If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff? | Hacker News Reader

If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

23 pointsbabua20 comments

AI agents are getting rolled into everything. Companies will use them because they’re fast and cheap. But if agents replace a lot of paid work, people lose income. Less income → less spending → businesses push even harder on automation. Feels like a loop.

Cheaper prices help, sure, but not if folks don’t have paychecks. New jobs might show up, but I’m not convinced the timing works. Also, if most gains go to a few owners, their extra spending won’t replace everyone else’s demand.

So what actually keeps demand up? Profit-sharing so workers own a piece? Some kind of income floor from “automation dividends”? Totally new markets that soak up all this output? Or maybe real-world limits (energy, compute, regulation) slow things down. I might be missing something—what’s the concrete mechanism here?

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This Fred Pohl book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagonist of the story gets his robots to consume his good and fears that he'll get in trouble for this but instead he gets a medal. The original version of the short story as it appeared in the April 1954 Galaxy magazine is linked from the Wikipedia article.

Brilliant story and so clever. The despair at having to consume is excellent.

I've despaired at having consumed too much. It's commonly called hoarding, and it ruins your life.

Never pay to store your stuff somewhere else.

The strangest thing is that a lot of the people I know who pay a lot for multiple storage lockers are poor and the content of the storage lockers is not valuable at all.

I agree. Although there are some exceptions, such as people in the jobs that move a lot (military, traveling nurse, etc).

When you're poor, you've got a vast collection of things that might be helpful in some future situation, and it seems reasonable to keep all of them, because of the sunk cost fallacy. Meanwhile, due to the reality of the situation, you waste most of your disposable income needlessly.

abundance without incomes stalls demand— what’s our real-world “robot consumer” to keep the loop running.

Regarding the popular belief that AI will take jobs... If 10 (or 2 or 20...) developers can be replaced by 1 dev using AI, why fire 9 (or 1 or 19) of them when your competitors now could be 10X (or 2X or 20X) more productive by giving AI tools to their 10 (or 2 or 20...) devs?

If you own an organization and can afford to pay the salaries of 10 (or 2 or 20...) souls, you'd have to be very cheap and short-sighted to prefer reducing your payroll instead of boosting your productivity 10X (or 2X or 20X).

I don't see AI taking jobs, I see AI:

- Taking companies/organizations owned by cheap people.

- Taking huge projects ―like building a browser or an OS from scratch― to small groups or even solo developers.

We see the opposite happening with companies getting rid of employees and pouring ever penny into AI not to get left behind in the race.