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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

All well and good if you are employed, well off and rich. But if AI starts eliminating jobs, even being rich may not help you in the coming crash. Why a crash ? Most people will not be able to buy anything other than a bit of food and pay their rent, if they are lucky.

I doubt we will see most of these impacts for 10 to 20 years. I wonder if this is a reason Trump wants low interest rates ? With low rates the rich can borrow at a low fixed rate and purchase items like Gold and Land. Then when rates have to raise, more $ for them.

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> I doubt we will see most of these impacts for 10 to 20 years

Have you been to Seattle lately?

I was in Seattle around 8 years ago. If I go tomorrow, will I notice any real difference?

The number of unsheltered homeless people has doubled in that time.

I truly believe the goal is to bring blue cities back to the 70s through 90s. Dangerous, gritty, dilapidated, horrible schools, corrupt government. But it will be cheap to rent and artsy 20 year olds / older homosexuals without children will enjoy it

It doesn't make sense. If there is a collapse in demand, prices will follow.

It's also reasonable to expect prices to go down if there is a productivity boom.

That expectation only holds together if you think of consumers as a single monolithic cohort. But prices can stay high and price out most consumers as long as there is a minority of rich ones still able to afford it:

https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/bifurcated-how-the-...

Like they are gonna buy all the flour and tshirts at high prices?

The op didn't say that scarce goods would become something only the rich could afford, they said no one would buy anything.

How many bags of rice do rich people buy on average, would you say?

Suppose it depends how many serfs they've got. /cynical

If they can resell them abroad at a higher price than locals can pay? Then, all of it.

Sell them abroad... to... _other_ poor people? Or, aaah, it makes sense as your sibling comment was saying to trade between them in order to feed their serfs.

It's only reasonable if you ignore literally everything that capitalism has done in the last 50 years.

Prices can only go up because to do otherwise harms shareholder value. None of the COVID inflation prices have come back down even though supply recovered. Prices continue going up.

People spend less of their income on basic needs than they did 50 years ago.

Housing breaks that somewhat, but on average people consume more of it (larger, higher quality spaces), so it isn't really apples to apples.

That's if AI goes full singularity. Barring this scenario, it might be the end of while collar dream and social mobility in general, but not nessarily the catastrophic "nobody buys anything" change

I don’t see 70 million Americans transitioning from white collar “knowledge worker” to plumbers and electricians in the 18 months the hype men are quoting. Many don’t even have the physical capabilities for it.

I'm not seeing that either. I rather thought of white collar work being devalued rather than disappearing. By "end of white collar dream" I meant that you won't be making good money with it, because it would be commoditized with all workers being pretty much the same as far as employers concerned - but there will not necessarily be less work to do. And you will probably be able to afford food, clothes and shelter.

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