this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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I don’t understand. The economy is not only driven by production (workers/labor), but also by consumption (people, also workers).
Let’s say AI can perform the production side without any human labor. That eliminates the workers (who are also the consumers). So, what do you get when you remove most/all consumption from the economy and are left with just AI?
You get what's in the movie Elysium.
They don't care. To them, the world is doomed anyway. It'll all have to collapse before they can rebuilt it into a better world, so better to accelerate the collapse as fast as possible so they can start sooner on the rebuilding part of the plan. And if you have to break a billion human shaped eggs to make a tech bro wet dream omelet then that's what'll happen because afterwards they say humanity as a whole will be much better off.
It's very cold hearted.
Elysium has human laborers, though. The main character literally works at a factory creating the droids for the station's uses.
It seems implied that they have labor and work as a means of control and less because they need to. Most of the work seemed to be just oppressing people like him.
I don't see any attempt at the movie's part showing that the products they were making weren't somehow used by the citizens of Elysium. The droids are everywhere, implying that they fulfill a need based on what remaining manufacturing can be done on world.
It's not meant to portray a society that has a fully automated economy, it's about one that relies on the other for creating goods that will be used and priced out of the range of the laborers who created it.
In these people's mind it's always somebody else who is supposed to employ people and pay them salaries.
It's roughly a Tragedy Of The Commons situation: each such individual wants to take without giving, and it is indeed sustainable if only a few do it, but as others see them gaining from doing that, they too want to do it - eventually in aggregate there will be too much extraction for what little production there is to keep up and the whole thing collapses.
This has already been going on with Globalization - notice how in the last 2 decades or so for the average person in wealthy nations it feels that money doesn't go as far and the abundance of shinny toys still fails to make up for a feeling of constant pressure and uncertainty, and how what we are told is the inflation adjusted amount equivalent to a 1960s blue collar worker salary that paid for a house, car and a family of 5 back then, in the present day barelly covers housing.
IMHO, there are already too many with too much power (and, remember, Money is Power) whose relation to Society is purelly extractive, and the political direction in most Western nations, especially the US, is for things to keep on getting worse so it seems we're bound for dystopia.
IDK Wall-E?
I'm not sure this is true, most of recent big tech changes seem to have been driven through a "invest a lot at loss, then monetize" model. So I don't think this relies on demand anymore.
Where do you think the money for the monetize step comes from if it's not demand?
Funding, right?
Don't companies like Twitter, Uber, OpenAI, Bumble etc. fully rely on them for growth and try to actually be profitable once they have reached all the audience they can have?
As a user this is especially infuriating because many of these service have an expiration date, for example there will be a new dating app every so often, which will start its enshitification process after about 2 years.
Humans consumers will still exist, and at that point we would have no choice but to facilitate some kind of UBI or else there's going to be a few billion people that aren't going to just sit around and die.
A human surplus. This on steroids possibly?
until there isn't a human surplus in the consideration of those who manipulate the easily led...
Is this some satire that's gone over my head?
Well, what I seen this image as was the classic divide and conquer strategy of the capitalist classes against the working class and/or arbitrary race category to enable them to control and/or murder at will.
However, this image is actually a complete gas lighting exercise in using toxic characteristics from capitalism to describe communism. I didn't notice the hammer and sickle, which to be fair makes no fucking sense...
The relevance to the above post was really trying to play on
"The Production of too many useful things results in too many useless people"
which I take as a satirical poke at the deficiencies of capitalism, although it's of unknown origin as far as I know..
If automation does reach a point where labour isn't needed, then it may well encourage the likes of Murdoch et al to intensify the encouragement of class war.
Sorry, I clearly don't pay enough attention to the shit I post :(