I wonder what happens if your consumer base has all had their incomes replaced by AI? Who buys your product your now making with it? Does AI just lead to the end of capitalism as we know it?
If the AI's can truly replace humans to the point where there is nothing useful for your humans to be doing, then it would cease to matter whether or not the rulers produce and distribute the things the consumers need/want. You'd need good enough AI security to handle any unrest which ensues, and protect any natural resources that might be important to you.
If you no longer can utilize any of the labor of your consumers, then the only products you need to make are: 1) The things you personally want, and 2) The things needed to maintain sovereignty against any other similarly advanced groups. Category #1 would be a very small volume, but Category #2 might be industrially more than the entire world's current production of everything, just for your fiefdom. It would be unstable until someone conquered the entire globe, and would likely only need to provide for about 500-5000 people in their "court" to provide for the rulers own selfish social needs.
Absolutely. AOC became an elite before she became wealthy. Same for J. K. Rowling and most academics at the top of their fields.
0: https://president.columbia.edu/news/hillary-rodham-clinton-j....
Every one that achieves cultural relevance or an administrative post absolutely is. Some of those are born into it. Most are not.
You’re still confusing wealth with power. Plenty of people who never need work again are not elites, e.g. Steve Wozniak. And plenty of elites don’t have enough saved to survive extended periods of not working, e.g. many in television or politics.
> don't know too many university presidents / deans / provosts who personally control enough wealth to have the power to change the direction of their society
Larry Summers.
They don’t wield wealth as power. They wield influence. Same as how a U.S. Senator need not be wealthy to be powerful; if anything, they wield their power to produce wealth.
This reminds me of Marinetti predicting electricity will usher in a post-scarcity world [1]. (Like, students will be hooked up to outlets to learn faster, electricity in the ground will make crops grow faster, flying cities will make land scarcity a thing of the past, et cetera.)
For example, automation may increase worker productivity but that doesn't benefit the worker but the owner: the worker may actually be worse off because the owner will now likely fire workers due to the reduced labor need and the resulting reduction of available jobs suppresses wages. On the other hand, some jobs where workers would outperform automation will be underpriced to the point that it's not worth paying someone a livable wage for the quality advantage over an automated process at a fraction of the cost so those jobs go away too.
Or for food production we may be producing an abundance but as the total need is limited, instead of reducing prices because of the increased supply, we end up instead importing out of season produce from the other side of the world, min-maxing convenience food for appeal/addictiveness and destroying unsold goods to avoid lowering the market price.
Or for drugs we literally value the sanctity of patents over the lives of people in underdeveloped countries who couldn't afford the medicine in their lifetimes (cf. the refusal to suspend/discount COVID vaccine patents for poorer countries to allow them to produce generics to vaccinate their populations).