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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand the economics of the full AI rollout.

Who the hell is buying anything if more than 50% of the workforce is unemployed? And among the post-AI employable, every job that isn't highly skilled is going to have the wages pushed to the floor due to rampant unemployment.

None of this shit works unless we figure out "Star Trek welfare"...

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When you think about it, we're only "useful" to billionaires because we have something that they want, and that something is not called "work". Work is just that thing that people must figure out before they can generate wealth. Money is the goal, work is just something in the way.

As most human tasks are automated away, the bargaining power of the (figurative) 99.9% of people who were actually producing wealth by doing actual work will converge towards zero.

I wish I had something positive to share, but if you don not happen to be a billionaire, then the future looks grim.

Agreed. That said, when it does get grim, a few billion of net worth probably isn't as consoling as it used to be for the billionaires when the head of your security team has instated himself as chief warlord of your bunker and you're no longer allowed to make eye contact with your former wife and mistresses.

Do you think 99.9% of people will elect to just lay down and die?

based on how we've been behaving over the last 10 years, essentially yes. We are all just hoping to crawl up high enough that us and our offspring might survive while the world literally burns and billionaires and capitalism managed to destroy any movement to slow down our destruction of our environment and sustainable economies for faster short term extraction of profit and power for themselves.

in the short term, ai has been job-creating and unemployment remains quite low. The technology has mostly been augmentative (like every other technological revolution beforehand)

if (big if) the technology continues to improve at the current rapid pace, then we would need to organize welfare for the bottom % of population that cannot compete with ai or robotics in any feasible way, but that kind of presupposes insane productivity growth such that living off 'welfare' is a life of luxury compared to the average life right now

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