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.
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...
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
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.
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
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.
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.
Very optional consumption.
Employed doing...what?
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!)
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.
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.
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
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?
And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.
As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.
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.
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
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 think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
datadrivenangel•45m ago
awakeasleep•38m ago
Night_Thastus•37m ago
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.
jacobn•36m ago
DanielVZ•35m ago
ihumanable•33m ago
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.
clarle•26m ago
BuyMyBitcoins•6m ago
In other words, I have no idea where all the white collar workers are supposed to go.
TFNA•33m ago
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.
mrbungie•22m ago
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).
ajb•28m ago