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Comment by BirAdam | Hacker News Reader

If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs. This is an unlikely scenario. Not all things will be made/run by AIs in a short time. It is far more likely that specific jobs in specific industries will be taken by AI, and AI will slowly take the labor market. This will drive down prices on products, services, and labor. Once human labor's price is low, and once many product prices are low, the overall employment level of humans will rise. The effect of AI then is actually just deflationary pressure on all prices over time.

The really scary part is what happens to all of the newly unemployed people between the falling prices part and the rising employment part. My guess is, governments and markets won't move quickly enough and unrest is what happens.

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We might just keep making more jobs and coming up with more busy work to keep people grinding away for 40 hours a week.

If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years.

If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.

That example doesn't hold up once you expand your view to other countries. Where are all these jobs that magically materialize in labour surplus economies like Brazil or Bangladesh?

Yes, i do feel that many people woho talk about jevon's paradox element of employment have not spent much time in developing economies. You can have a lot of people doing absolutely nothing, economically, day to day and still have a functioning state

In the UK we have approx 22 million adults doing not much so you can see it in developed places too.

Googling Bangladesh unemployment seems to be 4.7% and GDP growth has averaged about 7% so not so different to elsewhere apart from faster growth from a low base?

Also just to be clear on the outcome of what you said: Humans will be cheaper than AI in order to compete.

AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a hole? You'd better do it for less human!

I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while competing against machines optimised to do a job.

In the UK 10litres of water and 10kwh of power cost about £2.50. Hiring someone to dig holes probably runs 50x that.

We are already at a point where the richest 10% of Americans represent half of total consumer spending. A lot of companies would fail but plenty of them would survive just fine if we assume AI won't take literally ALL of the jobs.

As for the civil unrest, I see Minneapolis as a bit of a dry run of what it would take to remove large numbers of presumably poor minorities along with anyone else who objects. The job is clearly more than the leadership expected but it still seems within the realm of possibility given the fact the minority party leaders are barely saying no to those in power.

If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.

Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse.

IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We started to automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to automate whole humans (or better) eventually.

Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to ignore this.

"Disruptive rethinking of economics" is a very optimistic way to put this IMO.

The big problem I see is that there is little incentive for "owners" (of datacenters/factories/etc) to share anything with such hobbyist laborers, because hobbyist labor has little to no value to them.

All the past waves of automation provided a lot of entirely new job opportunities AND increased overall demand (by factory workers siphoning off some of the gained wealth and spending it themselves). AI does neither.

Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it... Lol as if you really believe that a bunch of people will actually control everything and the govt wont?

Think harder.

of course they can, but that's a process, and a reactive one at that.

the government won't control uptime, ever.

> Who cares who owns the data center? The govt can send in the army and nationalise it

Do you think the government is going to react with mass nationalisation of private companies to fight wealth inequality? What would the threshold be? The top 1% owning half of everything? 70%? I share no such optimism. The wealthy already have their interests much better represented in politics than their share of votes should allow (and this is a really difficult problem to tackle!), this is only gonna get worse and any government action against rich people interests is going to be increasingly difficult to trigger and sustain.

Even if such mass nationalisation happened, why would you expect a better final outcome than every attempt at communism got (while doing the same thing): Namely, government just splitting up those spoils with their cronies?

The US govt is already useless in constrast with the ruling corporations. Congress can't get anything done. What makes you think they could or would do anything to the slave owners who pay them?

those are just "wishful thinking" or "Noble lies" that we are used to in the post-truth world. Until now, only creative jobs are going away. Music, Arts, Software development.. Construction Work, Garbage Collector etc, are much safer than expected after the "Robot Revolution"

I think you'd be suprised how effective robots will be at manual tasks eventually. Manipulating physical objects in space is a different problem from manipulating text strings, but efforts to solve this problem are already well under way.

Boston Dynamics has shown us that the difference between a clumsy robot and an agile one is mostly software, and the differences between current Unitree-class robot and an actual practical worker robot is also likely to be mostly software (and of course access to lots of compute power - most of the 'brain' is unlikely to be situated within the robot body itself, instead residing in a data centre some milliseconds away).

yeah yeah, we heard it million times. Noble lies.

The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief. That’s why AI is hitting creative and white-collar work first: you can replace or augment digital labor from a data center, scale instantly through subscriptions, and avoid the slow, expensive realities of manufacturing, maintenance, and safety certification.

Physical robotics is a very different game. Even if the software improves dramatically, real-world robots are bottlenecked by supply chains for actuators, sensors, batteries, precision parts, and the teams needed to deploy and maintain them. We are running out of Material to build just CPU/GPU/RAM, imagine complex Boston Dynamics robots..

People always vastly overestimate what can be done in the short term, and vastly underestimate what can be done in the long term.

I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap, at a cost far less in inflation-adjusted terms roughly that of a ZX80, connected by gigabit-speed links to a world-spanning network of similarly unimaginably fast servers connected by near-terabit optical links. And all this has changed the world in ways impossible to anticipate in the 1980s, ways that look like the most extreme cyberpunk fiction of that time. Who could have anticipated, for example, that politics is now substantially driven by covert bot farms, or that LLMs could seduce people into suicidal psychoses?

Yes, robots are going to be underwhelming for quite some considerable time, just like the ZX81 represented almost no improvement over the ZX80 and so on - each generation represented only a marginal increase over the previous. Solar panels were crap 20 years ago; toys useful only for powering pocket calculators. But they got a little bit better year by year, and small improvements compund exponentially. Now renewables are approaching 50% of electrical power generation in many places, and it's pretty clear that in another 20 years, wind/solar/battery will be the sole generation source for all but the most niche activities.

I expect the robot boosterism of the present day to bust pretty quickly when we see how different their capabilities are from the fantasy. But fast-forward just 20 years, and supply chains adapt much faster than expected (cf. Chinese electric car manufacturing) and the concept of ubiquitous robotics seems much more feasible. It certainly seems likely that if we can make roughly 100 million cars every year, we can make robots at a similar rate. I think it's likely to change the world in ways we can't imagine yet.

People live longer than 20 years, and the average person born today can expect to see perhaps four such technological revolutions. Think long-term.

Your laptop is an advanced computer, but the intelligence and computer power is in the cloud. GPU is expensive and no way we can provide it to everyone on earth. Material-wise we have limitations. Unless we destroy the earth, we won't have the amount of raw material that we need to automate cheap jobs. The ROI is too low.

So the likely trajectory is not a sudden wave of millions of helpful humanoids, but selective automation in structured environments like warehouses, factories, controlled logistics, where conditions are predictable and ROI is clear. Meanwhile, messy, unstructured "dirt jobs" persist as human work because humans are still the most adaptable system available at the lowest upfront cost, maybe not today in the welfare state in Europe, but for sure in other places on Earth...

> I'm reclining right now typing on what would have been in the 1980s an unimaginable hypercomputer lying in my lap

But in the 80s you would have a home. In 20 years, I doubt we will be able to buy a home, or even have Humanoids to serve us.

> The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief.

Quick question: imagine there's a new commercial robot that can essentially work at your house like a tireless professional maid/butler. It costs as much as a new car, which you're used to change every few years.

Who do you think will profit more in our capitalistic society the car manufacturer, or the robot manufacturer?

> Who do you think will profit more in our capitalistic society the car manufacturer, or the robot manufacturer?

Probably the robot manufacturer will be the car manufacturer. But Robot won't be for everyone, as Teslas are not for everyone, and again: The supply-chain for sensors, computer chips are already on the limit, imagine if we suddenly want to build Humanoids. So mostly you won't have your humanoid. You just won't need a Robot at home, because you won't have a home in first place.

> If machines did all the repetitive, labor intensive, productive work, including building more machines, the natural consequence would be a very disruptive rethinking of economics. Post-scarcity is only a disaster if money exists. People would still work, but as a hobby, not as a way of survival.

That's what they told us during the industrial revolution. And also what they told us during the last automation rush of the 70s/80s

It's a political problem, not a technological one, and it's been that way for at least 100 years.

> the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs

What do you think money is...?

Money is a way to indirectly trade labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.

> If all jobs were taken by AI in a short time span, the companies owning and operating those AIs would go out of business as no one would be able to afford the products made by the AIs

I think The companies would go out of business if the government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or national security interest. Do you think that would not be the case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a study of our history would reveal this as the more likely scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any amount of it.

The end game is nationalisation lmao. How people cant see this is mad...

It wouldnt be the first time in history a govt has taken into their hands an organisation that is deemed too powerful.

if the government is owned by corporations via the stock markets than governments taking over organisations is privatization via a majority shareholdership and not nationalization.

Are you seriously this delusional? THe leaders of tech firms operate at the behest of Trump. Not the other way round.

Who funds those tech firms? It's not Trump. His power is mostly theater to his constituents and those who funded Trump: spoiler: he's not entirely self funded, and some of his funding is at least from others so he's conflicted in his self interests to others. We call this a classic conflict of interest.

How did Trump get where he is? Who was and is his supply chain? Who made him? Who did he 'use' and 'need' to 'build himself'?

Yeah I can see that. Though the separation between "govenrment" and "corporation" is pretty thin already. So nationalization or corporitization, whatever you want to call it, its just a label for rich and powerful people concentrating power and deriving benefits.

There are millions of jobs that can be fully automated with 20th century technology but are still done by humans today because 1) third world labor is just too cheap 2) unions and other job protection policies.

Therefore the scenario where 'all jobs being replaced in a short time span' is simply impossible.

Sometimes that delays it.

But when the tech is good enough and cheap enough then the picketing unions find their only barganing chip, that of witholding their labor, has become a toothless threat: no matter how long and hard a person of the profession "computer"* refuses to work for me for daring to have an unauthorised "electronic brain"**, the absense of that labour will not cause me any loss.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

** https://archive.org/details/electronicbrainh00cook/mode/1up

I think you arn't paying attention: AS long as there's 1 seller and 1 buyer, Capitalism will happily burn the rest of the population.

Sure there's some other limits on social cohesion, but the idea that we can't squeeze upward and leave a bunch of poor people destitute is optimistic.

It's also how you ensure no one thinks: Hey, maybe capitalism isn't an optimal distribution of social good.

Except the services that are intractably human: educators, judges, lawyers, social workers, personal trainers, childcare workers.

Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

The best educator I’ve ever had is ChatGPT.

How scalable is that in the sense that teachers have been obsoleted and we can run zero-staff schools?

One would assume - if this were to happen - that supply and demand would bring prices back down, as everyone would rush to those fields.

Our increased efficiency producing manufactured goods, technology, food, and clothing has already produced this effect in healthcare, education, childcare, and more. That's how the effect works.

The only question is, are we prepared to deal with the social ramifications of the consequences? Are we ok with new crises? Imagine the current problems dialed up 10x. Are we prepared to say, "the market is in a new equilibrium, and that's ok"?

Healthcare, education and childcare are either free or affordable in almost all developed countries.

Even in places where these services are expensive, it does not seem to be because the workers are highly paid.

They are not free, they are paid for by taxes. And in pretty much all countries, irrespective of funding model, these services have increased in price much faster than general inflation. This is the Baumol effect in action.

I imagine personal trainers and childcare workers would see a drop in demand and perhaps also an increase in supply if a bunch of people suddenly lost their jobs to AI.

There's already examples of lawyers offloading work to ChatGPT even though they weren't allowed to. Also educators (and students), though if all other work is automated, what's there to educate for, and how would the prospective students pay?

Social work, childcare, for now I agree:

My expectation is that general purpose humanoid robots, being smaller than cars and needing to do a strict superset of what is needed to drive a car, happen at least a decade after self driving cars lose all of the steering wheels, and the geofences, and any remote safety drivers. And that's even with expected algorithmic improvements, if we don't get algorithmic improvements then hardware improvements alone will force this to be at least 18 years' between that level of FSD and androids.

The big tech AI barons absolutely claim that their LLMs can replace educators, judges, lawyers, and personal trainers. I've seen some vague claims about childcare robots, but for whatever reasons anything that's not pure software appears to be currently outside their field of vision. They're unlikely to make any claims about social workers because there's not enough money in it.

No; the services that seem most intractably human, at least given the current state of things, are very much those in personal care roles—nurses, elder care workers, similar sorts of on-the-ground, in-person medical/emotional care—and trades, like plumbing, construction, electrical work, handcrafts, etc.

Until we start seeing high-quality general-purpose robots (whether they're humanoid or not), those seem likely to be the jobs safest from direct attempts to replace them with LLMs. That doesn't mean they'll be safe from the overall economic fallout, of course, nor that the attempts to replace knowledge work of all types will actually succeed in a meaningful way.

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