Ask Lemmy

This exact scenario has been happening since the industrial revolution.

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.

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

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.

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.

That seems like a 'plebs' problem and not a 'billionaires' problem.

This is to a degree already a problem. Not because of AI, but because of stagnating wages and an increasing wealth gap.

It used to be that a company designing and selling was limited by funding, but now we're increasingly seeing companies with all the money in the world who are seeing sales going down due to the simple fact that people cannot afford to buy what they're selling. The supply is there, but modern corporate effectively eradicate their own market.

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.

That's the thing. These companies are not thinking that far ahead and they don't care about the consequences even if it hurts them too.

The only thing matters to these people is making number go up. They want more money. They want it right now. They don't care what consequences it has for them or the world later so long as they get more money now.

There will never be a universal income. Countries will let their people starve before they give them money for nothing.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A lot of other responses are good here, but something important to keep in mind is that not all jobs are going to be taken over by AI. A lot of the jobs currently targeted by AI are white collar jobs. So, what will likely happen is that there will be a widening gulf between the few white collar jobs remaining plus skilled trades and the "unskilled" labor plus good economy.

Typically, high income inequality leads to increased crime. Luckily, there will be a bunch of unemployed people who will need jobs going from "observe and report" style guarding to armed mercenaries who will shoot to kill for the paycheck.

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

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.

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.

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, ...

I remember the book series that was called rats, bats, and vats. Its sci-fi but It explores a bit of "Shareholders" AKA people who owned everything and "Vats" people born from vats/test tubes that owned nothing. In fact you owed the shareholders for being born and almost no one could pay for themselves. But if you only got one share, then you had much more rights in the society they found themselves in.

The only people that will make money are the Shareholders and only huge amounts of shares at that. Everyone else will become the "Vats". Thats one such terrible way of living that I could very well see occurring in the US. Next generation land owners vs everyone else except its peoples time via shares.

The system will collapse on itself.

Either the super concentration of wealth triggers governments to enact heavy taxation on fortunes or the system simply gets reset by the large majority that will simply ignore what is considered valuable today in detriment of something else.

Regardless, how things go today is not a sustainable route

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.

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.

we will find out soon. likely i sooner than others.

that is honestly when they start gassing people, and shooting those who fight back.

Basically rich who own resources will trade between each others. Poor will become poorer and eventually either become “slaves” or go anarchy in territories which have no interest for rich. Before that happens there will be transition period when not rich but still sociopathic enough will be still paid well to oppress poor to extremes where there are no means to resist. This will continue until oppression can be automated. Then oppressors will face same oppression. Basically max level post apocalyptic capitalism cyberpunk but without widely available fancy prosthetic. More of junkyard, gangs, eat worms cyberpunk for most of us. Likely it will take maybe few of hundreds years to get to such extreme point, depending on how dumb and passive humanity will be. Though there will be few points where we will have a chance to revolt. I think there’s a decisive point somewhere within nearest 10-15 years. If AI thing won’t burst within this time we will have next critical point somewhere in 30-60 years after first point. This is where things will start really affect future middle class. After that point if there will be no global change we are fucked.

P.S. This is all pulled out of my ass. I’m probably wrong. Do something about it if you can/want, but don’t stress about it. Stressing doesn’t help. If it makes it easier for you - we are unlikely to live long enough to be affected significantly

The companies that won't do well in that scenario are the ones that sell products to the sorts of people who will lose their jobs to AI. But not all companies do that.

(In the extreme case, there might be an economy no longer oriented primarily around what humans want.)

“How do we spend with no income?”

“Time to move upmarket!”

This has already been happening in a terrifying number of industries. Every time you see some absurd “pet cookie delivery” service that seems insane, it’s because the only viable business model that remains is pledging fealty to the wealthy.

Remember back when almost every scholar was employed copying books by hand? And then this jerk invents the print press.

The economy didn't collapse and everyone suddenly had access to more books for cheap. Scholars could spend their time reading books for the sake of reading, not just copying them. They could spend time writing their own books.

Going forward we'll just have the means to get more done.

There will still be jobs to do. We just don't have titles for them yet. If I told my grandma back when she was alive that I'm a web developer, she'd think I'd lost my mind and become a spider.

We're in a slightly better spot now where we have the means to feed and pay everyone without them necessarily having a job. There needs to be a political to do so, though.

There will be other jobs.