The real answer is no one. They will quickly realize that at the root of the economy are the regular people, and since the economy is a cycle, when you cut off a part, the cycle doesn’t work anymore.
People (doomers) here are saying businesses and rich people will, but this can only, work for a limited time, because either the products will shoot up in price since only the rich can afford them, or the businesses won’t be able to sell their products, so they can’t buy new things, which means no more revenue to the shareholders.
Think of all the companies that live from b2b models, when you look closer, they are all at some the suppliers of b2c businesses, except, maybe military companies. That company that makes the lithography machines (asml) only sells to other businesses such as tsmc. Tsmc also only sells to other businesses, but they sell to businesses that sell to consumers.
orcrist@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I like how you mixed a few notions together in a way specifically designed to induce chaos.
Even assuming that AI can take away jobs, which is itself I think inaccurate, and provably so, that has nothing to do with people lacking money. In an ideal world, we could use technology to improve productivity so that we would need to work less.
So then what you are actually asking is a different question. What you’re actually asking is, what happens if we create an economic system that takes away most money from most of the people, to much larger degree than is currently happening. And for that, all you need to do is go look at the history books.
Finally, your question as posed is partly self-contradictory. You’re talking about AI being competent enough so that it can fire everyone, but improvements in technology are not always monetized. They can also lead to extreme cost savings. If for example, if I don’t have the money to hire an accountant, but I don’t need to because the software package is good enough to handle all of it for me, then there’s no problem to be solved. And this is true for any number of so-called white collar jobs.
So then what we actually see is that jobs change and evolve over time. The word computer used to talk about a person who did arithmetic and other such operations. Now it’s used to refer to the machine itself.