Who pays for that value, and from what, if all knowledge workers lose their jobs?
It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.
It sounds like the economy would largely reduce to the small minority class of independently wealthy people.
It takes a skilled knowledge worker to use these things.
And worse, these are the tasks that help the junior people eventually grow into the skilled knowledge workers required to operate models, so there's a pipeline problem too.
I'm already seeing tech execs/hiring managers getting very frustrated at the lack of new-senior-engineers to hire. The market will correct for this in time.
The demand for senior+ engineers has remained steadier through this downturn from my anecdotal observations, with new grads being by far the most negatively affected, but even that seems to both be shifting from talking to people a handful of years younger than me + CS enrollment has already precipitously declined [2] as the narrative that programming is dead because of AI has spread rapidly.
All that leads me to think it's going to be a junk-show over the next decade for people trying to hire as the pipeline was destroyed.
1: https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo... 2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/13/compute...
To follow on from that comment, if the growth in breadth of capacity of AI leads to a decrease in the risk of running a smaller business, which I don't think is an unreasonable prediction, then it's not inevitable people do lose their jobs. Employers get smaller, higher-leverage, and more plentiful.
Not completely, but compared to the middle ages we 50x'd their output. Which is a great illustration what it means to make a job 50 times more productive. We went from 80-90% of the population being required to barely make enough food for everyone to survive, to 4% of the population producing such an abundance that consuming too much food has become a systemic health issue
I'm pretty skeptical on the outcomes and the costs also (natural and social as well), but possibly we can have 50x or even more software in the end! The phrase will be truer than ever:
> Software is eating the world!
https://www.agtechmarket.net/news/laserweeding (random web search, I don't vouch for this site, it just looks legit at a glance)
Next innovation could be to scale succession planting, which keeps the ground from being exposed in between crops and lets you transition from nitrogen fixers to users quicker, getting more food out per acre while reducing fertilizer usage. But you can't do that with current harvesters and human labor is too valuable to spend on this.
Also take broccoli harvesting, typically you get a few big heads, then it keeps producing smaller heads, but it's not economical to harvest the smaller heads with human labor. Robotic harvesting lets the same plant produce more food per acre and uses the energy needed for new plants instead to keep producing food.
This is where this is going, the whole industrialism is totally self-serving, and for every problem its answer is digging deeper in the rabbit hole, and creating 2 more problems in addition to solving the initial problem only half-way.
I don't want to say what you are suggesting is not possibly useful, I just want to emphasize how stuff works out in reality, in addition to doing some nice stuff like what you called out (the halfway solution to the problems). All we get is more alienation and humans getting depressed and feeling a lack of purpose... but somehow we cannot afford to pay fair prices for the agricultural work, and pay fair prices for the food, and not overproduce and overpollute... and the same thing is happening in every aspect of the human condition, not only food production, which is the most basic and ancient activity we have been doing.
I have done succession planting in my home garden, but it's definitely not worth the time investment for the food alone. But it's real neat to see your aphid problem disappear as the nasturtiums pop up without any pesticides needed. You can even feed the world with it, if most everyone wanted to be farmers... (as opposed to some Organic practices which is the same mass farming but the pesticides are "naturally-derived")
There are other grazing animals in addition to cows btw, as temperate marshland forest can be grazed by pigs, for example. Also sheep, and goat exist for example.
Vegetable production is nice, but we don't need to work all land. We don't need to produce so much food that we cannot use up meaningfully, just waste or take to places to create overpopulation there also. Reckless industrialism and capitalism are the core barriers to sustainability. (the former includes socialist planned-economical models also, we've seen our part of that also)
This also leads to a kind of a singularity.
They do not care unless these companies can get a bailout.
UBI only exists for companies that are too big to fail. Case in point, 2008 and SVB when there was too much money on the line.
One of the AI companies attempted to guarantee themselves a way for the government to bail them out if they were close to defaulting on the debt from the data center build out.
Arguably, the main impact of securing SVB depositors above the $250k limit is that it prevented thousands of people from being laid off that week, as their employers wouldn't have had the money to make payroll the following Wednesday.
Sure, but is that the case now? Is everyone made whole when a bank fails and they have more deposits than the insurance limits? Or only when it's the well-connected / too-big-to-fail?
Looks like the answer is no: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/a-small-banks-failure-le...
So I don't think it's unreasonable to describe SVB as a bailout. Not for the investors, but for the depositors. Has anything changed to reduce the moral hazard / make it less likely to recur?
But if there was a bank failure at a regionally smaller bank with a regular customer or startup depositing the same amount of money over the insurance limit, their money is gone.
Just like Intel got a "bailout" from investment as chosen by the US government, AI will eventually have a very similar story.
Pretty much and has been for awhile.
https://nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/100-NYU-...
In early 2023, within the span of two months, the United States experienced three out of the four largest commercial bank failures in U.S. history, as Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and First Republic Bank all toppled.1 Yet, despite these banks having roughly $300 billion in uninsured deposits at the time of their failures2 and despite the failures costing the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) an estimated $38 billion, uninsured depositors took no losses in any of the failures.3 While these results were striking, they were far from unusual. Since 2008, uninsured depositors have experienced losses in only 6% of total U.S. bank failures.
...
Formally, the United States caps deposit insurance at $250,000 per account,6 but, in reality, the post-2008 financial system comes close to providing de facto total deposit insurance covering all amounts in all accounts.
What's the U stand for in UBI?