So it doesn’t answer my question. Real GPUs are bought. Presumably because real consumption is taking place. Presumably because real value (productivity) is produced. Which in turn reduces knowledge work labor (maybe?). Which may destroy jobs. Which reduces excess income and consumption in… a consumer-driven economy.
My point is, it’s actually not rational for the worst actors you could imagine. There’s a link in the chain missing for me logically and I think “billionaires” actually isn’t the answer.
Nobody knows what that work is though, and nobody wants to talk about it lest everyone realizes this all might be a house of cards.
Or rather than higher taxes, more money printing because inflation is just so incredibly low because of advancements in productivity.
That’s the only thing I can imagine so far. All other paths in my mind lead me thinking about uprising and political unrest.
(I’m not a doomer. I’m literally just trying to imagine how it will work structurally.)
Not saying that’s even remotely realistic over the next century, but it does seem to be how some of these people think. Excessive wealth destroys intelligence, it doesn’t enhance it, as countless examples show.
Its a big reason why there is a decent possibility that AI is dystopian for the majority of poor to upper middle class people. There will still be a market for things that are scarce (i.e. not labor) but the other factors of productions such as land, resources, capital, etc. People derive more income/wealth from these will win in an AI world, people who rely on their skills/intelligence/etc will lose. Even with abundance; there's no reason to think you will have a share of that.
If people don't have the money to pay for shavers, shavers either won't be made, or they'll be purchased and owned by businesses, and leased for some kind of servitude. I'm not sure what kind of repayment would work if AI and machines can replace humans for most labor. Maybe we're still in the equation, just heavily devalued because AI is faster and produces higher quality output.
Alternatively, government might have to provide those things, funded by taxes from businesses that own machines. I think, realistically, this is just a return to slavery by another name; it's illegal to own people as part of the means of production, but if you have a person analog that is just as good, the point becomes moot.
I think it gets scary if the government decides it no longer has a mandate to look after citizens. If we don't pay taxes, do we get representation?
A robot, who I will name Robort, over time becomes, say, 1/10th the price of human labor. But they do 10x the work quality and work 10x longer.
In that scenario, you could pay them the same wage but produce significantly more economic value. The robot, who won’t care about material possessions or luxuries, could make purchases on behalf of a human - and that human, overworked in 2025 or jobless - has a significant quality of life improvement.
Help, an economist or someone smarter, check my math.
But that kind of gets back to my original point, which was that I think the vast majority of economic interaction will be business to business, not just in value (the way it is today) but also in volume. I.e. in the same way that everyone has a license, maybe every family also has a registered household business, for managing whatever assets they own. The time it takes for self hosted models to approach frontier model performance isn't huge, and maybe we see that filter in to households that are able to do decent work at a cheaper rate.
Children (under the age of 18) are less productive and spend significantly less time doing anything that could be considered work and they don't pay their parents in any significant capacity.