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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

There has to be a tipping point when enough jobs are done by machines that there are not enough wage earners to buy products and services created by these machines. At that point a choice must be made, to either take the machines and lock them behind secure walls to only be used by the privileged and leave everyone else to squalor, or to fundamentally change the structure of society where work and money are no longer core elements. I've got my bets on which one will occur.

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Cost of products made solely by machines will approach zero. If machines take all the jobs, humans will live like aristocrats. Imagine telling farmers 200 years ago, that 95% of the humanity won't be farming at some point. Imagine them making bets similar to yours.

That’s not going to happen overnight. Producers will keep the price the same for a higher profit margins because other things in life still require money.

> Cost of products made solely by machines will approach zero. This is going to end capitalism.

Money is just a game coin. The aristocracies need it because they need someone to provide services to them. By creating that bond an economic and currency system has to be created as well. But once they don't need people to provide services, well, they can remove that system too.

That pretty much means the end of everything for ordinary people and the beginning of the "Lord of light". That also means that humans probably won't be able to go through the great filter -- yes I believe it is not a scientific filter, but a social one.

Labor is not the only requirement for production. Resources will become the limiting factor, and their price will rise above what non-AI-owning people will be able to afford. So back to square one of scarcity.

> there are not enough wage earners to buy products and services created by these machines.

i keep hearing this argument, but is this actually true historically when machines took over a lot of jobs (like, farming)?

We never had machines before that could take over all of the jobs. We don't yet, but we are postulating what would happen if we did.

Which one do you think will occur?

I think the movie Elysium makes a decent prediction for a potential near term future.

It looks like AI is more likely to render knowledge workers less valuable rather than making low skill workers less valuable.

Now if you get AI + Robots (with dense energy) to work together, yeah we’re all in trouble.

No need for dense energy. The robot plumber can plug itself in in your bathroom, or run a cable from the robot plumber car.

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