Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it.

A trillion here, a trillion there and all the AI companies are also telling us they're planning on wiping out 2/3 of jobs in the next 10 years? Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense.

I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs with AI, who is going to be buying *all the stuff*?

Unemployed people aren't much of a demographic, and you can't just say UBI because that doesn't make sense either. You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI just so that there's a market for people to buy stuff from them? That's nonsense.

Not trying to creep anybody out, but I just don't see a stable outcome for a society that doesn't need 2/3 of the population.

View on HN

>I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs with AI, who is going to be buying all the stuff?

Money is just a proxy for access to resources. If a machine that is capable of replacing almost all jobs is really created then money will matter much less than access to said machine. Taken to the extreme to make the point, if you had a genie that could grant your every wish, what would you need money for ?

Yeah but what if that genie charges money for wishes.

> If you had a genie that could grant your every wish, what would you need money for ?

The things that a magic AI Genie will never be able to give you no matter how far into the AGI/Singularity things get. Such as Land, Energy, Precious Metals, Political and Social Capital, etc.

Georgism is the only way forward. Tax land, energy, metals, and other constrained natural resources, not labour.

Yep. Tax the resources that capital needs to produce the stuff. This is just a simple way to think about how we think about tax regimes etc can evolve.

'Political and Social Capital" don't belong on that list.

All of these things can be easily obtained with control of a machine far enough into 'AGI/Singularity'.

Energy, Precious Metals etc are not obtained with Money. They are obtained with human work and effort, all of which we are now saying is doable by the machine.

This is what a lot of people don't get. The magic genie that lets you wish for more wishes isn't a a rack of GPUs in a DC somewhere.

It's a domestic robot that can do full maintenance on another domestic robot.

Self replicating machines are the genie that grants you more wishes. They are the genie that can turn that land, energy, and precious metals into copies of themselves.

What happens when the genies realize that the meatbags that require 3000 kilocalories a day are just a net drag on the whole system?

Altman was just this week quoted as saying things in that direction...

Money is a proxy for the value of peoples' time. Since AIs are not people, they cannot create value.

Couldnt they create value by saving people's time? Like a shovel, or a bulldozer.

OpenAI is not going to pay off my mortgage, it’s not going to replace my roof, it’s not going to fix my car, and so on. Money is still going to be very necessary for goods and services.

I don't see what point you are making here. I responded to OP asking about "who is going to buy all the stuff". The people who would be concerned with that are by and large not stressed about paying house mortgages, replacing roofs or fixing cars.

And if they were, then the machine will just do all that for them. That's the point. The things you mentioned don't need intrinsically need money. The machine can fix or create whatever car, replace whatever roof, and build whatever house.

> The people who would be concerned with that are by and large not stressed about paying house mortgages, replacing roofs or fixing cars.

Well they should be, because actually putting 2/3rds of the workforce out of work in a short, sudden fashion is probably not going to end well for them.

> The things you mentioned don't need intrinsically need money. The machine can fix or create whatever car, replace whatever roof, and build whatever house.

What machine is this? It certainly doesn’t exist and won’t in the short timeframe these AI companies are predicting everyone is gonna be laid off. Maybe, maybe if the timeframe for “no one has a job anymore” happens over say, 100 years, things might go slowly. Over two or three years? Heads will roll.

>Well they should be, because actually putting 2/3rds of the workforce out of work in a short, sudden fashion is probably not going to end well for them.

Maybe. The ruling elite being a small fraction compared to the downtrodden masses is hardly a new manifestation. Regardless, money won't be the primary issue. Again it's just (intrinsically) worthless paper. All of its current value is a social construction and new ones could take its place if necessary.

If you are one of the 2/3 replaced by a bot, will you be able to pay for those things?

We're already there. Most of us have jobs that are just made up to fill the gaps after steam power and automation. In the future, we'll have jobs that fill up the AI gap. It's UBI, but more arbitrary so we can tell ourselves we're useful while group X is not.

Hmmm. I wonder if you get to choose between window maker or window breaker.

UBI is a more of a convenient trick we use to suppress the part of our conscious that tells us "wiping out 2/3 of American jobs is Bad".

"who is going to be buying all the stuff?"

Easy - a greater portion of the world's resources can go toward the luxury market for the wealthy. This is already the trend.

It's dark but certainly not impossible to have a smaller and smaller group doing all the spending and keep spending the same, and to keep stability by force using technology.

I want no part of it.

Luxury products can only exist at the margin of a broader economy. You can have luxury sports cars only if you have a market and an entire supply chain for millions of non-luxury cars.

Companies will save billions on those pesky health insurance premiums and payroll taxes...by paying for OAI tokens instead.

Then when the labor market is nice and hollowed out, the tokens will go up in price several-fold.

I think the optimistic scenario is AI can do the jobs but humans don't become unemployed so the workforce is 1 lot of humans +2/3 that in AI. The humans are wealthier and can buy the stuff.

Like rather than Dilbert writing code, he gets promoted to pointy haired boss and manages an AI which writes the code.

> Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense.

what if… MBAs turned from economics to a religion and no one noticed?

Unbelievable! Next you’ll tell us that Elon‘s self driving car promises were all just hype for the cult…

Econ has always been a bit faith based as it is.

Depends. The basics are testable. An explanation of scarcity is available in Basic Economics and should be required reading (Sowell)… but whatever this VC nightmare thing is… I agree.

The viability of a currency is nothing more than faith.

The singularity is nigh

In fairness it's mostly Anthropic that is constantly banging the were taking your jobs drum.

Everyone else has been less explicit, likely because it's just not politically a good idea to keep pronouncing it.

It's part of Anthropics marketing though. Maybe to push the idea you can't beat us so join us?

Anthropic is running a similar marketing campaign as AWS/Devops tools which were trying to replace in-house IT. Pitch to the few that you can be 10/100x as productive and valuable on the hopes that they will push their organizations in this direction.

As far as an AI no jobs catastrophe, I doubt they have any idea / plan any better than any rando person out there. They just think being first puts them in a good spot.

I’ve seen no discussion about what the social consequences are going to be if a predicted 2/3rds of people lose their jobs.

I don’t imagine they’re pretty.

Tripling productivity is not the same as thirding jobs. Demand will grow. People enjoy products and services.

Tripling productivity? Where? You can say this but where is this measurement being sourced. Every time I ask how LLMs can simply replace a real front desk assistant I get responses like: well that use case isn't viable because <enter excuse here>.

> "People enjoy products and services." ???

WTF does that even mean? Folks are so deluded with all of these "right around the corner" solves that AI has in store that they fail to realize how out of whack the numbers game has played out. In any other reality people would be scrutinizing Sam Altman at every angle. But because of some magical AI sauce the incomprehensible numbers now magically make sense.

But for a lot of us: it doesn't. If you're going to claim hundreds of billions in revenue, just a few short years from now, you better have a really fucking great product today. Not in 6 months, not in a year - but right now.

SaaS has not been displaced. Workers have not been displaced (other than shifting their salaries to AI spend which does not equate to worker replacement). Where does madness end? The only thing that makes sense is an implosion that will ripple all the way through many other markets which will now take years to fix.

> You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI

They will have no choice. Proletariat must not be hungry and agitated. Free legal MJ for everyone!

A gramme a day...

Keeps the doctor away?

It’s from a book called Brave New World.

If you want some light reading: 1984, brave new world, and atlas shrugged will mostly get you caught up on current events.

That's the wealthy outlook: solve climate change and that pesky employment issue with those oh so annoying plebs in one smooth go.

"It may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world."

Welcome to late stage capitalism. Where non of the incentives have anything to do with helping people and reducing costs for things people care about - energy, food, healthcare, basic needs.

In the ex-USSR internet segment there was a saying on nerd forums - "Don't know matan(1), will convert you to methane". Just saying :) . It's not like billionaire sociopaths had ever any issues with "useless" humans. Peter Thiel even follows a modern neo-religion along those lines.

(1) matan - mathematical analysis, as a reference to a widely known and hard to learn university course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com