000 home PC to run and now the same level of compute can be found on disposable vape pens, at some point armies of robot servants built by the "tech companies" will be integrated into every facet of human life, from the lowest plebians to the wealthiest patricians.
No, it can and will get so, so much worse.
I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA.
Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere.
This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents.
And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get.
You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory.
Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected.
You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy.
Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class.
And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing.
And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget.
And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.
But yeah, once the buying power dries up, who is left keeping the lights on?
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 don't consist of those
2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela
Are you aware of any reputable study that supports this? Everything I've seen, coding included, has productivity at a net neutral at best, with large cost increases due to LLMs.
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 interesting. I have started multiple porting-to-WASM projects, a Jellyfin clone that I am already running on my home server written in Erlang, new themes for my blog, and many other things.
I realized that over the years there has been dozens (hundreds?) of projects that I have wanted to do, but I never really got around to doing them because it was just too much effort and I couldn’t justify the time sink. By having multiple agents working at once, I can work on multiple projects concurrently, and I can focus on the harder (and more fun) parts of programming.
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
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”.
To me looks like we aren't and your personal projects don't support the opposite.
I use Codex for work, and I feel like I accomplish more with it than I would have without it. I juggle a lot more projects concurrently and can broaden the scope of what I am doing.
Now we can argue what I do is “easy”, and you’re probably not wrong, but most white collar work is pretty easy and being able to accomplish more easy tasks is still potential productivity.
For that matter, if I am not distracted with the trivial tasks I can dedicate more of my time working on hard problems, maybe even ones we would call “important”.
One thing I have seen no evidence of is AI being smarter than the smartest humans. It's still just a search engine (with an impressive human language UI) of existing human knowledge. It cannot do anything it has not been trained on.
Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
History has repeatedly shown us isolated examples of completely replacing the need for human labour.
The industrial revolution did destroy jobs, but back then labour was incomprehensibly unproductive. So much so that around 200 years ago 50% of the entire workforce worked in agriculture.
This meant that although a large percentage of the total workforce was affected by the industrial revolution the total percentage of jobs that machines could do was absolutely tiny. Even where machines could typically only automate some percentage of the total work. For example, in agriculture although machines could do a lot of the work, there was still a need for humans to operate the machines.
However, there were some exceptions. Texture weavers were completely replaced by machines – it didn't make them more efficient it made them unemployed. More recently human calculators have been completely replaced. And more recently still checkout staff at supermarkets are being replaced by self-service systems. Again, a self-checkout machine doesn't make a job more productive, it entirely replaces the need for a human to do it.
Even today there's still relatively very few jobs which can be entirely done by machines, but for the first time ever, we're starting to see how this could change.
Then the question then is what new jobs might be created if you no longer need graphic designers or VFX artists or lawyers? If humans aren't good for physical labour or mental labour then what are they good for?
The assumption that humans will remain employable assumes that humans will still be able to provide some economic value which machines cannot. That humans unlike horses won't be sent to the glue factory because there will still be some economic use for us so that we can still be net providers and not a net-burden.
Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of jobs which machines won't be able to do, if you have the entire workforce competing for those jobs then you'll probably be paid so poorly you might as well not have a job.
Would be interested what you disagree with. Is it that you don't believe that AI will be able to replace humans entirely? If so what jobs do you think are safe? Or is it that you believe new jobs will be created? If so can you describe what these jobs might involve that machines cannot do?
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.
Very optional consumption.
...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion
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.
The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.
Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.
NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.
The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.
Those with >~$350k spend drastically less on consumption, funneling most into wealth generating assets
Those <350k->~$100k spend almost 86% of their income on consumption
Everyone else doesn't have enough purchasing power to matter to the market, spend greater than what they earn and have a dependency on debt.
The economy now is already at the point where it doesn't need the bottom 50% to even participate to continue current growth, outside of providing the labor necessary to fuel the consumption of the middle bracket.
The problem is AI/LLM automation is threatening the exact middle bracket that is sustaining the current consumption based economy. If we automated all the jobs of the bottom half of the economic underclass, the ~$100k+ group could run in a closed loop. Instead, we're trying to automate the labor of the very group thats sustaining the system.
The loss of white collar work is going to cause a huge cascading failure that we aren't ready for.
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.
Thank you for letting me in!
Sol Roth
PS:
Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.
Employed doing...what?
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.
The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.
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 credit and on worse terms the more you need it. In fact the banks love to lend to the ultra-rich (including the guys who pay $0 in taxes and use their shares as collateral, while having their corporations buy back the stocks).
If you want to tinker around the edges, keep using their money. But in a world where AI makes everything cheap, why not have communities roll out their own money, and pay UBI in it? Waiting for the federal government to issue UBI is a fool's errand (not even Nixon was able to get it done, as president, much less someone like Andrew Yang who I supported and built campaign apps for, http://yang2020.app).
The community acts as the source and the sink of the money. And since we don't want to "trust" any given member of the community to operate the database, we need... a blockchain. I know, this is where I will get heavily downvoted for mentioning that (I have a feeling that there is even keyword matching to do it automatically). But... what is the alternative?
https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...
The alternative is that people keep relying on giant corporations to give us jobs, and on giant banks to issue our money supply, while they just siphon more and more money to the rich. But any time someone says "hey, we have the technology to self-organize and serve each other" there are people frothing at the mouth angry at this person. Frankly, towns could build socialist cooperatives for everything, e.g. their own Uber without the shareholder class taking most drivers' salaries. AI makes it easy. But the main thing is making our own money supply, and giving it out as UBI to each citizen to spend on food, robots, etc.
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.
https://www.depressionscrip.com
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 too much money to be made otherwise.
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0b9a2a-4c6c-8394-8a66-7f86c510c8...
Nope, many things are worse than the past 3-4 decades and getting worse still. Especially precious things like access to jobs and good-job-qualyfing education and healthcare and housing and food.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
So given there are constraints, resources must be rationed/allocated somehow.
Maybe we now have the technologies to remove this resource constraint. We'll see.
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of economics. Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
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).
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
What I'm pushing back against (which I often see in discussions of UBI) is that powerful people will give out free money just out of the goodness of their heart or because "they'll need people to buy their products". We're transitioning out of an era where labor has held (historically) a lot of power, but now technology is heading us down a path where capital will hold the vast majority of the cards. And a lot of the discussion around stuff like UBI just feels like hopium to me: "Surely with an abundance of riches we won't just let people die in the street!" But yes, we actually do let people die in the street already, especially if they're kinda far away.
The powers behind tech and AI are not going to give up that power willingly, or from the good of their hearts.
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 is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.
(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
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, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?
> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]
I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.
[1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...
"We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly" blame the people responsible is laughable at the point.
It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.
Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.
Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable
The franchise is much more inclusive now in every developed country than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
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...
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
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 a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.
Not from so distant past - Soviet Union collapse caused mass unemployment and similar socioeconomic scenarios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wild_nineties
Mass poverty and skyrocketing crime levels (mugged for sneakers was common), while ultra rich grabbed money and power.
Not sure if I get your point
Humans will be cut off from work and will be on a forever UBI system that you will have to be spending tokens as currency for basic services /s.
SpaceX sold lots of xAI capacity to Anthropic.
They don't need us.