> 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?
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.
UBI could be done a lot of different ways, but it's a natural fit with progressive taxes. A UBI funded by taxes makes taxes more progressive. It's somewhat like the standard tax deduction, except you still get it if you don't pay any tax.
It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on.
The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out automatically? For the employed, the government check and increased paycheck withholding (if the standard deduction were removed) would largely cancel out. But if you lose your job, you still get the government check.
You could also see this as a reworking of unemployment benefits so that everyone always qualifies for them and they don't run out.
> UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
How? It’s going to be a better situation than the current situation where people just become homeless and live on the streets. Yes, rent and food will cost more but there will always be vendors willing to make a reasonable margin.
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.
American voters are way too resistant against any sort of welfare and/or social assistance; UBI will NEVER get approved here.
Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility. There is a widespread false narrative that any sort of government help is leftist socialism and communism.
People on HN throw out UBI like a viable option... lol please. We can't even fund social security, SNAP or paid parental leave. UBI is a non-starter.
A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle.
Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x more annual growth in money supply would counter the positive supply shock to keep the purchasing power of a dollar stable; the fact that more dollars would exist would simply reflect the reality of having more stuff to go around.
Whether and how it may be possible to achieve such supply growth, however, is another matter entirely. While I'm personally optimistic about the technological trajectories of AI, solar/fusion, and humanoid robotics, optimizing/liberalizing Western economies and adjusting to a post-labor-scarcity world will both be at best politically turbulent.
The incentive for the wealthy to go along with such policies is that it would be a practical necessity in order to continue selling their stuff. If 90% of the population lacked a survivable income, that wouldn't be a functioning economy, it would be a precursor to civil war. Even so, private corporations won't want to voluntarily employ people they don't need, because that's just a textbook prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, publicly funding such capital distribution puts the corporations on a level playing field relative to one another while enabling business to continue as usual.
My suggestion would be to drive the policy the other way around: whenever there is deflation measured in the previous year, it automatically triggers a UBI "deflation dividend" scaled to create price stability, distributed equally to everyone.
It probably won't be a straight up cash, but something like what Cuba does: Cuba does not have a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead, the Cuban government guarantees basic survival through a socialist welfare system, consisting of state-controlled employment, heavily subsidized utilities, free universal healthcare and education, and a monthly ration book (Libreta de Abastecimiento) for basic food items.
Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to UBI, but what I'd rather see is a system of guaranteed jobs and educational/training stipends (with part-time and/or remote options). The reason for that is primarily fault tolerance: in the event that a major disaster renders our AI/computational infrastructure inoperable (or adversarial), it's imperative that humanity itself act as a redundant store of all the information necessary to preserve or reboot civilization.
That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.
Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right?
Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?
UBI in a world where everyone makes roughly the same amount of money per year would be a wash. You'd just be redistributing money to people in roughly the same percent that is was taxed from them. But we do not live in that world.
And even if it does end up as a complete wash, that still seems like it would lead to a better economic outcome. You'd end up with trickle-up economics. The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.
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 you're right, and when we talk about UBI it should be expressed in what it can provide not some arbitrary number. Can it provide all required needs (housing, food, transport, entertainment, etc) or not?
I think of it as closer to $500/month, with supply-side government subsidies of food and housing, and then increasing taxes such that the mean person nets 0$.
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
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.
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.
Forget about UBI, most of us (the current earners) may not see social security, which we've paid into. Social security is a ponzi[1]. If jobs collapse, the inflow into the Ponzi stops, which also stops the outflows.
If we actually had UBI most people would supplement their income with stuff they enjoy doing. There’s going to be a lot of art, music, literature. Human made creative content is always going to cost a premium and people will keep paying for it.
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.
> 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
I think the mistake they're going to make is that they already have most of us fighting for scraps
But they want all of us fighting for even smaller scraps
There's always a limit to how far this can be pushed
That's true, but the limit isn't fixed, it depends on their ability to keep things under control. AI is poised to increase that ability if we allow it to develop entirely under the control of private interests.
The UBI comes from taxes and moderate money printing to balance things. Yes I expect the rich to get taxed more because otherwise things should get violent, in the extreme hypothetical of this discussion.
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)
Even with those companies, the stock prices are stupidly inflated, but even granting them being profitable that’s still only like six companies. Thats like 1% of the s&p 500.
A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especially startups are not profitable.
> except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge
I think it's worse than that. The frontier labs are purporting that there won't be any "new work" required in the future—starting with knowledge workers and then eventually snaking down into more manual labor jobs via robotics.
The irony is that these same labs are still hiring engineers to build the machinery they're so convinced will make engineers obsolete. It's so paradoxical it's not true.
The only true things are that AI is a bubble, the current technology is unsustainable given the amount of compute required, and LLMs are overhyped in what they can do well versus what they need to be closely supervised with.
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”.
You jest, but the wonderful thing is billionaires are mortal.
The known anti-semite and Hitler admirer Henry Ford's chartiable foundation added DEI to its mandate in 2021.
Andrew Carnegie, an infamous monopolist and strike crusher...his charitable foundations helps fund science education to this day, and his university has graduated countless engineers.
The point is... billionaires will die... their capital can continue to work both in the economy and society.
I mean... unless someone figures out immortality. I dread the thought of Jeff Bezos invoking prima noctae
When Jeff Bezos dies, someone is going to inherit his money. There's no particular reason to believe that whoever he chooses as his heir(s) will be less disposed toward funding fascism and destroying the ability of regular people to have a voice in the world.
You invoke Carnegie, but the current generation of robber barons have shown no real propensity toward philanthropy—they donate to charity, to be sure, but in tiny (relative) amounts, and frequently to their own foundations, which make it legally charity, but in practice just another way for them to control their own money.
The proposals that the billionaires of today will give away their money (and thus power) within their lifetimes, or that their heirs will suddenly become champions of labor and the downtrodden, require some fairly significant evidence—from today, not just comparisons to the Gilded Age—before they can be considered credible.
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.
Could you elaborate on some of these load bearing asumptions?
Maybe your thinking that underneath the corporate SAS economy, theres a giant sea of consumer spending that props it all up.
That might be reasonable, but remember that in this future hyper unequal AI economy, only a handful of ultra wealthy people, most likely through agent proxies, make up more purchasing power than the bottom 95% combined. We're already past the 50% mark in the real world, so this is not implausible.
I'm not saying this is a good future. In fact its absolutely dystopian. But its way more plausible than the fantasy world the author is describing.
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.
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 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.
All of us? All over the world? Elect not to do something that would make us individually rich and powerful, and instead accept the risk of being left behind if someone else does it?
I don't know, I don't think many nations/organizations would go for that. If we had that level of trust, it feels like there's a lot of other bad stuff that wouldn't be going on right now.
> 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.
Well Bezos did actually state that he wants to turn Earth into a natural park.
But yeah, the robot armies don't need grain so why hike up the price of bread? Lack of grain makes those people resentful which means you need to deal with their anger. Sure, it can be dealt with but it's just cheaper to give the humans grain so they are docile. This is basic governance 101 that goes back to the romans (and further).
They also didn't slaughter all horses immediately. You can't eat that much horse meat anyways. It happened piece by piece.
The only good reason for an abrupt mass culling of the 99% (for a coldly calculating rich person with no empathy) would be game theory, i.e. them not being a contender for power any more. If there are no humans, there is nobody who can question the control of the 1%. It would be thus less about economics and more about power.
I am really rooting for the bottom 99%, myself being a part of it, but I really don't know what will happen to us.
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.
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!)
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.
It's interesting how people stubbornly remain locked into the existing systems. Every time something about automating jobs comes up there's the inevitable "how will people afford X??", and then one of the responses is usually "UBI" or similar. It's like people are literally unable to see beyond some system based on getting money. And AI will ultimately push the status quo beyond that. Even though UBI might be helpful, it's just a stopgap in the face of 100% of human labour eventually having 0 economic value. But the very concept of money, on which income is based, is rooted in the idea that human labour has positive economic value.
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.
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.
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
Yeah, I always think of it as Gustafson’s Law but Jevon’s is probably more appropriate.
Tangential, but related.
When I first started my career, it was working for a company that used SVN as its version control (Git hadn’t quite won yet). Every Friday, we would do The Merge. We called it that, like a proper noun.
The Merge was almost always a 4-6 hour process because it would be taking every branch of every feature/bug we have worked on, and merged it into trunk. The day would be then spent fixing merge conflicts as they came up. I was the most junior engineer (borderline intern) and so that task generally fell on me.
Eventually, I found git-svn, and it brought a multi-hour task down to like 30 minutes, since the merging was so much quicker.
Fridays were always blocked out for me to do The Merge, but it’s not like when I got it done in 30 minutes they said “oh, umm, there’s nothing else to do, go home and forget being paid for today”. They just found other stuff for me to do and I did that.
There’s always more stuff that can be done. We won’t ever run out of potential shit we can do.
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?
It is not. Horses are chattel, bred by humans for the purposes of serving them. Humans, even the poorest humans, are free creatures and not analogous to horses.
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.
This is probably the best one for coding? The two main findings are that developers didn't want to do tasks without AI (implication being that they would find it too tedious) and for the tasks that were measured, there was a speedup (and more of a speedup if you had more experience with AI tools)
Unfortunately "productivity" is very hard to measure directly. I prefer looking at how much money companies are paying Applied AI companies (a lot) because in aggregate, that meant these companies justified ROI vs. OpenAI/Anthropic directly, and sufficiently enough that large enterprises are willing to go through the time and money to spend on a vendor. It's not foolproof but it dampens the effect of companies tokenmaxxing their Codex/Claude Code to look productive.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
Maybe not at first. Regardless of when they get replaced by tech, you’ll see those jobs get saturated and wages go down. Which sucks because they are already low
10 years ago we said "Technology cannot replace programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, etc" and here we are, potentially on a cusp of replacing all of those in a decade.
We can keep moving the goal posts all we want, but eventually things will get automated.
Why can't we have automated farm land, automatic harvesting, automatic sorting, delivered automatically via robotic trucks to your door? It's not that far fetched.
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.
UBI gives 100 to John. John original subsidies as handicap of 2000 USD removed. You think this will work? Or corporations will obediently stay and pay more taxes instead of just do the corporate inversion? Or maybe you keep John subsidies and then on top of that give the UBI too. So where you get the extra funding given USA already 1.5T deficit every year? Fed print more free money? And if everyone get the UBI, you think the OLED TV is still 1000USD? UBI is a fanfic by people who don't know how economy works. EVERY SINGLE UBI failed to date. Yeah sure let's try again.
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.
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.
It's very new because it uses trustless technology at an entire community level, and UBI to put money into circulation, rather than letting the bank underwriters quietly choose winners and losers. You're not supposed to give banks the monopoly to issue the money. That's the whole point I just made.
Some communities will do better than others, but when they start running out of federal dollars, their local currency will ensure people can still eat, and plumbers will still get off their ass to fix leaks.
"Wildcat currency" was indeed a lot more unstable before the US blew them out of the water with "the greenback", which was issued to finance the civil war, backed by land taxes and tariffs, and then they passed laws making it "legal tender" for all debts, even the private ones.
Banks have been working with the US government hand in glove, if credit money is the vast majority of our M2 money supply, where do you think all that new money comes from that enables people and businesses to pay back all the loans with interest? Who do you think bails out those banks and forces them to buy treasuries? and so on.
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
The “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
> Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
You can't rule over the dead.
Though it's unfortunate that those in power don't seem to understand that their lives are much better than kings and queens of the past. Even the average person in a first world country lives much better than royalty from even a few hundred years ago.
It's ironic, the pursuit of power usually limits its own growth. To maximize power you have to give it up, because it's multidimensional
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.
The companies are moving so fast and don't seem to care if things are rough around the edges. They're really betting big that AI is going to be unhackable.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food
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?
> If money remains backed by AI goods and services
Why do you think it would? If 99% of people never use those services, why do you expect they'd continue to exist? Just to justify the existence of some temporary class of worker to provide services that, for some reason, aren't fulfilled by the AI?
> Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
Not at all. If you're starving and someone offers you the last diamond in the world for a weeks worth of food, its unlikely to be a worthwhile trade since without the food you'd die, and then (to you), the diamond is entirely worthless. Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of our current economic system, its not a fundamental law of reality
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.
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.
61,000 empty houses in San Francisco, 10,000 unhoused people. Even if the unhoused population is under reported by an order of magnitude, there is more than enough housing available to house everyone where they currently are.
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.
There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 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...
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
If history is any guide, you're technically correct, but it's no help to the lower classes. Many a divine king, high priest, or emperor has died at the hands of those they depended on. But systemic change is rare. A new despot replaces the old and the cycle continues.
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.
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
Yup. And the disillusionment in Trump makes them a fertile ground for a _competent_ manipulator.
Trump is comically incompetent, old, and probably suffers from minor dementia at this point. Now imagine somebody like Mamdani or Rubio gaining control of these disillusioned people and telling them that it's all because of "corporations" or "liberal anarchists" (underline the correct answer).
The only way to fix it is to correct the underlying economic problems that are pushing all the wealth into a smaller and smaller number of dense city cores. Promote remote jobs, prohibit new dense housing, tax dense office space.
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.
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 rich people. Let 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 UBI probably isn't the right solution 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 in developed countries is much broader now 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, 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.
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.
<sarcasm>History teaches us that rich and powerful think about consequences of their actions and optimize for balanced, non-violent outcomes</sarcasm>
In this context, I argue that if a significant sector of economy goes fully AI, it is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union where within few months most people lost their jobs. The wikipedia link above shows how similar scenarios unfolded in many eastern block countries, specifically mass unemployment, poverty and crime.
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?
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.
UBI could be done a lot of different ways, but it's a natural fit with progressive taxes. A UBI funded by taxes makes taxes more progressive. It's somewhat like the standard tax deduction, except you still get it if you don't pay any tax.
It keeps the wolf from the door, but you still need to save enough to retire on.
The US standard tax deduction amounts to about $1300 a month. Suppose that were instead paid out automatically? For the employed, the government check and increased paycheck withholding (if the standard deduction were removed) would largely cancel out. But if you lose your job, you still get the government check.
You could also see this as a reworking of unemployment benefits so that everyone always qualifies for them and they don't run out.
This is the most concisely-expressed version of the actual concerns for UBI that I've ever seen, thankyou.
> UBI in an unconstrained market is nothing else than enslavement.
How? It’s going to be a better situation than the current situation where people just become homeless and live on the streets. Yes, rent and food will cost more but there will always be vendors willing to make a reasonable margin.
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.
American voters are way too resistant against any sort of welfare and/or social assistance; UBI will NEVER get approved here.
Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility. There is a widespread false narrative that any sort of government help is leftist socialism and communism.
People on HN throw out UBI like a viable option... lol please. We can't even fund social security, SNAP or paid parental leave. UBI is a non-starter.
A true UBI might be hard to fund today, but it's not inherently hard to fund in principle.
Mathematically speaking, any UBI amount (or other expansionary monetary policy) could be offset by an equal and opposite increase in aggregate supply, resulting in more money with net zero inflation. If we had 100x higher annual growth in supply of housing/food/energy/transportation/healthcare/electronics/etc., creating 100x more annual growth in money supply would counter the positive supply shock to keep the purchasing power of a dollar stable; the fact that more dollars would exist would simply reflect the reality of having more stuff to go around.
Whether and how it may be possible to achieve such supply growth, however, is another matter entirely. While I'm personally optimistic about the technological trajectories of AI, solar/fusion, and humanoid robotics, optimizing/liberalizing Western economies and adjusting to a post-labor-scarcity world will both be at best politically turbulent.
The incentive for the wealthy to go along with such policies is that it would be a practical necessity in order to continue selling their stuff. If 90% of the population lacked a survivable income, that wouldn't be a functioning economy, it would be a precursor to civil war. Even so, private corporations won't want to voluntarily employ people they don't need, because that's just a textbook prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, publicly funding such capital distribution puts the corporations on a level playing field relative to one another while enabling business to continue as usual.
My suggestion would be to drive the policy the other way around: whenever there is deflation measured in the previous year, it automatically triggers a UBI "deflation dividend" scaled to create price stability, distributed equally to everyone.
It probably won't be a straight up cash, but something like what Cuba does: Cuba does not have a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Instead, the Cuban government guarantees basic survival through a socialist welfare system, consisting of state-controlled employment, heavily subsidized utilities, free universal healthcare and education, and a monthly ration book (Libreta de Abastecimiento) for basic food items.
For UBI to work, the precondition is Universal Billionaire Income, so it will look something like this when its implemented: The Secretive Conglomerate That Controls Cuba’s Economy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/16/world/america...
Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to UBI, but what I'd rather see is a system of guaranteed jobs and educational/training stipends (with part-time and/or remote options). The reason for that is primarily fault tolerance: in the event that a major disaster renders our AI/computational infrastructure inoperable (or adversarial), it's imperative that humanity itself act as a redundant store of all the information necessary to preserve or reboot civilization.
That being said, I do think UBI (with some guardrails) is still preferable to making everyone consume services provided exclusively by government monopolies. Not because anything provided by the government in particular is going to be magically low-quality, but because any monopoly is inherently insulated from long-term systemic incentives to compete on price and quality.
I don't understand UBI.
Let's say a burger costs $10. Then UBI is implemented. But not just like $1K/month UBI... $1M/year UBI... for everyone! There's no way that the burger is still $10 now. Right?
Won't the economy just soak up all the extra UBI money? So a burger will cost $1000 in world where everyone gets $1M/year? And like $20 when everyone gets $1K/month? Isn't it all just a wash?
UBI in a world where everyone makes roughly the same amount of money per year would be a wash. You'd just be redistributing money to people in roughly the same percent that is was taxed from them. But we do not live in that world.
And even if it does end up as a complete wash, that still seems like it would lead to a better economic outcome. You'd end up with trickle-up economics. The kind that has incentives for companies to appeal to consumers, and consumers that have money to spend on goods and services.
Markets have a bid and an ask.
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 you're right, and when we talk about UBI it should be expressed in what it can provide not some arbitrary number. Can it provide all required needs (housing, food, transport, entertainment, etc) or not?
I think of it as closer to $500/month, with supply-side government subsidies of food and housing, and then increasing taxes such that the mean person nets 0$.
Only if the government funds it by printing money. If it's funded with taxes on the rich there's no reason for any inflation.
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
Agreed. 90% of UBI would go to rent and 10% to food. That isn't some kind of artificial demand; people have always needed food and shelter.
As for higher taxes, they're trying to get ahead of the pitchforks.
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.
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.
This is also what I was thinking... how did this article get so many upvotes when it has some glaringly weak points?
Forget about UBI, most of us (the current earners) may not see social security, which we've paid into. Social security is a ponzi[1]. If jobs collapse, the inflow into the Ponzi stops, which also stops the outflows.
https://www.hoover.org/research/biggest-ponzi-scheme-earth
If we actually had UBI most people would supplement their income with stuff they enjoy doing. There’s going to be a lot of art, music, literature. Human made creative content is always going to cost a premium and people will keep paying for it.
> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
And plenty of free time to figure out how to eat the rich.
If the rich have control over the communication networks and over highly intelligent AI systems then it follows that they would use that control to prevent the masses from organizing into a cohesive political unit, and keep them fighting amongst each other for scraps.
This is already happening on a smaller scale, of course, but if AI models become capable enough to replace the majority of workers then it will put the golden apple to shame.
People will just… form communities and communicate offline?
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.
> 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
I think the mistake they're going to make is that they already have most of us fighting for scraps
But they want all of us fighting for even smaller scraps
There's always a limit to how far this can be pushed
> There's always a limit
That's true, but the limit isn't fixed, it depends on their ability to keep things under control. AI is poised to increase that ability if we allow it to develop entirely under the control of private interests.
“Figure out”? Pretty sure it’s a solved problem. It’s only social and psychological issues standing in the way. I suppose that’s what you meant.
Made harder by the fact that we make it illegal and hostile to build housing
> It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.
That sounds very nice. I would finally be able to work full time.
oh for fucks sake are you making an excuse for them now so you’re not disappointed when you’re starving?
The UBI comes from taxes and moderate money printing to balance things. Yes I expect the rich to get taxed more because otherwise things should get violent, in the extreme hypothetical of this discussion.
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
Going green is much cheaper now than it was. That may invert at some point but it's hard to predict when that might be.
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)
Even with those companies, the stock prices are stupidly inflated, but even granting them being profitable that’s still only like six companies. Thats like 1% of the s&p 500.
A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especially startups are not profitable.
We’ve seen this before when the mines and factories closed.
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.
> reskill find new work
except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge
and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed
neither of these conditions are happening this time around
so we have not "been there before"
> except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge
I think it's worse than that. The frontier labs are purporting that there won't be any "new work" required in the future—starting with knowledge workers and then eventually snaking down into more manual labor jobs via robotics.
The irony is that these same labs are still hiring engineers to build the machinery they're so convinced will make engineers obsolete. It's so paradoxical it's not true.
The only true things are that AI is a bubble, the current technology is unsustainable given the amount of compute required, and LLMs are overhyped in what they can do well versus what they need to be closely supervised with.
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.
The things some people on HN believe leaves me baffled.
“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”.
You jest, but the wonderful thing is billionaires are mortal.
The known anti-semite and Hitler admirer Henry Ford's chartiable foundation added DEI to its mandate in 2021.
Andrew Carnegie, an infamous monopolist and strike crusher...his charitable foundations helps fund science education to this day, and his university has graduated countless engineers.
The point is... billionaires will die... their capital can continue to work both in the economy and society.
I mean... unless someone figures out immortality. I dread the thought of Jeff Bezos invoking prima noctae
Billionaires are mortal.
Money isn't.
When Jeff Bezos dies, someone is going to inherit his money. There's no particular reason to believe that whoever he chooses as his heir(s) will be less disposed toward funding fascism and destroying the ability of regular people to have a voice in the world.
You invoke Carnegie, but the current generation of robber barons have shown no real propensity toward philanthropy—they donate to charity, to be sure, but in tiny (relative) amounts, and frequently to their own foundations, which make it legally charity, but in practice just another way for them to control their own money.
The proposals that the billionaires of today will give away their money (and thus power) within their lifetimes, or that their heirs will suddenly become champions of labor and the downtrodden, require some fairly significant evidence—from today, not just comparisons to the Gilded Age—before they can be considered credible.
HN used to be even more libertarian than it currently is.
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.
Could you elaborate on some of these load bearing asumptions?
Maybe your thinking that underneath the corporate SAS economy, theres a giant sea of consumer spending that props it all up.
That might be reasonable, but remember that in this future hyper unequal AI economy, only a handful of ultra wealthy people, most likely through agent proxies, make up more purchasing power than the bottom 95% combined. We're already past the 50% mark in the real world, so this is not implausible.
I'm not saying this is a good future. In fact its absolutely dystopian. But its way more plausible than the fantasy world the author is describing.
maybe lay off the kool-aid for a while, my friend
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.
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.
> participate in traditional economics
Nor in recent patterns of "democracy".
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.
> Lots of struggle. But not as bad as some folks are saying
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?
All of us? All over the world? Elect not to do something that would make us individually rich and powerful, and instead accept the risk of being left behind if someone else does it?
I don't know, I don't think many nations/organizations would go for that. If we had that level of trust, it feels like there's a lot of other bad stuff that wouldn't be going on right now.
History provides the same answer every time this question arises
> 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.
Prompt engineering of course.
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.
The main difference is that horses are incapable of organizing a revolution
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.
Well Bezos did actually state that he wants to turn Earth into a natural park.
But yeah, the robot armies don't need grain so why hike up the price of bread? Lack of grain makes those people resentful which means you need to deal with their anger. Sure, it can be dealt with but it's just cheaper to give the humans grain so they are docile. This is basic governance 101 that goes back to the romans (and further).
They also didn't slaughter all horses immediately. You can't eat that much horse meat anyways. It happened piece by piece.
The only good reason for an abrupt mass culling of the 99% (for a coldly calculating rich person with no empathy) would be game theory, i.e. them not being a contender for power any more. If there are no humans, there is nobody who can question the control of the 1%. It would be thus less about economics and more about power.
I am really rooting for the bottom 99%, myself being a part of it, but I really don't know what will happen to us.
Historically it has fit reality, but yes, this time may well actually be different...
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.
You will starve to death while Musk gets a luxury space yacht.
There's a darkly simple answer - they won't be provided for, they'll be culled.
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?
> how am I to make heavy use of frontier AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?
You are not supposed to run them locally but to pay for them running somewhere else.
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!)
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.
It may not stay that way for various reasons. Maybe bringing down from China may not make sense anymore.
It's interesting how people stubbornly remain locked into the existing systems. Every time something about automating jobs comes up there's the inevitable "how will people afford X??", and then one of the responses is usually "UBI" or similar. It's like people are literally unable to see beyond some system based on getting money. And AI will ultimately push the status quo beyond that. Even though UBI might be helpful, it's just a stopgap in the face of 100% of human labour eventually having 0 economic value. But the very concept of money, on which income is based, is rooted in the idea that human labour has positive economic value.
We have an economy like this:
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.
In your example, why didn't a 6000% ROI not attract enough investors and introduce competitions, eventually lower the ROI?
Regulatory capture.
it's stunning to me that in most verticals the middlemen seem to be eating the whole pie.
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.
Things aren't as hopeless as you assume.
I read this essay a few months ago which calmed those doomsday theories for me somewhat: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
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.
Are you getting paid to do any of these?
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
The Jevon's paradox of personal projects. Amazing.
Yeah, I always think of it as Gustafson’s Law but Jevon’s is probably more appropriate.
Tangential, but related.
When I first started my career, it was working for a company that used SVN as its version control (Git hadn’t quite won yet). Every Friday, we would do The Merge. We called it that, like a proper noun.
The Merge was almost always a 4-6 hour process because it would be taking every branch of every feature/bug we have worked on, and merged it into trunk. The day would be then spent fixing merge conflicts as they came up. I was the most junior engineer (borderline intern) and so that task generally fell on me.
Eventually, I found git-svn, and it brought a multi-hour task down to like 30 minutes, since the merging was so much quicker.
Fridays were always blocked out for me to do The Merge, but it’s not like when I got it done in 30 minutes they said “oh, umm, there’s nothing else to do, go home and forget being paid for today”. They just found other stuff for me to do and I did that.
There’s always more stuff that can be done. We won’t ever run out of potential shit we can do.
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.
In what sense is an LLM analogous (much less reducible to) a search engine?
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.
Are people really basing their world view off The Terminator?
Because this kind of talk always sounds like it’s because people thought The Terminator was a documentary.
You saw something kinda analogous in a movie once, therefore it's impossible? Am I the one basing my views off of science fiction?
It just seems like people are asserting that AI will enslave humanity without any reason to actually think that outside of speculative fiction.
I’m trying to discuss a scenario where the labor class becomes extraneous/unnecessary to the elite class, not an AI takeover.
Yeah, you guys do that a lot
Write a book about it then?
Idk. They're trying to manifest their weird cyber-dystopia head-canon
Why? Idk
This time isn't different.
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?
This is a good take. I’d like to know how you think this is going to shake out over the next few decades
Horse labor went away is a objectively decent argument
It is not. Horses are chattel, bred by humans for the purposes of serving them. Humans, even the poorest humans, are free creatures and not analogous to horses.
You sound blissfully ignorant. I'd honestly advise staying that way. The alternative is depressing af.
My bröther, I am burning so many tokens it is unimaginable. I do not think human employees are anywhere near becoming obsolete.
I'm not sure I follow
Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth?
In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs 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
> generally productivity increasing
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.
https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
This is probably the best one for coding? The two main findings are that developers didn't want to do tasks without AI (implication being that they would find it too tedious) and for the tasks that were measured, there was a speedup (and more of a speedup if you had more experience with AI tools)
Unfortunately "productivity" is very hard to measure directly. I prefer looking at how much money companies are paying Applied AI companies (a lot) because in aggregate, that meant these companies justified ROI vs. OpenAI/Anthropic directly, and sufficiently enough that large enterprises are willing to go through the time and money to spend on a vendor. It's not foolproof but it dampens the effect of companies tokenmaxxing their Codex/Claude Code to look productive.
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.
Who will vote against seizing your assets if you fire us all?
The same crowd who always vote against their own interests. To paraphrase, "give them somebody to look down on, and they'll empty their pockets for you."
It's going to get a lot harder to convince people that $outgroup took your job when $outgroup are all obviously unemployed too.
Here is the answer:
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.
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?
The real danger is that many humans never learned how to justify their existence except through labor.
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.
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.
> who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment.
Very optional consumption.
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.
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
People are confused.
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.
Wait, if I had a company, why would I want to pay my workers more so they'd buy more? That just sounds like I'm keeping my money with extra steps?
Are we still doing labor theory of value in 2026?
We need global UBI but it's not going to happen.
Not before violence takes the place. People are semi-developed selfish tribal monkeys and it sadly looks like that.
"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.
Maybe not at first. Regardless of when they get replaced by tech, you’ll see those jobs get saturated and wages go down. Which sucks because they are already low
10 years ago we said "Technology cannot replace programmers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, etc" and here we are, potentially on a cusp of replacing all of those in a decade.
We can keep moving the goal posts all we want, but eventually things will get automated.
Why can't we have automated farm land, automatic harvesting, automatic sorting, delivered automatically via robotic trucks to your door? It's not that far fetched.
It does sound like the end of the middle class though.
You can almost map each comment to a kubler ross stage
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.
Employed doing...what?
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.
Some may argue we have already reached the point of nonsensical compliance, audits and middle-management propping up the illusion of work.
Tesla sold lots of Cybertrucks to SpaceX.
SpaceX sold lots of xAI capacity to Anthropic.
They don't need us.
Where did Anthropic get money to buy (rent, actually) capacity from SpaceX?
UBI gives 100 to John. John original subsidies as handicap of 2000 USD removed. You think this will work? Or corporations will obediently stay and pay more taxes instead of just do the corporate inversion? Or maybe you keep John subsidies and then on top of that give the UBI too. So where you get the extra funding given USA already 1.5T deficit every year? Fed print more free money? And if everyone get the UBI, you think the OLED TV is still 1000USD? UBI is a fanfic by people who don't know how economy works. EVERY SINGLE UBI failed to date. Yeah sure let's try again.
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.
That's the greatest contradiction in our current system.
Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.
They can get rid of non billionaires next?
I think this is legitimate concern that a lot of well paying jobs will essentially ruin prospects of more upscale services.
1 billionaire. Pure capitalism only needs 1 xonsumer.
by the time that shows up in corporate earnings the current CEOs will be long gone with their golden parachutes from making their stock price go up
they'll have enough to live the rest of their lives in lux
so why should they care what happens to their former company, or to the plebs
Welch literally destroyed GE and but by then was long gone and laughing his way to the bank; this is just next-level Welch
that's the unfortunate reality
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?
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.
So bitcoin, but without calling it that because of the political implications.
No. Bitcoin is one coin for everyone. The attempts to create "colored coins" back in 2013 fell flat, then it became a "store of value", and punted on being a "peer to peer payment system". https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
I started Intercoin in 2018 to try to fix this. Let every community have its own coin, and Intercoin acts like the internet of coins... interconnecting them. We raised about $1M, and built the system, but we couldn't compete with the zero-sum games and scams in crypto, because investors and even "crypto VCs" wanted to just 10x at the expense of everyone else. And also regulators don't actually allow creating fake volume, which is table stakes to be listed on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko and taken "seriously" by crypto investors, so it instead became a business where we go town by town, community by community, influencer by influencer: https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf
I've interviewed lots of economists from different schools of thought, such as community currency economists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXTn52kL0Yo
I've also interviewed regulators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocrqgkJn4m0
And also founders of decentralized networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
And there's a lot more resources on https://community.intercoin.org that discusses this stuff. But Intercoin kind of failed as a "crypto" project, because we were unwilling to stoop to what projects did in order to attract capital.
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.
It's very new because it uses trustless technology at an entire community level, and UBI to put money into circulation, rather than letting the bank underwriters quietly choose winners and losers. You're not supposed to give banks the monopoly to issue the money. That's the whole point I just made.
Some communities will do better than others, but when they start running out of federal dollars, their local currency will ensure people can still eat, and plumbers will still get off their ass to fix leaks.
"Wildcat currency" was indeed a lot more unstable before the US blew them out of the water with "the greenback", which was issued to finance the civil war, backed by land taxes and tariffs, and then they passed laws making it "legal tender" for all debts, even the private ones.
Banks have been working with the US government hand in glove, if credit money is the vast majority of our M2 money supply, where do you think all that new money comes from that enables people and businesses to pay back all the loans with interest? Who do you think bails out those banks and forces them to buy treasuries? and so on.
Is it something like Great Depression scrip?
https://www.depressionscrip.com
Yeah and something like https://scf.green/story-of-worgl-and-others/
The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
The “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
Though it's unfortunate that those in power don't seem to understand that their lives are much better than kings and queens of the past. Even the average person in a first world country lives much better than royalty from even a few hundred years ago.
It's ironic, the pursuit of power usually limits its own growth. To maximize power you have to give it up, because it's multidimensional
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.
The companies are moving so fast and don't seem to care if things are rough around the edges. They're really betting big that AI is going to be unhackable.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food
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?
If money remains backed by AI goods and services, it will remain valuable no matter how scare it gets.
Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of economics. Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
> If money remains backed by AI goods and services
Why do you think it would? If 99% of people never use those services, why do you expect they'd continue to exist? Just to justify the existence of some temporary class of worker to provide services that, for some reason, aren't fulfilled by the AI?
> Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
Not at all. If you're starving and someone offers you the last diamond in the world for a weeks worth of food, its unlikely to be a worthwhile trade since without the food you'd die, and then (to you), the diamond is entirely worthless. Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of our current economic system, its not a fundamental law of reality
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.
Must be why they're all hot for humanoid robots: security that doesn't get paid or have families to worry about
This is just Terminator with extra steps.
They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
Or might have their own opinion about certain orders.
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.
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.
Are you going to be the one to round up all the homeless people and ship them off to abandoned houses in Appalachia?
Admittedly this is a few years old: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/61000-homes-are-empty-in...
61,000 empty houses in San Francisco, 10,000 unhoused people. Even if the unhoused population is under reported by an order of magnitude, there is more than enough housing available to house everyone where they currently are.
I mean, if we’re going to expropriate real estate then that’s a different discussion.
Nurse Ratched was not a sufficient argument for ceasing to protect the mentally ill from themselves, it turns out.
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?
This, 100%
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.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0b9a2a-4c6c-8394-8a66-7f86c510c8...
Yes, envy is a bitch.
There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 years ago.
Spoken like a true partner of a capital management firm! Making money off of money. What a productive part of society as a whole.
>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...
Things aren’t perfect therefore they’re terrible.
Things aren’t terrible therefore they’re perfect
We cannot all live like Americans because we do not have enough crude oil -- even not taking into account the consequences for the climate.
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.
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.
Because "wealthy" is relative. Because the sort of people who do that stop at just "rich;" they don't make it to "super-rich."
healthcare for the homeless means seeing more homeless. It’s much more effective to let them die.
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.
In the US, the government only answers to the wealthy class.
> 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.
> 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.
[1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...
Sam Altman is too stupid to realize he's arguing for nationalizing the AI companies.
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."
He is saying that while holding Worldcoin as THE solution behind his back. He hopes to show it when the time comes.
I’m quite sure he knows that this is exactly what he’s arguing for and would like his AI company to be one of the main regulated providers
He will be perfectly happy when his friends crown him the AI czar
He's not that stupid, he's just gaslighting people.
At some point a AI that maximises paperclips and one that consumes resources to achieve a few people self interested desires starts to look the same.
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.
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.
When clankers become the new consumer, we won't even be needed :)
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.
This. And unless people were not paying attention, the automated protection part is getting pretty close to reality.
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.
If history is any guide, you're technically correct, but it's no help to the lower classes. Many a divine king, high priest, or emperor has died at the hands of those they depended on. But systemic change is rare. A new despot replaces the old and the cycle continues.
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.
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.
Exactly.
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
Yup. And the disillusionment in Trump makes them a fertile ground for a _competent_ manipulator.
Trump is comically incompetent, old, and probably suffers from minor dementia at this point. Now imagine somebody like Mamdani or Rubio gaining control of these disillusioned people and telling them that it's all because of "corporations" or "liberal anarchists" (underline the correct answer).
The only way to fix it is to correct the underlying economic problems that are pushing all the wealth into a smaller and smaller number of dense city cores. Promote remote jobs, prohibit new dense housing, tax dense office space.
They have big guns. Good luck.
They aren't the only ones: on average there are 1.5 guns for each person in the U.S.
Try shooting a tank with a 9mm.
How are tanks working out in the Ukraine against an almost inexhaustible supply of cheap drones?
The real robot terminator is 50 BMG
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.
So, back to the author's title - if they leave everyone to die/with no money, who buys their services and enables them to turn a profit?
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 rich people. Let 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 UBI probably isn't the right solution 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 in developed countries is much broader now 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, 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.
And, as we know, hungry desperate people just lie down and die. Maybe nibble at a piece of cake if they have some.
This is true surprisingly often.
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
Yeah! Bones, no matter how young, do not make decent concubines.
This is clearly the goal.
Many billionaires have expressed the desire to eliminate the lower classes. Just take a look at the World Economic Forum and their goals.
French Revolution says the people win in that case but who knows.
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.
They will pay us to colonise Mars! One way trip.
"A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!"
FDR created the US welfare system which destroyed socialism in the US. I'm not predicting the future but it has basically happened before.
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...
The goal of automation is to end humanity
This is why the Epstein Class is planning a mass culling (world war).
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.
why 2030?
Totally, that's what history teaches us /s
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.
What does history teach us in this context and how is the current situation comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Not sure if I get your point
<sarcasm>History teaches us that rich and powerful think about consequences of their actions and optimize for balanced, non-violent outcomes</sarcasm>
In this context, I argue that if a significant sector of economy goes fully AI, it is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union where within few months most people lost their jobs. The wikipedia link above shows how similar scenarios unfolded in many eastern block countries, specifically mass unemployment, poverty and crime.
"Agents"
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.
That's when you whip up a war to kill off as many young men of your own people as possible. Why do you think war has always been with us?
This article seems unreasonably optimistic.
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.