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Comment by OptionOfT | Hacker News Reader

What I really find really weird here is that when I buy stock in Apple, I do so because I think Apple will create new value.

But with AI the hope is that the value created will be proportional to wages being removed.

I.e. if AI creates more value, it means that the large majority of people will actually have less money, bar a few lucky ones. You have to remember that AI is being touted as the final solution to basically do all your administrative work for you, and all your software engineering.

So if it fails we all lose a lot of money because the stock market will drastically go down.

But I don't think humanity overall will be better off if it succeeds.

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UBI never "mathed" to me. It always smelled like a pseudo solution to distract the soon-to-be-replaced long enough until they are replaced.

Well, wealth redistribution makes sense. But the idea that it would be voluntary does not.

Especially since we're going to have AI soldier robots before AI farmer robots.

Why is the hope that value is proportional to wage being removed and not increased productivity? The problem with this thinking is it already assumes an AGI/ASI replacing all work, rather than a force multiplier like with industrialization, electricity, and computing. AI being touted as the "final solution" doesn't mean anything if AGI is not right around the corner, and it isn't.

If AI is so successful that it can replace even 10% of current work that will be reflected in higher GDP and worker producitivity in the economy. Everyone has this cynical assumption that all benefits will go to the rich, but it hasn't been that way with the previous revolutions either, has it? Did cars only benefit the rich? Trains, radio, television, computers? Initially, that always seems like the case. Who could buy computers in the 80s? But the technology diffuses into the whole economy over time.

> with AI the hope is that the value created will be proportional to wages being removed […] if AI creates more value, it means that the large majority of people will actually have less money, bar a few lucky ones

That’s one (not unreasonable) prediction of AI automation. Another is that it will empower the same people whose tasks are made redundant to create value somewhere else. In a way they have to, or they will perish. The sum of all value created does not have a fixed upper bound.

Weirdly enough I have the feeling here that companies don't want to do make more money with the same (retrained) people.

They want to make more money with less people: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat...

> All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet.

> companies don't want to do make more money with the same (retrained) people

Right, a capitalist dream where the factory is fully automated and you can cut all labor cost.

But we're not competing to become laborers at a fixed set of coal mines here.

The service economy is significantly larger than industry; in the US, 77% of GDP. Worldwide, 60%.

There's a limit to how many coffee shops you can have in any one area, but it's limited by purchasing power and not by natural resources that capitalists compete for monopoly over extraction.

There is always something to do.

(Also, I'm grossly overestimating people's willingness and ability to retrain.)

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