Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Further proof of this: Climate change.
If everyone is fired by AI, who's going to buy the products and services made by the companies if no one has money anymore?
Submitted 4 months ago by tigerjerusalem@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 4 months ago
These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Well that’s not true at all. The vast majority of investors are on it for the long term.
Empricorn@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Did you mean to say shareholder and corporate management? Investment itself (especially diversified) is completely about long-term performance.
Blubber28@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yup, economics are all about “LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!” It’s infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.
Damage@feddit.it 4 months ago
Pathogens don’t really think of what will happen after the body they’re abusing dies
Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
They kind of do. (I am so sorry, not trying to be that guy).
Look at HIV. The original strain is horribly deadly, but the strains that have evolved within the last decade are much more tame. It’s because the virus that kills its host doesn’t get to spread - Zombie outbreaks excluded here.
The flu is the same way. New strains always emerge, but they are usually not fatal to most even without a vaccine.
Damage@feddit.it 4 months ago
They manage this by dying en masse and self-selecting, soooo…
s38b35M5@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Back in the 1980’s they told me it’d trickle down.
…eventually.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They were actually talking about how they were pissing on the living room floor while we’re in the basement.
morphballganon@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Don’t think of people having money as an on-off switch. It’s a gradual shift, and it’s already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Capitalism doesn’t look that far ahead.
I agree it’s going to be problem. It’s already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn’t pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that’s why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that use to be expensive but are now cheap) and don’t understand how life is more expensive.
Zahtu@feddit.org 4 months ago
Ever heard of the everlasting sustainable war? ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Sustainable_War
If robots generate all of productivity and human labor is no longer needed, the economy would not be able to sustain itself. Instead, in trying to cope with the unneeded human labor and to ensure continued productivity, the only area where productivity would be ensured is by means of war using human resources, namely destroying things in order to be rebuild, thus generating a sustaining feedback loop. The rich will get richer and everyone else will only be employed as soldiers in a continuing war economy.
Even though this is a sci-fi concept, i believe it’s not a stretch to say we are headed to this direction.
Etterra@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Well I mean Orwell hit on the same concept with 1985, with the major powers just rotating who was blowing up who at any given time in order to keep the proles in line.
SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You accidentally added a year. The book is 1984.
BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world 4 months ago
We’re already there, in a sort of way. Products aren’t built to last, aren’t built to be repaired. Buy a new phone, computer, washing machine, every year! You wouldn’t want the social embarrassment of not having the latest gadgets! And if that fails, we’ll just release a patch that prevents the irreplaceable battery from lasting a full day.
Plus after computers made it so one person could do the job of 100, entire new industries popped up to do meaningless jobs shuffling digital money around. Some of the most comfortably-paying upper-working-class jobs are entirely pointless. But it keeps educated people from questioning the system. As long as they get a cushy paycheck twice a month they’ll happily make another B2B web 3.0 cloud-based KPI tracking analytics platform and not question if their job is meaningful.
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
This is a common question in economics.
It’s called technological unemploymemt and it’s a type of structural unemployment.
Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.
An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there’s like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.
There was also a time in Englans when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.
Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.
There’s been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach, a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there’s not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.
Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.
One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn’t as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.
barsquid@lemmy.world 4 months ago
A major problem is all the money from these increases in efficiency go to a handful of people, who then hoard it. A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 4 months ago
A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.
The money is life. The money must flow.
maynarkh@feddit.nl 4 months ago
The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.
SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
This doesn’t sound sustainable at all. A billionaire only needs so much gasoline, food, medicine, TVs…
Collapse of entire industries will happen way before we even get a chance to see industries reinvent themselves to cater to billionaires. Don’t believe me? Just look at what happened to the economy during the pandemic.
maynarkh@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Yeah of course industries will collapse. 100 car factories will close, 5 superyacht factories will open, tying up the same amount of productivity. Owned by the same guy.
There will be tons of spacecraft launchpads, private jet hangars, etc.
And wars of course.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 4 months ago
In theory, UBI.
In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.
If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it’s not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.
exanime@lemmy.world 4 months ago
There is zero chance any UBI model would keep the economy going in a mass layoff scenario UBI may keep people alive for a short while (few years) getting the basics needs but that’s as far as it would go.
In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.
This is likely the mildest of outcomes
If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it’s not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.
100% agreed. AI evangelists overhyped “AI” to get companies to commit more money than it’s worth through FOMO. Exact same way CVS lost its panties to Elizabeth Holmes
Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
What gives you such confidce it will fail if I may ask?
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
They won’t, they’ll simply die and the market will slowly adjust to those with capital.
Zron@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Don’t forget your sacred duty boys, dicks out for Harambe.
It’s the only way to fix this fucked timeline
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, can’t think past their quarterly reports. The ones that are private are competing with the public ones and think following trends by companies that are “too big to fail” will work out for them.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
In a better world machines would do the work and humans just would share the wealth and live life in peace.
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
The thing is though, everyone needs to do something just for the satisfaction of not doing nothing.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Due some special circunstances a few years ago I was one year without a job and without the need to find a job because I had my finances and laboral future secured. At no point I was without anything to do. I just did a bunch of personal projects that were not driven by money but for my own enjoyment and the need to create some things. Also did a lot of exercise and took on trekking.
I could live all my life like that if I needn’t a job for sustaining myself.
franglais@lemm.ee 4 months ago
It’s only fools and the rich who pedal the narrative that a whole section of society would turn into lazy slobs, do nothing except watch TV.
barsquid@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I wonder if there are ways for people to find meaningful things to do other than being forced to work in order to be housed and fed?
EABOD25@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I’m an optimist, so I’ll believe one day we’ll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don’t criticize me too harshly
zephr_c@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Hey, that’s a reasonable thing to hope. The flip side, of course, is that I’m hoping I don’t have to live through Star Trek’s idea of how the 21st century goes. They definitely got all of the details wrong, but I’m afraid the vibes are matching a little too well.
Infynis@midwest.social 4 months ago
Hey, we’ve still got 2 months to the Bell Riots, and DeSantis was talking about putting all the homeless people in Florida on an island
bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 4 months ago
While I agree, I’m skeptical that we’ll see any meaningful advance toward that end in our lifetimes.
abbadon420@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I think it’s as relistic a future as the complete destruction of mankind, but your point of view makes life a lot more enjoyable. Here’s a nice quote to back it up:
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future” - Victor Hugo
KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
I am also an optimist. I believe one day we’ll all be dead, and all that will remain are robots that fuel off blood, left to invade hell for the only thing that will sustain them.
lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 4 months ago
With that quote I expected to open a lyric video to a metal song
marcos@lemmy.world 4 months ago
AI owners will.
And if you then go around wandering “oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want”, “that’s way too few people to fill a market”, or “and what about all the rest?”… Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I see three possibilities if AI is able to eliminate a significant portion of jobs:
- Universal basic income, that pays out based on how productive the provider side was per person. Some portion of wealth is continually transferred to the owners.
- Neofeudalism, where the owners at the time of transition end up owning everything and allow people to live or not live on their land at their whim. Then they can use them for labour where needed or entertainment otherwise. Some benevolent feudal lords might generally let people live how they want, though there will always be a fear of a revolution so other more authoritarian lords might sabotage or directly war with them.
- Large portions of the population are left SOL to die or do whatever while the economy doesn’t care for them. Would probably get pretty violent since people don’t generally just go off to die of starvation quietly. The main question for me is if the violence would start when the starving masses have had enough of it or earlier by those who see that coming.
I’m guessing reality will have some combination of each of those.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 4 months ago
If ONLY some smart fella had pushed a theory about collective ownership of the means of production or something
Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
In the USA, it would be option 3 all the way. We would see three classes: Mega Rich, the warfighters of the mega rich, and then the rest of us left to starve.
They wouldn’t just pull the plug and leave us to our own devices, they would actively destroy farming equipment and industry to make sure life is awful
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’m not even sure it will be 3 classes because having a soldier class risks them deciding to just take over. This is one of the real dangers of AI, they won’t have any issue going into an area and killing everything that moves there until they are given an encrypted kill command. Or maybe the rich will even come in with an EMP (further destroying what infrastructure is left) and act like they are the heroes while secretly being the ones who give the orders to reduce the numbers in the first place.
Worst part is the tech for that already exists. The complicated kill bot AI is getting it to discriminate and selectively kill. I remember seeing a video of an automated paintball turret that could hit a moving basketball with full precision 20 years ago. Not only that, it was made by a teenager (or team of teenagers).
NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s the neat part. No one.
If the rich can hire a handful of the middle class to build and maintain their robots, then they can just cut the poor and working poor out of the economy entirely, and they will be willing to accept any conditions for food and shelter.
We can arrange the economy anyway we choose. Taking all of the decision making for themselves is part of the plan.
Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
So we will have a handle of people living like The Jetsons, and everyone else like the Flintstones down below.
Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 4 months ago
They won’t need maintenance if they’re a general purpose intelligence. A technology that has the possibility to free all of humanity from scarcity, has the possibility to finally collapse dominance of aristocracy for good. Sure, they’ll try and put themselves on top somehow. But once the knowledge exists, anyone can create a version for the greater good.
NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world 4 months ago
OK good luck setting up the economic system that doesn’t just reward the rich.
sundray@lemmus.org 4 months ago
As stated, the companies push AI aren’t concerned with the long-term consequences. But if you want to know how the individuals who run those companies personally feel, do a search for billionaire doomsday preppers.
TL;DR: They’ve got a vision for the future. We’re not in it.
deafboy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
All kinds of people fatasize about the end of times. From the losely asociated groups of rednecks, to the religious cults. The rich just has a better budget for their hobbies, and their toys are more visible. Which, paradoxicaly, disqualifies them from the prepping game.
Number one rule about the secret bunker is not telling anyone about the secret bunker.
sundray@lemmus.org 4 months ago
rednecks, to the religious cults
I see your point, but usually those groups don’t have the ability to accelerate the arrival of the end times, whereas the billionaires might.
howrar@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Why would we need anyone to buy things? Remember that money is an abstraction for resources. If you can do everything with AI, then you already have all the resources you need. Whether or not someone else needs what you produce is irrelevant when you already have access to everything you could want.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeaaaah, the issue there is that, that is completely incompatible with our current system of capitalism. If we do not take deliberate steps to transform the system, it will collapse.
Deceptichum@quokk.au 4 months ago
Good. The system is fucked.
Let it collapse and we can work on a new system without hundreds of years of entrenched rich elites deciding it.
Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 4 months ago
It’s no less compatible with capitalism than any other economic system. The idea that humans are no longer needed to do any kind of work is an issue the world has never faced before.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Look at empires of the past.
Things were so bad in Dickens’ London that living in sewers to live off whatever scraps you could find was an actual occupation.
Wealth creates its own reality.
greywolf0x1@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
And they couldn’t even murder their royals, fuck the brits
Wooki@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You’re implying AI has the intelligence to remotely achieve this. It doesn’t. It is all venture cabalist porn for over glorified keyword copy paste. Thats it.
irreticent@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You’re implying AI will never progress beyond its current potential.
I doubt it’ll be taking our jobs anytime soon, but to assume that it will never improve would be naive.
Wooki@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It has barely improved since the 70’s/80s. Hardware got faster.
Its a fallacy to assume “line go up”.
Arn_Thor@feddit.uk 4 months ago
That, my friend, is the problem for whichever schmuck is in charge after me, a C Suite executive. By then I will be long gone on my private island, having pulled the rip cord on my golden parachute.
markr@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Everyone will be working multiple shitty service jobs that robots are not cost effective to automate. Our miserable wages will be just sufficient to keep the wheels on the cart from falling off.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 months ago
But not enough to pay rent.
solomon42069@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Or get medical care when we’re sick.
soratoyuki@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we’ll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.
deadlyduplicate@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Which is why you place hards limits on capitalism with a lotmof oversight like in the north European countries. It can be done right ifnits done right. That is, of you wa to do it right. If you simply want to say “fuck it, I want to get rich” then you go for the no limits no safe wors style that the US is practicing.
Valmond@lemmy.world 4 months ago
My base rule is that if it’s needed or used by a majority of people, then the government should have it (probably exclusively too). Like hospitals, schools, infrastructure like roads and trains, electric grid, eventually the internet.
Now, shops and food isn’t in there, probably because we shop wildly differentt I guess, but some base could be handled by rhe government (which is usually the case, like minimum rights to food etc).
Sgt_choke_n_stroke@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You’re describing the end goal of monopoly
Aceticon@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The whole increasing concentration of wealth and fall in median quality of life can be traced back to basically each individual of the Owner Class thinking that somebody else will keep the system going by employing people and paying them well enough so that they keep on buying stuff.
The whole think is pretty much a Tragedy Of The Commons as defined in Game Theory, only instead of a shared grazing commons that would be fine if just one person had a few more sheep than they should (but gets overgrazed and then everybody looses if more people have a few more sheep than they should), we have the Economic system.
Historicallly one of the big reasons for the invariable appearance of some kind of social construct above the individual with the ability to take decisions for the group and force individuals to comply (from the “council of elders” all the way to the modern Democracy) is exactly to stop people from, driven by pure selfishness, “overgraze” in the various “commons” we have and ending up destroying the whole thing for everybody - if you have one or two doing it the “commons” can handle it, but too many and you get a tragedy.
And here we are after 4 decades of Neoliberalism whose entire purpose was to reduce the power of entities making decisions for the good of the group to overseeing the commons and force individuals from overexploiting it, so it’s not at all surprising that we are seeing various common systems starting to collapse due to over-exploitation, and I’m pretty certain that whatever societies will be dominant next are not those which embraced Neoliberalism the most as those will be the ones with the most collapsed systems and that stuff take a lot to recover (plus the very people who overexploited them to collapse will do all they can to avoid having stop what they’ve been doing and that gave them so much personal upside maximization and they’ve basically bought politics in the West).
franglais@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Norway
Urist@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Neoliberalism is killing the good parts of Norway (and there were bad ones to begin with).
Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 4 months ago
That’s the cool part, you won’t. If everything crucial is automated, people can drive things forward for passion rather than for money. Of course, this would effectively collapse capitalism, which won’t happen painlessly.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 4 months ago
This question was asked, and the answer was “Kill the poor, make line go up.”
xavier666@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I remember in Interstellar, the Blight caused huge starvation among the poor causing them to riot. The government asked NASA to drop an orbital bomb on them but NASA refused, which caused the government to remove funding for NASA and close it publicly. It was just fiction then but it’s looking a bit grim now.
rothaine@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Well here’s a story written in 2003 about exactly that, that I find myself thinking about more and more often
slazer2au@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That seems like a Q3 issue for 2026 let’s put the conversation off till then.
/s
jballs@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Q3 2026 will come around and the AI will report that revenues are down. The CEO will respond the only way they know, by ordering that costs be cut by laying off employees. The AI will report there is no one left to lay off but the CEO.
Fade to black and credits roll.
MissJinx@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The thing is, for AI to work we still need hardware, houses, food etc. Yes a lot of jobs will change but other new type of jobs will come.
Remember at the end of the day AI can do CPR
Shardikprime@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yet