Once you have an army of robot slaves ... you've rendered the whole concept of money irrelevant. Your skynet just barters rare earth metals with other skynets and your robot slaves furnish your desired lifestyle as best they can given the amount of rare earth metals your skynet can get its hands on. Or maybe a better skynet / slave army kills your skynet / slave army, but tough tits, sucks to be you and rules to be whoever's skynet killed yours.
At some point in the future, if you aren't using AI, you won't be able to compete in the job market.
the tools feed back to the mothership what you are accepting and what you aren't
this is a far better signal than anything they get from crawling the internet
Job market is formed by the presence of needs and the presence of the ability to satisfy them. AI - does not reduce the ability to satisfy needs, so only possible situation where you won't be able to compete - is either the socialists will seize power and ban competition, or all the needs will be met in some other ways. In any other situation - there will be job market and the people will compete in it
maybe there will be. I'm sure there also is a market for Walkman somewhere, its just exceedingly small.
The proclaimed goal is to displace workers on a grand scale. This is basically the vision of any AI company and literally the only way you could even remotely justify their valuations given the heavy losses they incur right now.
> Job market is formed by the presence of needs and the presence of the ability to satisfy them
The needs of a job market are largely shaped by the overall economy. Many industrial nations are largely service based economies with a lot of white collar jobs in particular. These white collar jobs are generally easier to replace with AI than blue collar jobs because you don't have to deal with pesky things like the real, physical world. The problem is: if white collar workers are kicked out of their jobs en masse, it also negatively affects the "value" of the remaining people with employment (exhibit A: tech job marker right now).
> is either the socialists will seize power and ban competition,
I am really having a hard time understanding where this obsession with mythical socialism comes from. The reality we live in is largely capitalistic and a striving towards a monopoly - i.e. a lack of competition - is basically the entire purpose of a corporation, which is only kept in check by government regulations.
It doesn't matter. What you need to understand - is that in the source of the job market is needs, ability to meet those needs and ability to exchanges those ability on one another. And nothing of those are hindered by AI.
>Many industrial nations are largely service based economies with a lot of white collar jobs in particular.
Again: in the end of the day it doesn't change anything. In the end of the day you need a cooked dinner, a built house and everything else. So someone must build a house and exchange it for a cooked dinners. That's what happening (white collar workers and international trade balance included) and that's what job market is. AI doesn't changes the nature of those relationship. Maybe it replace white collar workers, maybe even almost all of them - that's only mean that they will go to satisfy another unsatisfied needs of other people in exchange for satisfying their own, job marker won't go anywhere, if anything - amount of satisfied needs will go up, not down.
>if white collar workers are kicked out of their jobs en masse, it also negatively affects the "value" of the remaining people with employment
No, it doesn't. I mean it does if they would be simply kicked out, but that's not the case - they would be replaced by AI. So the society get all the benefits that they were creating plus additional labor force to satisfy earlier unsatisfied needs.
>exhibit A: tech job marker right now
I don't have the stats at hand, but aren't blue collar workers doing better now than ever before?
>I am really having a hard time understanding where this obsession with mythical socialism comes from
From the history of the 20th century? I mean not obsession, but we we are discussing scenarios of the disappearance (or significant decrease) of the job market, and the socialists are the most (if not only) realistic reason for that at the moment.
>The reality we live in is largely capitalistic and a striving towards a monopoly
Yeas, and this monopoly, the monopoly, are called "socialism".
>corporation, which is only kept in check by government regulations.
Generally corporation kept in check by economic freedom of other economic agents, and this government regulations that protects monopolies from free market. I mean why would government regulate in other direction? Small amount of big corporations are way easier for government to control and get personal benefits from them.
You should read some history.This veiw is so naive and overconfident.
* https://phys.org/news/2023-08-people-pointless-meaningless-j...
Parliament had made a law phasing in the introduction of automated looms; specifically so that existing weavers were first on the list to get one. Britain's oligarchy completely ignored this and bought or built looms anyway; and because Parliament is part of that oligarchy, the law effectively turned into "weavers get looms last". That's why they were smashing looms - to bring the oligarchy back to the negotiating table.
The oligarchy responded the way all violent thugs do: killing their detractors and lying about their motives.
Why would this happen? Money is simply a medium of exchange of values that this contractors, mechanics and other hardcore blue collar trades are creating. How can they be broke, if Ai doesn't disturb their ability to create values and exchange it?
Money mean nothing. It is simply medium of exchange. The question is, is there anything to exchange? And the answer is yeas, and position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange. There's no reason for recession, there is nothing that can hinder ability of blue collar workers to create goods and services, all that things that when combined is called "wealth".
Don't think in the meaningless category of "what set of digits will be printed in the piece of paper called paycheck?". Think in the terms, that are implied: "What goods and services blue collar workers can't afford to themselves?". And it will become clear that the set of unaffordable goods and services to blue collar workers will decrease because of the replacement white collar workers with AI, because it is not hinder their ability to create those goods and services.
You think so? Give me the contents of your checking, savings, and retirement accounts and then get back to me on that.
> position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange.
You appear to be confused about the concept of consumers, let me help. Consumers are the people who buy things. When there are fewer consumers in a market, demand for products and services declines. This means less sales. So no, you don't get to unemploy big chunks of the population and expect business to continue thriving.
No, demand is unlimited and defined by the amount of production.
>You don't get to unemploy big chunks of the population and expect business to continue thriving.
I mean, generally replaced worker with the instruments - is the main way to business (and society) to thrive. In other words, what goods and services will became less affordable to the blue collar workers?
Enough of your trolling, go waste someone else's time.
Obviously it is affect. Supply of goods are increased and their relative market value are increased - how can this not increase their incomes?
I mean yeas, values of consumed goods will decrease, so blue color workers will be able to consume more. That's exactly what is called increase of income.
AI is poised to disrupt large swaths of the workforce. If large swaths of the workforce are disrupted this necessarily means a bunch of people will see their income negatively impacted (job got replaced by AI). Broke people by definition don't have money to spend on things, and will prioritize tier one of Maslow's Hierarchy out of necessity. Since shit like pergolas and oil changes are not directly on tier 1 they will be deprioritized. This in turn cuts business to blue collar service providers. Net result: everyone who isn't running an AI company or controlling some currently undefined minimum amount of capital is fucked.
If you're trying to suggest that any notional increases in productivity created by AI will in any way benefit working class individuals either individually or as a group you are off the edge of the map economically speaking. Historical precedents and observed executive tier depravity both suggest any increase in productivity will be used as an excuse to cut labor costs.
No, it doesn't. Where's that is come from?
I mean, look at the situation from the perspective of blue collar service providers: what is exactly those goods and services, that they was be able to afford for themselves, but AI will make it unaffordable for them? Pretty obviously, that there's about none of those goods and services. So, in big picture, all that process that you described, doesn't lead to any disadvantage of blue collar workers.
they are heavily outnumbered and "outfunded"
Ubiquitous surveillance is another.
Similar to how advertising and legal services are required for everything but have ambiguous ROI at best, AI is set to become a major “cost of doing business“ tax everywhere. Large corporations welcome this even if it’s useless, because it drags down smaller competitors and digs a deeper moat.
Executives large and small mostly have one thing in common though.. they have nothing but contempt for both their customers and their employees, and would much rather play the mergers and acquisitions type of games than do any real work in their industry (which is how we end up in a world where the doors are flying off airplanes mid flight). Either they consolidate power by getting bigger or they get a cushy exit, so.. who cares about any other kind of collateral damage?
Building things IS a contribution to society, but the people who build things typically aren't the ultimate owners. And even in cases where the builders and owners are the same, entitling the builders and all of their future heirs to rent seek for the rest of eternity is an inordinate reward.
This goes both ways. Let's say there is something you want but you're having trouble obtaining it. You'd need to give something in exchange.
But the seller of what you want doesn't need the things you can easily acquire, because they can get those things just as easily themselves.
The economy collapses back into self sufficiency. That's why most Minecraft economy servers start stagnating and die.
They would use some of the goods/services produced themselves, and also trade with other owners to live happy lives with everything they need, no workers involved.
Non-owners may let the jobless working class inhabit unwanted land, until they change their minds.
I miss the star trek visions of the future
now the "good" outcome is a world sized north korea, with elon as ruler
and the bad outcome is the ruler using his army of robots to eliminate the possibility of the peasant revolt once and for all
This economic relationship can be collectively[1] described as "feudalism". This is a system in which:
- The vast majority of people are obligated to perform menial labor, i.e. peasant farmers.
- Class mobility is forbidden by law and ownership predominantly stays within families.
- The vast majority of wealth in the economy is in the form of rents paid to owners.
We often use the word "capitalist" to describe all businesses, but that's a modern simplification. Businesses can absolutely engage in feudalist economies just as well, or better, than they can engage in capitalist ones. The key difference is that, under capitalism, businesses have to provide goods or services that people are willing to pay for. Feudalism makes no such demand; your business is just renting out a thing you own.
Assuming AI does what it says on the tin (which isn't at all obvious), the endgame of AI automation is an economy of roughly fifty elite oligarchs who own the software to make the robots that do all work. They will be in a constant state of cold war, having to pay their competitors for access to the work they need done, with periodic wars (kinetic, cyber, legal, whatever) being fought whenever a company intrudes upon another's labor-enclave.
The question of "well, who pays for the robots" misunderstands what money is ultimately for. Money is a token that tracks tax payments for coercive states. It is minted specifically to fund wars of conquest; you pay your soldiers in tax tokens so the people they conquer will have to barter for money to pay the tax collector with[2]. But this logic assumes your soldiers are engaging in a voluntary exchange. If your 'soldiers' are killer robots that won't say no and only demand payment in energy and ammunition, then you don't need money. You just need to seize critical energy and mineral reserves that can be harvested to make more robots.
So far, AI companies have been talking of first-order effects like mass unemployment and hand-waving about UBI to fix it. On a surface level, UBI sounds a lot like the law necessary to make all this AI nonsense palatable. Sam Altman even paid to have a study done on UBI, and the results were... not great. Everyone who got money saw real declines in their net worth. Capital-c Conservative types will get a big stiffy from the finding that UBI did lead people to work less, but that's only part of the story. UBI as promoted by AI companies is bribing the peasants. In the world where the AI companies win, what is the economic or political restraining bolt stopping the AI companies from just dialing the UBI back and keeping more of the resources for themselves once traditional employment is scaled back? Like, at that point, they already own all the resources and the means of production. What makes them share?
[0] Depending on your definition of institutional continuity - i.e. whether or not Istanbul is still Constantinople - you could argue the Roman Empire survived until WWI.
[1] Insamuch as the complicated and ideosyncratic economic relationships of medieval Europe could even be summed up in one word.
[2] Ransomware vendors accidentally did this, establishing Bitcoin (and a few other cryptos) as money by demanding it as payment for a data ransom.