Ask Lemmy

This is not specific to AI. This has been slowly happening over decades, wealth is accumulating in smaller and smaller sets of people. Capitalism is cancer on humanity.

Those big bosses just want to take everything and give nothing, whatever that means. It doesn't matter if it kills them in the end too.

This is unsustainable, and it will get much worse before it can get better (if ever).

That's the entire elephant in the room of the future economy. Just don't think about it, put your head down, don't question things, and consume more short form social media slop.

The bourgeois will happily let the masses starve and die when unemployment soars. They don't give a fuck about us as long as their profits rise. (The great depression began in 1929 and it was almost a decade before the implementation of the new deal to provide economic relief to the masses.) They won't be bothered to give a fuck until the line stops going up. They will happily murder us if we dare strike for better working conditions

AI isn't increasing productivity, it's being used as a way to mask headcount reductions for the sake of short term profits, even though ROI is poor.

Furthermore, implementation of AI is increasing the intensity of the workload for people that survive headcount reductions.

Business is a big club, and you ain't in it.

Sorry, that's three or four quarters further out than we consider in this economy.

K shaped economy. They don't care if we can afford anything. Its Versailles. The peasants starve while the aristocrats move the "economy".

You're missing the fact that the people who run the AI companies literally want us all to die so they can take our money.

They don't want other people to exist. Except as slaves to them.

Peter Frase wrote an article (and soon after a book expansion of it) called "Four Futures" in which he examines this question.

According to Frase, the future we wind up with can be categorized into a Punnett square based on two questions: will essentials be abundant or scarce? And will they be distributed selfishly or universally?

If we have more than we need and we give it away universally, that's Communism. If we have less than we need, but we share what we have and our burdens equally, that's Socialism.

Now here's the two you're asking about. If we don't have a populist revolution, we wind up with one of the bad ones.

If we have abundance, but it's hoarded, we get Rentism. You can see outlines of this already. It's where you pay for digital files that can be endlessly reproduced and are forced into subscriptions to continue using appliances despite the fact that their continued use is free to the company. This is the one you're asking about. If we reached full automation, but still charged people for everything, you'd have a version of serfdom, likely with a basic income. The income would likely be based on a social credit system in which people who show the most obedience are rewarded with money to buy things that are basically free to produce. There might be a system of artificial scarcity to force people to devote a certain number of hours each day to unnecessary work or watching advertisements to receive income.

The last one is called Exterminism. You can read about it in the article. It's pretty self-explanatory.

hint: they won’t. a flooded labor pool means the corps can pay as little as possible for the labor they do need humans for. it’s the whole point of capitalism. for a neat story about it, read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair.

Oh no, don't think further or you might arrive at leftist / social conclusions 🤔.

(take with a grain of salt depending on location and understanding)

Companies have no more profit, because people don’t have income, so people can’t spend on their AI produced products

In this scenario both lose, the company adopting AI and the worker. Am I missing something?

The worker-consumer is no longer a source of wealth to the company since their labor no longer has value, but that doesn't mean there is nothing a company can do to try to acquire wealth. They just have to exclusively cater to the people who control that wealth. The business model of a media company might be spreading anti-democracy propaganda and collecting surveillance data for the use of the people who worry about what a desperate and starving Joe might do. Once Joe is gone they can spin narratives about why all this was the right moral choice.

Joe doesn’t have any more money to spend on video games
Companies have no more profit, because people don’t have income, so people can’t spend on their AI produced products

Funny thing, a Scottish fellow named Adam Smith figured that an economy where people don't have money to spend ends up stagnated and/or fucked over. Somewhat ironically, that is the piece that is most often overlooked by today's liberal economists (the kinds that are in favor or less regulation and taxes)

Most rich assholes like the idea of lording over a bunch of dirty peasants, of feeling superior to the unwashed masses, having them offer themselves into slavery out of "free will"

Yes you exterminate the now surplus population everyone in charge is a schmittian so people who aren't them is inherently violent against them to them and reducing that is an existential good have you never met a wealthy

By the time this comes to fruition, The billionaires will have all of the money and you will be working as a slave. They don't give a fuck f you can afford to buy something or not.

I think a lot more people need to read "The Naked Sun" by Isaac Asimov for the answer to this.

You've hit the nail on the head.

Companies pushing for AI are playing a short game, not a long game. They have not considered the consequences of this course after a short term return (which may not materialize anyway).

The whole AI debacle is a great example of why it's bad to have engineering developments without the philosophical conversations. We need the A in STEAM to tell the E's when they're opening Pandora's Box.

The economy will shift to serve a smaller number of people.

The people who lose their income will fall into poverty, existing on charity, begging, or scrounging, or they will die. (They will nearly all die sooner than they would have if they had maintained their income)

The CEOS and shareholders might understand this, but none of them can solve it alone, and trying to do so puts them at a disadvantage vrs their competitors.

The productive capacity will go toward ever more elaborate and esoteric projects, like Bezos wedding, or sending Musk to Mars, or building the biggest superyact, again.

And the majority will suffer.

People will accept lower wages to compete with AI... Up to a point... My prediction is that it's going to make the wage gap deep enough that people will have to revolt. What frightens me is what comes after, it's going to get worse before it gets better. Especially given the fact that people don't vote because of "both sides fallacies".

I really want to be wrong but it seems a handful of humanity believes we're all doomed and none of this planet or society matters. Their greed and brazen disregard for the consequences of their actions is a result from the psychosis of greed and/or sociopathy, or they know something the rest of us don't and are trying to get theirs before the end. Like the movie Don't Look Up or Knowing.

That is a problem for the next quarter's CEO to deal with

I believe the French got there once and they managed to solve the issue

I really wouldn't want to get to that point and I honestly don't really understand why the rich class just continues this course because I do believe it's playing with fire at this point

Is there any possibility besides Universal Basic Income to keep the system running and not collapsing?

Do you know the saying "Soylent Green is people"? Well, ...

Why would the owners need to keep the system running if they have all the resources and tools?

One need not worry about the game not being able to continue if one already won.

This exact scenario has been happening since the industrial revolution.

That is the question. But you're missing one crucial element. How are the very companies employing the AI going to make money when there's no consumer to purchase their products?

The oligarchs will give us just enough UBI to not riot. It's going to be used as a bribe to keep them in power. That's my issue with calls for UBI; they permanently entrench class dynamics. Our only (peaceful) leverage as workers to improve our conditions is to withhold our labor. If AI actually succeeds in mass unemployment, we lose that and we'll be forever at their mercy.

If AI works like tech guys say it will (of which I have my doubts) it’ll basically work like another Industrial Revolution. Back then it was supposedly a similar issue: people used to weave fabric by hand, but when the spinning jenny and electric loom came around they weren’t needed anymore so they were out of a job and turned destitute. Companies started selling the products internationally in the colonies and employed differently qualified workers to handle the new machines. So the hand weavers got replaced by loom operators and knowledge workers. If you believe the Silicon Valley class, this transition will be the same.

The issue is that the traditional weavers stayed destitute, because they weren’t equipped for the new labour market and so a lot of them were driven into poverty and radicalisation. As always capitalists don’t really care about that though

It'll just be a corprate circle jerk of companies paying each other for "products and services". People will work for food an be shelter, provided by the company you work for. I believe the kids are calling it "techno-feudalism".

I don't think the ai and data centres are for us.

The billionaires who want to survive this upcoming apocalypse need ai to be functional in order to survive in their bunkers.

Everyone else till then is basically free labour, training material and collateral.

In the end, the owners have access to the resources, can get labor or whatever for cheap, and can live in control and luxury even without selling much or anything, while trading amongst themselves.

They don't have a need or use to produce for the parents anymore. It only makes sense for as long as they have gain.

Owners may incite conflict and war to gain more control. The peasants will join for a lack of better knowledge, access, or alternatives.

We're back in the middle ages.

People rise up and destroy or regulate the destructive forces, and establish a more sustainable system - maybe.

We're already seeing a slow shift to more goods and services aimed at the rich and very rich. It's what you expect to see as fewer people get control of more of the money. The rich are fine with whatever number of people being out on the street, as long as they aren't one of them. The same reasoning goes for whose business will fail because the middle and working class can't sustain them anymore. As long as it isn't my business, whatever.

as others have stated if you've spent any time in the corporate world, especially the tech industry, you'd realize that they simply don't think that far ahead. They live in the now. They live by the quarter. beyond that there's no point in thinking about 2 to 5 years down the line. As long as they're making money now then that's all that matters.

It's the same with billionaires and the wealthy. They can't think that far ahead, they don't need to. They don't need a retirement plan, they can stop whenever they want. But who will cook their food? produce their goods? etc? who cares they aren't thinking about that. they live in the now, quarter to quarter.

No, you aren't missing anything. You're right that some sort of basic income is inevitable (universal or not). Even if you are a raging capitalist, you still need the plebs to have SOME income to be able to purchase goods and services.

However, for this to happen, it must be demonstrable that AI is actually causing high unemployment. Right now, while economic productivity is kinda increasing due to AI, unemployment isn't. When it happens:

• Capitalists will advocate for BI.
• Market socialists will advocate for BI combined with government/coop ownership over some or all means of production.
• Socialists that prefer planned economics could advocate for an expansion of universal basic services.
• Primitivists will advocate for bans on AI or whatever, I dunno.

Massive unemployment is bad for everyone including the ruling class, as that leads to pitchforks, guillotines and chopped off heads.

Rich people don't actually need more money, it's fundamentally about being above common people (i.e. power). If AI can cater to their every need, they don't need to have more money than a 2010s billionaire who still had to pay people for goods and services.

Kill the poor, use all the products. They are intentionally collapsing the system. They have correctly realized that they can go back to feudal times without armies of peasants as the main military and economic engine.

I think we tend to forget that companies are not “people” or a thinking thing. They are run by people. All the current CEOs only care about getting money to themselves. By the time things are close to collapsing, these people will have made more than enough money for themselves and pass off the CEO seats to someone else for that to be their problem.

If you ask that in a company meeting, they'll shot you in the head. Two times, above each eyebrow, just to be sure.

They are contractually obligated to by the investors.