And then? I'll compensate the loss of thousands of dollars I don't earn anymore every month with the profits of a $100 investment in some ETF?
> If the labor is worthless, the great majority of people will be poor. Due to the law of supply & demand, property will be worthless since there will be very little demand for it.
Property has inherent value. A house I can live in. A farm can feed me. A golf course I can play golf on. These things have value even if nobody can buy them off me (because they don't have anything I want). Supply and demand determine only the _price_ not the _value_ of goods and services.
> Countries with or without resources often have poor citizens simply because being poor is the natural state of mankind. The only system that, historically, allowed the greatest number of people to exit poverty is capitalism. Here in Eastern Europe we got to witness an astonishing change of fortunes when we switched from communism to capitalism. The country and its resources didn't change, just the system and, correspondingly, the wealth of the population.
None of this has any connection to anything I've written. I'm talking about the concept of a resource curse. Countries rich in natural resources (oil, diamonds, ...) where the population is poor as dirt because the ruling class has no incentive to share any of the profits. The same can happen with AI if we don't do anything about it.
> How can they become richer when most people are dirt broke (because they were replaced by AIs) and thus can't buy their products and services?
Other rich people can buy their products and services. They don't need you to buy their products and services because you don't bring anything to the table because all you have is labor and labor isn't worth anything (or at least not enough to survive off it). Put differently: Why do you think rich people would like to buy your labor if using AI/robots is cheaper? What reason would they have to do that?
> Look at how even Elon's fortunes shrink when his company misses a sales forecast. He is only as rich as the number of customers he can find for his cars.
You're proving my point: Elon still lives in a world where labor is worth something. Because Elon lives in a world where labor is worth something it is in his interest that there are many people capable of providing that labor to him. This means it is in his interest that the general population has access to food and water, is well eduacated, ...
If Elon were to live in a world where labor is done by AI/robots there would be little reason for him to care. Yes, he couldn't sell his cars to the average person anymore, but he wouldn't want to anyway. He could still sell his cars to Altman in exchange for an LLM that strokes his ego or whatever rich people want.
The point is: Because rich and powerful people still have to pay for labor, their incentives are at least somewhat aligned with the incentives of the average person.