[krunck]

These are projects designed to serve the US military in it's future wars against China and other "threats". Note that "other threats" includes the American citizenry. You'll be - probably already are - targets of continual AI propaganda and manipulation to keep you compliant and keep paying your taxes to support this waste.

[RiverCrochet]

When AI takes all jobs, how are the taxes gonna be paid?

[rchaud]

Same way it always has for empires throughout history - expropriating land and resources from the weak and giving it to the strong. And of course, borrowing money to finance more looting and pillaging.

[triceratops]

If AI does all the work, why even collect taxes?

[TitaRusell]

Why are we still keeping these useless "citizens" around?

[ElevenLathe]

Once they're fully depreciated we can use our ICE gulags to turn them into dog food. A big savings for imperial shareholders!

[collingreen]

They aren't. Nobody in power is so dumb they haven't thought of this yet - the scary idea is that those people in power don't think this is a problem, which implies the normal folk like us are either on our own or actively exterminated.

If the billionaire class doesn't think they need taxes or a workforce then what does that look like? If the population goes from 8B to like 5K + robots for the drudgery then all the problems go away - no more war, no more climate change, no famine, no large logistics problems.

I continually worry that these people in power see the rest of us as a nuisance to optimize away.

[RiverCrochet]

Why can't this happen now without AI?

- Certainly the current population level isn't needed to support the current number of billionaires. Isn't there about 1000 right now? I probably eat more than 2 or 3 of them.

- What happens in 100 years when the billionaires have kids and their kids have kids?

[collingreen]

Yeah I don't think AI is required for above, it just pushes the question of what's going to happen if huge swaths of jobs go away. Parent asked who is going to pay taxes in that world. I'm simply saying there's a version of this where "they" don't care because there is no intention to keep the current social order of a large tax paying lower and middle class.

[floren]

> Certainly the current population level isn't needed to support the current number of billionaires. Isn't there about 1000 right now? I probably eat more than 2 or 3 of them.

That's a good attitude, if we all set out to eat more than 2 or 3 billionaires they'll be in our stomachs and out of our hair before you know it!