Well here's a story written in 2003 about exactly that, that I find myself thinking about more and more often
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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This question was asked, and the answer was "Kill the poor, make line go up."
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.
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.
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If all the money is hoarded by the rich, who is going to spend money to make the economy run?
The rich will live in their bunkers while society collapses and blame it all on communism.
The rich will keep trading with each other. Look at housing for an example.
If the AI can run everything, then we become a post scarcity society. I'm hoping for Iain M Banks Culture series myself, but who knows. Or maybe the AI becomes so intelligent it just checks out like in the movie Her and we have to go back to doing it with non-AI tech.
Whoever still has money. Either importing wealthy immigrants to replace the American market or they'll move their products to the markets that still have money.
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.
Were already seeing a drop in product quality and reliability. Just try a search engine for practically anything. Chances are you already type "wiki" or "reddit" or "Lemmy" or whatever along with your search terms. AI(LLM) is just advanced cargo cult development. It won't translate to physical design even though that's being pushed by management level and marketing. Products will stop being useful altogether.
That's on top of the tailoring to business and wealthy class as others have argued here. But even that will have to endure enshitification. Ultimately the wealthy will pay for labor on their toys(they already do, we just can't afford those).
This us a marketing and executive delusion issue.
If we all run out of money they will harvest the marrow from our bones. They'll extract a fee, don't doubt it.
In the 2000s, there was a strong angle about how programmers would no longer exist thanks to drag and drop programming tools and website builders. The average office worker would write little programs as easy as a excel formula, and a "programmer" would cease to exist.
I remember CS professors fearing for the future as they talked about the doomsday scenario of programmer jobs ceasing to exist, going the way of human calculators and the people who put letters together for a printing press.
Of course, business is still normal. It ebbs and flows.
I think about that whenever I think about AI.
Well, in the purely fictional hypothetical that an LLM could advance to the point of reliably replacing humans without a stark loss of quality and marginal cost-benefit before legislations step in to make the cost of increased power consumption and environmental damage reflect on what these companies pay in:
Their will be an owners class who have stake or claim over facilities and technology to utilize the AI, and then there will be an everybody else who have to fight tooth and nail politically for basic human rights as well as shelter and food. Just the current system but whether it's that much worse or better depends on how well our democracies function.
An llm will never be able to do this. Unfortunately the word AI has been hijacked by companies and marketeers. Ai now means just about anything really.
They're actually coming up with new words to describe what AI used to mean such as AGI, which stands for artificial general intelligence.
To elaborate on the premise of this post, The boost that we're going to get from an actual artificial intelligence one that is perhaps sentient will be so much that the tasks that were once performed Will become so mundane and menial that it will not make any difference who performs those tasks or if they're even being paid to do so.
In the same sense that the printing press removed the necessity for scribes, at least for the majority. Or the firearm displaced the bow and arrow as the dominant weapon.
Eventually, what general artificial intelligence will give us is a world free of our Faith-Based monetary system currently dominating the world.
In essence, we shouldn't need money after general artificial intelligence is implemented.
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They'll be making stuff for rich people.
When there is a scarcity of resources a population will shrink to sustainable levels. Right now there are too many people to share the scraps left from the billionaires hoovering up all the capital. People will stop having kids, others will die homeless, and population will decrease just as happens in any population of animals experiencing scarcity.
1024: This new farming technology means one person can feed 1000 people! What are the other 999 people supposed to do? Are the lords just going to conscript all us serfs and have us fight for their entertainment?
That’s pretty much what happened tho