[ben_w]

Long term, or short term?

Short term, money physically exists and gets spent, so if you wave a magic want of oversimplification and transition all labour to AI instantly, all the money currently in bank accounts and wallets gets spend on the same businesses it was already getting spent on, a lot of which gets spent on stuff from other businesses who have in this scenario also replaced all their labour with AI.

Eventually, perhaps quickly, all this money ends up in the hands of shareholders and landlords. There's a lot of both in the economy; famously retirement funds, but smaller-scale shareholders and landlords also exist. I wouldn't want to guess what the distribution looks like, probably highly variable between countries not just social classes (the definitions of which themselves can vary between countries).

Long term, money exists as a convenient fiction to help us organise transactions of goods and services: while it may be physically possible to eat gold and banknotes, you're not getting any real nutrients out of it when you do. So in a world where goods and services come from machines, the options are too broad to forecast: humanity could be relegated to the same role and economic stature as other primates (both in and out of zoos), or we could get universal UBI denominated in machine labour credits which lets each of us live better lives than the most extravagant billionaires live today.

[fluidcruft]

I don't know. It just seems odd because money was used as an abstraction of labor and if labor disappears it seems like money has no fundamental value. If you can't pay people to do something (because machines are doing all the labor). Then people have no money and money has no value to people. Industrialization resulted in transition to service-based economy but this new wave of machines are being said to replace service work.

I'm just trying to understand if suppose you have fully robotic farms and fully automated slaughterhouses and fully automated McDonald's, who is McDonald's selling anything to and how do these people supposedly buying fully-mechanized burgers have jobs? Something just doesn't add up about this in my head about how this equation balances.

UBI ultimately seems like socialism with extra steps. Mostly is comes across as billionaires desperately begging for an alternative to being nationalized.

[BobbyTables2]

I’ve also wondered about this.

Industrialization allowed people to shift human labor from agriculture to factories and such.

Seems like intellectual labor became more possible as people looked beyond subsistence but also more valuable since a greater population could drive demand for more than just subsistence related activities.

If both aren’t done by many humans, what’s left? Sports training and massage therapy? Sports training might not even be safe…

OTOH, my current lifestyle is already weird if I think about it. Developing software for a machine that I cannot make myself, whose raw materials I cannot obtain, using energy I cannot produce on my own — somehow entitles me to get a particular amount of goods and services from others including food, healthcare, entertainment, landscaping, and manufactured goods.

We live in interesting times…

[ben_w]

> If both aren’t done by many humans, what’s left? Sports training and massage therapy? Sports training might not even be safe…

Peacock tails.

As in, things where the effort itself is the point, to show off that you are capable of surviving when you consume resources so extravagantly on something other than (or even detrimental to) mere survival.

This includes stuff like hand-made art, being in a literal cult, extreme sports, and also refusing modern medical interventions/seeking out infections.

You may ask how someone can get paid for those things; I don't know, but we did manage to monetise talking to each other (ads on Facebook) and being locked in a house with some strangers while everyone's under surveillance cameras for a few weeks (TV show Big Brother).

[andrekandre]

  > how do these people supposedly buying fully-mechanized burgers

stand in line and watch some ads; the more you watch, the more you can order!

[ben_w]

What good is showing ads to someone with no money?

(Only answer I can think of is political ads).

[ben_w]

> I'm just trying to understand if suppose you have fully robotic farms and fully automated slaughterhouses and fully automated McDonald's, who is McDonald's selling anything to and how do these people supposedly buying fully-mechanized burgers have jobs? Something just doesn't add up about this in my head about how this equation balances.

Well, people need to eat, so either the customers are on government support, or it comes from passive income, or from savings.

The people without those options, do it the old fashioned way: pick berries, throw rocks at animals, rub sticks for fire to cook them, or starve. Mostly starve, as the maximum number of humans who can survive as hunter-gatherers is 100-1000x smaller than the current global population.

> UBI ultimately seems like socialism with extra steps.

I agree. It's very much "from each according to their ability, oh wait we're all strictly worse than machines I guess that's from each nothing, to each according to their needs".

> Mostly is comes across as billionaires desperately begging for an alternative to being nationalized.

Perhaps, but that feels like claiming they're playing 5D chess, when Zuckerberg only plays Settlers of Catan with sycophants who let him win.