[maaaaattttt]

I have this line of thought as well but then I wonder, if we are all out of jobs and out of substantial capital to spend, how do these owners make money ultimately? It's a genuine question and I'm probably missing something obvious. I can see a benevolant/post-scarcity spin to this but the non-benevolant one seems self defeating.

[neutronicus]

"Making money" is only a relevant goal when you need money to persuade humans to do things for you.

Once you have an army of robot slaves ... you've rendered the whole concept of money irrelevant. Your skynet just barters rare earth metals with other skynets and your robot slaves furnish your desired lifestyle as best they can given the amount of rare earth metals your skynet can get its hands on. Or maybe a better skynet / slave army kills your skynet / slave army, but tough tits, sucks to be you and rules to be whoever's skynet killed yours.

[sambull]

Good thing AI for now needs power, water and a place to exchange heat. Our version of womp rats if it goes to far I guess.

[neutronicus]

That's part of the "rare earth metals" synecdoche - hydroelectric dams, thorium mines, great lakes heat sinks - they're all things for skynets to kill or barter for as expedient

[sevensor]

I don’t think you’re missing anything, I think the plan really is to burn it all down and rule over the ashes. The old saw “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” works in reverse too. This is a foolish, shortsighted thing to do, and they’re doing it anyway. Not really thinking about where value actually comes from or what their grandchildren’s lives would be like in such a world.

[lukevp]

Capitalism is an unthinking, unfeeling force. The writing is on the wall that AI is coming, and being altruistic about it doesn’t do jack to keep others from the land grab. Their thinking is, might as well join the rush and hope they’re one of the winners. Every one of us sitting on the sidelines will be impacted in some way or the other. So who’re the smart ones, the ones who grab shovels and start digging, or the ones who watch as the others dig their graves and do nothing?

[bigfudge]

This is a bleak view. How about the ones who work hard to shape the way we adopt the technology to societal benefit ?

[moooo99]

> How about the ones who work hard to shape the way we adopt the technology to societal benefit ?

they are heavily outnumbered and "outfunded"

[salawat]

Some technology is fundamentally incompatible with some societal architecture's implementation details; AI is one such technology.

Ubiquitous surveillance is another.

[Miraste]

There are a few people like that, but not many. And certainly none in the AI space.

[mistrial9]

obviously China is going full forward and better at it, with no "Capitalism" involved

[MyOutfitIsVague]

There's plenty of capitalism in Chinese business. It's not a purely communist country, it's a hybrid system with an active market economy.

[Analemma_]

China has been communist-in-name-only since Deng, you're accidentally proving the parent's point instead of refuting it.

[greenchair]

ha, thanks for that!

[billy99k]

I already started incorporating AI into my workflow. It's definitely helped with productivity.

At some point in the future, if you aren't using AI, you won't be able to compete in the job market.

[sozforex]

At some point in the future, if you aren't AI, you won't be able to compete in the job market.

[billy99k]

Sure, maybe in 50 years. At the moment, it's a productivity tool. Strangely, by the look of the down votes, the HN community doesn't quite understand this.

[sozforex]

How confident are you that you will not be outcompeted by AI's in 3-7 years?

[blibble]

what you don't understand is you are training your own replacement

the tools feed back to the mothership what you are accepting and what you aren't

this is a far better signal than anything they get from crawling the internet

[Ray20]

That's a laughable idea.

Job market is formed by the presence of needs and the presence of the ability to satisfy them. AI - does not reduce the ability to satisfy needs, so only possible situation where you won't be able to compete - is either the socialists will seize power and ban competition, or all the needs will be met in some other ways. In any other situation - there will be job market and the people will compete in it

[moooo99]

> there will be job market and the people will compete in it

maybe there will be. I'm sure there also is a market for Walkman somewhere, its just exceedingly small.

The proclaimed goal is to displace workers on a grand scale. This is basically the vision of any AI company and literally the only way you could even remotely justify their valuations given the heavy losses they incur right now.

> Job market is formed by the presence of needs and the presence of the ability to satisfy them

The needs of a job market are largely shaped by the overall economy. Many industrial nations are largely service based economies with a lot of white collar jobs in particular. These white collar jobs are generally easier to replace with AI than blue collar jobs because you don't have to deal with pesky things like the real, physical world. The problem is: if white collar workers are kicked out of their jobs en masse, it also negatively affects the "value" of the remaining people with employment (exhibit A: tech job marker right now).

> is either the socialists will seize power and ban competition,

I am really having a hard time understanding where this obsession with mythical socialism comes from. The reality we live in is largely capitalistic and a striving towards a monopoly - i.e. a lack of competition - is basically the entire purpose of a corporation, which is only kept in check by government regulations.

[forgetfreeman]

I started a borderline smug response here pointing out how bullshit white collar and service jobs* where in deep shit but folks who actually work for a living would be fine. I scrapped it halfway through when it occurred to me that if everyone's broke then by definition nobody's spending money on stuff like contractors, mechanics, and other hardcore blue collar trades. Toss in AI's force multiplication of power demands in the face of all of the current issues around global warming and it starts to feel like pursuing this tech is fractally stupid and the best evidence to date I've seen that a neo-luddite movement might actually be a thing the world could benefit from. That last part is a pretty wild thought coming from a retired developer who spent the bulk of his adult life in IT, but here we are.

* https://phys.org/news/2023-08-people-pointless-meaningless-j...

[kmeisthax]

Neo-Luddism is less stupid when you remember that the Luddites weren't angry that looms existed. Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal.

Parliament had made a law phasing in the introduction of automated looms; specifically so that existing weavers were first on the list to get one. Britain's oligarchy completely ignored this and bought or built looms anyway; and because Parliament is part of that oligarchy, the law effectively turned into "weavers get looms last". That's why they were smashing looms - to bring the oligarchy back to the negotiating table.

The oligarchy responded the way all violent thugs do: killing their detractors and lying about their motives.

[Ray20]

>if everyone's broke >nobody's spending money on stuff like contractors, mechanics, and other hardcore blue collar trades.

Why would this happen? Money is simply a medium of exchange of values that this contractors, mechanics and other hardcore blue collar trades are creating. How can they be broke, if Ai doesn't disturb their ability to create values and exchange it?

[forgetfreeman]

Customers that have funds available to purchase the services you offer and who are willing to actually spend that money are a hard requirement to maintain any business. If white collar and service industries are significantly disrupted by AI this necessarily reduces the number of potential customers. Thing is you don't have to lay off that many people to bankrupt half of the contractors in the country, a decent 3-5 year recession is all it takes. Folks stop spending on renovations and maintenance work when they're worried about their next paycheck.

[sozforex]

When ~white collar [researchers, programmers, managers, salespeople, translators, illustrators, ...] lose their income/jobs to AI's -> lose their ability to buy products/services and at the same time try to shift in mass to doing some kind of manual work, do you think that would not affect incomes of those who are the current blue collar class?

[photonthug]

I think the obvious thing you are missing is just b2b. It doesn’t actually matter if people have any money.

Similar to how advertising and legal services are required for everything but have ambiguous ROI at best, AI is set to become a major “cost of doing business“ tax everywhere. Large corporations welcome this even if it’s useless, because it drags down smaller competitors and digs a deeper moat.

Executives large and small mostly have one thing in common though.. they have nothing but contempt for both their customers and their employees, and would much rather play the mergers and acquisitions type of games than do any real work in their industry (which is how we end up in a world where the doors are flying off airplanes mid flight). Either they consolidate power by getting bigger or they get a cushy exit, so.. who cares about any other kind of collateral damage?

[greenavocado]

Money is a proxy for control. Eventually humans will become mostly redundant and slated for elimination except for the chosenites of the managerial classes and a small number of technicians. Either through biological agents, famines, carefully engineered (civil?) wars and conflicts designed to only exterminate the non-managerial classes, or engineered Calhounian behavioral sinks to tank fertility rates below replacement.

[Beijinger]

https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/exterminations-a-review

[riehwvfbk]

Ssssh, you can't say that. Those types of brain damage are protected diversity.

[kerkeslager]

Why should we care if they make money? Owning things isn't a contribution to society.

Building things IS a contribution to society, but the people who build things typically aren't the ultimate owners. And even in cases where the builders and owners are the same, entitling the builders and all of their future heirs to rent seek for the rest of eternity is an inordinate reward.

[imtringued]

You don't. It's like Minecraft. You can do almost everything in Minecraft alone and everything exists in infinite quantity, so why trade in the first place?

This goes both ways. Let's say there is something you want but you're having trouble obtaining it. You'd need to give something in exchange.

But the seller of what you want doesn't need the things you can easily acquire, because they can get those things just as easily themselves.

The economy collapses back into self sufficiency. That's why most Minecraft economy servers start stagnating and die.

[afavour]

Unfortunately I don’t think the logic extends beyond “if we don’t do it, someone else will”. Anything after that is secondary.

[mistrial9]

What people say is not the same as what people do.. in other words, what is spoken in public repeatedly is not representational of actual decision flows

[articlepan]

Money is only a bookkeeping tool for complex societies. The aim of the owner class in a worker-less world would be accumulation of important resources to improve their lives and to trade with other owners (money would likely still be used for bookkeeping here). A wealthy resource-owner might strive to maintain a large zone of land, defended by AI weaponry, that contains various industrial/agricultural facilities producing goods and services via AI.

They would use some of the goods/services produced themselves, and also trade with other owners to live happy lives with everything they need, no workers involved.

Non-owners may let the jobless working class inhabit unwanted land, until they change their minds.

[datadrivenangel]

Better for them to give us jobs so we owe them and are less likely to revolt!

[rjbwork]

With what and against what? There will be spy satellites and drones and automated turrets that will turn you to pulp if you come within, say, 50KM of their compound borders.

[blibble]

will they care if they have an army of cheap easily replaceable robots with guns?

I miss the star trek visions of the future

now the "good" outcome is a world sized north korea, with elon as ruler

and the bad outcome is the ruler using his army of robots to eliminate the possibility of the peasant revolt once and for all

[quuxplusone]

One (satirical) answer to this question is given in Greg Egan's "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine" (2017). https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1599529933107.pdf

[kmeisthax]

The non-benevolent future is not self-defeating; we have historical examples of depressingly stable economies with highly concentrated ownership. The entirety of the European dark ages was the end result of (western[0]) Rome's elites tearing the planks out of the hull of the ship they were sailing. The consequence of such a system is economic stagnation, but that's not a consequence that the elites have to deal with. After all, they're going to be living in the lap of luxury, who cares if the economy stagnates?

This economic relationship can be collectively[1] described as "feudalism". This is a system in which:

- The vast majority of people are obligated to perform menial labor, i.e. peasant farmers.

- Class mobility is forbidden by law and ownership predominantly stays within families.

- The vast majority of wealth in the economy is in the form of rents paid to owners.

We often use the word "capitalist" to describe all businesses, but that's a modern simplification. Businesses can absolutely engage in feudalist economies just as well, or better, than they can engage in capitalist ones. The key difference is that, under capitalism, businesses have to provide goods or services that people are willing to pay for. Feudalism makes no such demand; your business is just renting out a thing you own.

Assuming AI does what it says on the tin (which isn't at all obvious), the endgame of AI automation is an economy of roughly fifty elite oligarchs who own the software to make the robots that do all work. They will be in a constant state of cold war, having to pay their competitors for access to the work they need done, with periodic wars (kinetic, cyber, legal, whatever) being fought whenever a company intrudes upon another's labor-enclave.

The question of "well, who pays for the robots" misunderstands what money is ultimately for. Money is a token that tracks tax payments for coercive states. It is minted specifically to fund wars of conquest; you pay your soldiers in tax tokens so the people they conquer will have to barter for money to pay the tax collector with[2]. But this logic assumes your soldiers are engaging in a voluntary exchange. If your 'soldiers' are killer robots that won't say no and only demand payment in energy and ammunition, then you don't need money. You just need to seize critical energy and mineral reserves that can be harvested to make more robots.

So far, AI companies have been talking of first-order effects like mass unemployment and hand-waving about UBI to fix it. On a surface level, UBI sounds a lot like the law necessary to make all this AI nonsense palatable. Sam Altman even paid to have a study done on UBI, and the results were... not great. Everyone who got money saw real declines in their net worth. Capital-c Conservative types will get a big stiffy from the finding that UBI did lead people to work less, but that's only part of the story. UBI as promoted by AI companies is bribing the peasants. In the world where the AI companies win, what is the economic or political restraining bolt stopping the AI companies from just dialing the UBI back and keeping more of the resources for themselves once traditional employment is scaled back? Like, at that point, they already own all the resources and the means of production. What makes them share?

[0] Depending on your definition of institutional continuity - i.e. whether or not Istanbul is still Constantinople - you could argue the Roman Empire survived until WWI.

[1] Insamuch as the complicated and ideosyncratic economic relationships of medieval Europe could even be summed up in one word.

[2] Ransomware vendors accidentally did this, establishing Bitcoin (and a few other cryptos) as money by demanding it as payment for a data ransom.

[sozforex]

You may find "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" book to your liking.