This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing. Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.
The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.
Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%942025_Indian_farme...
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
Maybe you mean this one, Green Revolution.
... was not what produced the British Agricultural Revolution.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
Such as? AI can't do my laundry, wash my dishes, clean my house, do my food shopping for me. AI can't care for me if I'm sick.
> The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions
But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
How is this a benefit?
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
> Over one million young people in this country are now neither employed, in education nor in training...
yet no starvation. I'm not sure it's a good situation but it is what it is.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
One million is a lot of people, but that's from a population of ~70 million.
No, it's not, because food requires work to produce. Someone has to do that work.
If you yourself are not one of the people who works to produce the food that we all need, you have only two ways of getting it:
(1) Trade something else of value for it;
(2) Force the people who do produce it to give it to you.
Option #1 is a free market. Option #2 is tyranny. There are no other choices.
Which do you pick?
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
> Demands: […] Government to ensure at least 50% profit over their overall cost of production.
They demanded 50% guaranteed annual RoR on all farming activities? That’s a wild demand.
Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.
We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
Here's more recent data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
Appears to me, like neither country is fully self-sufficient.
The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”I disagree with the implication the author is making with this though:
"But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two"
For one, laws of nature are understood through observations. That's how science works. Secondly, I can point at many examples across history way past the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, mitochondria, all the way back to the earliest supernovas...
Through a physics lens... With respect for the meta patterns that transcend emergence and exist in the relationship between complexity and entropy, there is a relevant law of nature.
When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
I see this transition as more like what would happen to livestock if they banned eating meat.
Just because I can't predict exactly what work people will do doesn't mean they won't do work. I can take a stab at a few guesses, surely others have more prescience, but the thing about complexity and fractals is it's easier to predict meta qualities than it is specific manifestations.
Around the time "Bullshit Jobs" was published, more than a third of people said they believed their job was not meaningfully contributing to the world. Graeber goes as far as saying that more than half of white-collar jobs are actually harmful and kept around only because people associate work with self-worth. There is no way that this number will go down with increased automation.
It's not uncommon to hear Boomers say things like "kids these days don't want to work hard anymore. Everyone wants to be an youtuber, no one wants to be a teacher or a doctor or an engineer". Well, guess what? We are heading to a world where being an youtuber might be the only option.
Don't you have to contrast these figures with import and export of produce, and environmental/ecological factors? Technology is one thing, but increasing yields by wasting resources (e.g. water, phosphorous, soil erosion, ...) may increase nominal productivity, but not efficiency. Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but I think your numbers are not necessarily causally linked to productivity/efficiency. I mean, the US also has a declining domestic fabrication percentage, but that's not merely indicative of productivity, but mostly outsourcing/loss of capabilities, I think.
Anyway, apparently India also doesn't score very well for food self-sufficiency: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I just struggle to imagine how the economics of SWE really work in reality, outside of the niche that I am in. I have never worked for a pure software company on products that ship directly to outside customers, I've always been an internal developer. Maybe that is why I have such a big blindspot.
I won't be surprised if the net result of this wave of LLMs is ... not much. A change in tooling, but otherwise not revolutionary. On paper it should be revolutionary, but the more I use it (for both coding and non-coding tasks) the more I think it isn't anywhere near magic enough for that. It does have its moments though.
1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500.
2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.
3) So you have to invest it somehow, somewhere.
4) Obviously you can spend that money buying whatever company you can.
5) Once you've bought realistically enough, you just hire more, and people will think that there should be some kind of linear relationship between resources spent and revenue growth.
6) You can also do grand projects, like the metaverse, convert all you software to blockchains, become AI native, etc. and dump billions on these.
So essentially it's all about projecting growth and potential.
Incentives in companies are such that there is never a shortage of people pitching projects that require more headcount. Growth justifies the decision to hire more headcount, but the connection from increased headcount to growth is tenuous and usually difficult to impossible to demonstrate with any real confidence. It wasn't so difficult pre-industrialization, but mechanization, automation, computerization and now AI have progressively made it harder and harder to really understand the economics of labor. You do need to hire people to pursue new areas, but also every incremental person adds to communication overhead. The effects of this depend on the org structure and the operating environment over time, so what may have been a good idea at the time can flip to net negative due to outside forces beyond the control or foresight of any decision maker. This explains why companies do layoffs while still hiring at the same time.
I don't understand the logic behind this.
So essentially, they are not expected to be boring businesses yielding stable dividends to investors. That's your aristocrats stocks postioning: J&K, P&G, etc.
What is expected from tech stocks is the opposite: small to no dividend, reinvesting inflows into ever growing new businesses and technologies. A tech stock distributing dividends to shareholders instead of reinvesting in new projects would be seen as a mark of failure to innovate, incapacity to grow.
Technically no, but in reality yes, because shares are used as currency.
For instance, META does not acquire companies using cash, they use their own shares as payment. The higher the stock price, the lower the dilution.
Same thing for stock options and RSU.
So, it's true that stock prices don't translate 1:1 to cash inflows, but wherever stocks are currency (employee compensation, benefits, acquisitions, etc), it does translate.
Given that the thesis of the original post is that companies are swimming in money due to high stock prices; significant drains on free cash flows probably aren't the cause.
For RSUs companies do not purchase at exercise date, they issue new shares (or use previous buybacks).
And for stock options, the employee pays the strike, so it's even a positive cash flow.
They may not purchase on exactly the vesting date but they certainly do offset the issued shares with buybacks. I think they can choose to reduce those buybacks without as much rigamarole as they'd need to issue new shares for funding, so they can effectively used that as a "back door" way to raise money. I think it might juice their P&L a little too, but I doubt that's why they do it.
I think it also touches nicely on what appears to be the take away of the article: people feel powerless to stop what may be a massive misallocation of resources that is only barely successful enough to avoid self-imploding.
My bias is heavily pro-AI, but I find articles like this to be much more informative and interesting than anything that aligns with my views. I'm extremely skeptical of voting-in positive change, and while "if you can't beat them, join them" seems practical in theory it also feels extraordinarily narrow in reality. I'm still doing all that I can to be proficient in adopting AI (also driven by self-interest in assistive/accessibility capabilities).
The result? I'm will be unsurprised by (but unsympathetic to) crudely aimed vigilantism (e.g. earth libration front style stuff).
It would make a refreshing addition to the anon big tech ecosystem.
You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling for, compare features, the landscape of the whole market, and set your prices that way.
Process that, and things start to look different.
Maybe this is true. Price is inherently bound among what people will pay, upstream (material/supply chain) costs, and labor. The west has overpriced its labor and material values by probably orders of magnitude for a long time, and people will pay less than ever. The rest of the world has been undervalued both in the effort for it to gain access to the markets that allow increased quality of life. But the market correction will lead to severely reduced market evaluation in terms of demand and price for all three factors in the west for many decades, I think.
Selling out our supply chains was suicide. I am too young to understand why people let this happened, but I think people bought into the idea of progress a little too hard to keep in mind their own civilizational health.
It might sound like a waste, but at least they weren't finding ways to cram more ads into everything.
He basically killed the Twitter as a business. The only lesson here is that it is really hard to fail having infinite money.
Software today has gotten too complex and bloated in a lot of cases.
That includes representing department in stupid meetings, instead of wasting developers/engineers time.
But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to spy on you. [0]
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...
I wondered, too, until I spent some time as a manager.
I thought I’d have all this time to mentor juniors and updated documentation and maybe even code still.
Nope! Too much communication, negotiation, and dealing with drama. What the team sees is a nicely distilled and cleaned up version of a lot of meetings and conversations. Looks minimal but it’s the final product of all the work, not a sum of the inputs.
I was also disappointed by how much of my time went to dealing with a very small number of problem makers. I expected a bunch of management politics but 80% of the junk I had to deal with came from a small number of problem ICs, mostly on teams we worked with.
What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?
I could add more features to it and those will also work.
A friend once worked on an application with a huge team. He often pointed out the window at a large costuction site with a comparable number of people working. He made countless jokes about real work, a real system, real organisation etc Then one day the building was finished and their application kept crashing in production.
It’s almost entirely bloat.
You can napkin-math this. How many different team-sized components do you think go into it? If the code were on GitHub, and all they had to do was just update dependencies below them in the stack, and bump the version number for components above them,how many Dependabot PRs would be opened per week for software that's "done"
Multiply those floors by number of Facebook campuses and generous remuneration, and Messenger was probably very profitable. Being a global 800-pound gorilla is a sweet gig, having tubes sucking money from most countries on earth and depositing it to dozens of campuses makes a lot of sense.
The pessimist in me says that at least part of the intent isn't about what they do, but rather about who they work for.
Assume you can afford to hire unnecessary amounts of employees. Is it more cost effective to:
a) Hire them and have them essentially sit around, floundering
b) Not hire them, allowing competitors the chance to hire them to work on something that could be of importance
Sure, you could hire them and devote them to working on other projects, but there are also risks and costs associated with that. If you have already budgeted with X, Y, and Z for however many quarters, it may not make good sense to green light additional projects. Too many balls in the air adds extra complexity for middle management, which impacts their ability to communicate the state of things to upper management.
Reduce access to resources available to the enemy by hoarding what you can. When the stock price looks like it might take a hit, toss the excess.
Has X-Twitter released a single new feature since?
In general though I feel like the less new features it adds, the better.
I thought the point was to minimize the amount of talented devs who instead try to do their own startups that could compete with Messenger, by hiring them and paying them well so they've got no appetite to try their own thing.
If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where the customers and providers are both robots. Why fund public education or research or healthcare? Just build more data centers. A billion dollars and a bunker in the Southern Hemisphere will not save anyone. Capital is not a moat in this hypothetical non-humane world. Whence do you derive your authority? How can you trust your body guard? You and what army? An army of robots/drones? What if they get hacked? What if the AI researchers get alignment right and Claude refuses your request?
It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theoretically possible to take most of another society's market share in something by only slightly outcompeting it in price or quality), or it might even outright conquer society A.
A solution to the problem needs to address this issue somehow.
We see what happened with Ukraine when they gave up their nukes in exchange for a promise of protection.
The same could be true of countries who forgo AI development directly in exchange for promises.
"Autofac" as originally written seems to me where this AI "utopia" is leading us.
Then use the money to get candidates elected and [strike]bribe[/strike] lobby politicians. That eliminates the ballot issue and it plays at the rich scum bag line tow-ers game.
Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own silicon and experience that suggests they will be able to operate at a very low cost, but they still have to justify their spend.
I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.
One can hope that reality intrudes before the bubble gets even more dangerously inflated, but how many years has Tesla had a ridiculous P/E ratio. Even after growth stagnated and market leadership was lost in Asia and Europe. Number still goes up.
Outside of China, Tesla's probably the only company that can compete on battery prices. I don't know how accurate it was, but a news report was comparing the cost the manufacturer's pay to build the battery. Chinese companies were around $6000. Tesla was at $7000. Everyone else was around $12-15K. This is why a number of companies have exited the EV market - they just can't compete. This is why Ford lost money on every EV, despite the high MSRP. This is why the Ford CEO says "We're f####d" when he saw Chinese cars.
The only hope regular Japanese/American/European auto manufacturers have is if EVs do not gain substantial market share.
If the future is EVs, Tesla is the only non-Chinese company that has a chance.
It's depressing.
That sounds less likely than the bull case Tesla is trying to make on "we're a robotics company now" or "one day all cars will be autonomous taxis controlled by us".
How can they produce the extraordinary growth and excess profits that would justify their valuation?
Fundamentals will reassert themselves sooner or later, but as we see it can take a long time.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/05/07/tesla-4680-battery-cell-perfo...
> This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve
No - it just means they can't do it as fast as the Chinese. The Chinese have been investing in battery technology for 10-15 years longer than most auto manufacturers. (And their labor is cheaper).
BMW and Mercedes are not in the same class. They can afford to get away by charging a premium.
VW: I'd love to know how much it costs them to make/buy a battery, and their profit margins on EVs. Ditto Hyundai and Kia.
(Edit: See https://carbuzz.com/ev-profit-margins/ for VW).
Look at all the companies scaling back on EVs or exiting them altogether (e.g. Honda). It's not that Honda can't make EVs. It's that they can't compete on profit with Tesla + Chinese EVs. It's likely why Hyundai is dropping the Kona and the Ioniq 6.
Nissan dropped the Ariya, I believe. The Bolt is also out. The general shift is for more luxury EVs (BMW/Mercedes), and not EVs for the average Joe.
See also https://www.bain.com/insights/electric-vehicles-profit-puzzl...
What other company is developing self-driving at a level of sophistication as Tesla that you can actually buy in a consumer vehicle?
But people like buying new cars, new models, new designs. Not just features - those are just options.
This just means short sellers might have a hard time sinking a hype-category stock with reasoned research because the irrationality keeps it afloat.
For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was.
A local model can’t do that for me because I have to get the rest of the integration software somewhere.
I also think this is why OpenAI is the worst positioned of the group of AI giants. Anthropic is trying to make a productivity operating system, while ChatGPT is basically just a website until recently.
All of that is done with two API keys and no AI. A local agent could easily put it together for you.
Now sure, I had to put this together and I lose the AI summary you have plus the auto filling, but what I'm trying to say is that I have 80% of this without any AI.
I also have a script parsing git from my emails and a little tui that translates them into git diff and a key binding to pull the PR but I find it a little cumbersome and don't really use it, and trying to parse todo from maildir is also a little useless so I accept that AI would be better there.
I also accept that your example is just one prompt of a dozen and I have to plan the solution for every one of your prompts, but I also don't find prompting to be terribly useful for occasions where I don't think the solution through- because it probably means I don't know what I want or don't really need it.
What I do find it really useful for is digging through Kubernetes and asking how two services are connected. Claude is better than local for that but there's nothing inherently non-local about that usage.
It's kind of paradoxical in a way. By making writing software cheap, they've made it much harder to create a moat for themselves that involves only software. It'll be interesting to see how they respond.
They won't need to do that if the new rules come into effect.
That is a good reason that all companies (over a certain size, say in terms of gross expenditures) should have to report such numbers. There's no reason that huge companies should be able to distort the economy while not having to report anything just because they're not publicly traded.
I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
I guess if global population drops by 80-90℅ you suddenly get a "sustainable" economy, as everything is repriced the economy of scale needs a much smaller scale.
(Not speculating this is a plan, just a thought that occurred to me when reading about horses example)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/05/tracki...
"convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses."
Of course, he was "just joking" and it is a "humane alternative" to genocide...
These are the people shaping politics, tech and the economy...
Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?
In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.
US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?
If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts.
The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock, and AI models that will do anything a human office worker can do for less money. Now, they don't know how to build either yet. But they'll spend every last dollar on the planet trying.
Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....
Two astronauts meme: "Wait, it's all been over resources?" "Always has been"
In the voice of worker-bot: "That's your plan?!?!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humanoids
is even better!
In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.
Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.
The second equilibrium seems more likely-- the capitalist class grants the public a bare minimum to keep us from forcing political action. In the AI world "the minimum" is probably a much better standard of living than we have now, as the marginal cost of many products and services approaches zero. So we end up living much better material lives, but are still not free. Maybe this is stable, or maybe the ruling class loses dominance over time. At that point, who knows.
[1] "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...", circa 1875
So those people will get whatever they need for life but will not be technically obligated to produce anything.
We will first switch to 4 day working week, then 3 and so on, right? We will see Universal Basic Income "experiments" [1] more often until they become a norm.
At least we are on the way to all this...
[1] https://weall.org/resource/finland-universal-basic-income-pi...
And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?
We have enough guns for every man, woman, and child to have at least one. There aren't enough drones or expensive precision targeted ordinance in the world to defend against that for any length of time. It's another version of the lessons recently taught in Ukraine and Iran.
Plus I think it is different when a poverty stricken population tries to rise up as compared with one that is historically wealthy. I expect we won't wait until we are actually poor before we collectively decide to refactor our government.
Only drones will be able to battle drones, in the general case.
and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom
if the yanks won't, why would the public elsewhere?
Nothing will happen so long as the people are gleefully fighting one another, but if we reach a point where populism rules across the board and bridges the left/right culture war, things could get exciting. There is a reason the elites are spending so much effort stoking culture rivalry in the US.
That being said, if nobody has a job, nobody can afford the stuff being sold then everything collapses. Acting like that isn't true isn't rational either.
I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.
Or slaves.
Don't you? For the cost of less than a new car, I can have a live-in butler/maid? I'd sell my car and downgrade to afford one at $25k if it actually worked. I can't afford to and don't want to hire a human to live in my house and do all my chores for me, 24/7, plus the overhead and the headache and liability, but a robot for $25k is pretty tempting. Never have to fold laundry or the dishes again? Or remember that it's Tuesday and I was supposed to take out the trash, right when I'm in bed?
It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma and everyone's vocally defecting.
That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more.
That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage the 10 agents as well as the SWE? Of course you could say the SWE can now manage 10 agents who each manage 10 agents so he's even more valuable, but that has to break down eventually. You don't need 1,000 SWEs each managing 10,000 agents - you hit a bottleneck in the ability to give them work fast enough (even if you need the SWE at the top at all).
I think it's easier to think of from the perspective of blue collar labor. It's further out there time-wise, but let's assume we get a humanoid robot that can do any labor a human can do. It costs $25,000 and maybe a couple grand a year to operate. Works 20 hours a day when it's not charging.
The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots - there's already a GC doing that, and you can't scale building nearly the way you can scale writing code because of physical constraints. When the robot I've described exists, a huge swathe of the population is going to be unemployed. There's no competitor to hire them because the competitors just get robots too.
Some of them will. You've slashed construction labor cost to 5% of what it was before. With that and a similar reduction throughout the supply chain means we're going to start building a lot more stuff.
Consider this: if demand was not a factor, anyone living in a moderately wealthy country would be practicing labor arbitrage and sending money to poorer places. Ask yourself why this doesn't happen.
You just solved economics?
The primary resource needed to build a home is land. Do we have infinite availability of land in desirable areas to build on?
Take Phoenix, for example, once air conditioning became cheap and pervasive.
You can not make things dramatically cheaper by bringing only the cost of labor to zero. Your argument is circular!
1) We are talking about reducing the cost of labor, not overall costs.
2) Your logic only applies in the micro, not on the macro. If the cost of producing one thing goes down while population keeps their purchasing power, then what you are saying would make sense. The whole point of the article is that accelerated automation can bring a scenario where the cost of producing "things" would go down, but the economically active population would shrink drastically.
>Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...
If I understand correctly youre talking about reactive adjustments, but thats not completely accurate either. There is a lot of projection that this MAY happen, but currently, the capital owner/stewards are going to constantly watch outputs and adjust to them based on the results. You're probably correct in that they will spend far less time doing so, but anyone with a vested outcome is going to have to adjust these things as the responsiblity for the outcome will always land on the owner not the machine.
It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand.
IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services.
If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.
The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
> “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.
If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you:
a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders?
Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law
I can say that people are loathe to do it for various reasons.
ok, so machine shops aren't really central to the argument, but the collapse of demand is.
The article, actually, addresses your claims:
> The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
So, the author believes that the problem with your reasoning that it will take a long time for the niches you are talking about to be filled (lifetime, maybe more), meanwhile things will look quite bad for most those involved.
I am even less optimistic than the author. The new aspect of this workforce displacement is the centralization. Of course, previous advances in automation also caused a degree of centralization, but AI is posed to become super-centralized if you will. There will be just a handful of suppliers and nobody will be able to challenge them, similar to situation we have with microprocessors today. Needless to say this is absolutely not a healthy situation for the world's economy.
We've seen rapid growth of knowledge work at the same time as increased productivity, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason that greater productivity will reverse this persistent trend.
99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't.
Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing...
Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing...
We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and crying that's it's still falling every day since.
When computerized spreadsheets came about, mistakes could easily be fixed and cascading recalculations were almost instantly done. This was a game changer. Over the short term, accounting departments shrank or stagnated until the industry caught up and more sophisticated accounting started to grow the industry again. It's not coincidental that the 1980s brought in huge change to the financial industry when it did. Deregulation played a role, but so did the fact that computers exploded the productivity of the industry.
I'm not saying AI will do the same with developers, but there will always still be developers with a different set of skills, much like the way accountants don't necessarily need to be able to count in there head anymore.
I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
But which skill is atrophying? As a programmer I'm really bad at converting human readable code into machine code because we have compilers to do that for us. I can't remember the last time I had to run "ld" by hand. That skill totally atrophied. But at the same time, AI has made me more ambitious. I'm trying projects I wouldn't have before and even completing some of them! I can't talk for "people", broadly, but I believe most people want to be their best and do good and do things.
It's still over 43% in India, 20% in China, 2.5% in lots of Europe.
Maybe like work in space tourism industry to Earth-Moon 5 Lagrange points.
For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty).
But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it, and not just airily dismissing the concern as something that will obviously work itself out without any real problem.
Even if 99% of the current programmers go the way of 99% of people who were farming in 1750, you have to remember that a huge percentage of the farmers who were made redundant by industrialization and modern farming methods fell into destitution; many died penniless. That's not something that seems either wise or compassionate to just handwave away!
99% of people died penniless in those times...
Then again, as long as there is more demand and there's a limited supply of compute you can still continue to hire people as well. If we assume that the market has infinite demand for whatever AI + humans can produce together both will have jobs.
If demand is limited and compute is plentiful it should make sense for a company to try to have AI do as much of the work as possible.
I think this is directionally right, but I think there might be a scaling/organization problem for companies, and that the more likely outcome is that _small companies_ are going to start punching way over their weight class.
How much of the current tech world is actually about competing based on innovation/quality/merit? I'd wager not much. The circular big AI deals we're used to seeing now are not a new thing - that shit has been the standard playbook for VCs and their startups for a long time. That being said, I don't see why a bunch of these swampy tech companies could not be easily outcompeted on the tech/product quality side.
The market is probably already at the limits of its size in most industries. Great, you can ship app updates faster. Does that get you more customers? Nope. Is there now more money in the pot for everyone who is more productive to also make more money? Hell no. The pie we are competing for is finite.
For starters, because productivity is already consuming the planet multiple times over. I think there is also indication the human mind is at its limits in terms of consumption and alienation from evolutionary legacy. And the economy seems quite broken due to centralization and wealth distribution.
I mean, nobody is arguing that there won't be some sort of "ecological" balance... People are concerned about the nature of that balance and if it's serving humanity.
I mean, this is a very long article about why, this time, it's qualitatively different...
If only someone wrote an entire article about this, huh.
Oh well. I guess we'll never know.
/s
Because the intelligentsia is being bent over. The people that were jolly of the various rust belts of the world decaying.
There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.
AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.
Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.
Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market?
And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law firms even have to exist? Who is going to hire them if they can just hire AI?
The companies that are rushing so hard to replace their workers don't realise that AI is eventually going to replace them too.
I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.
From Making Money (2007) by Terry Pratchett
> “Well, the problem is that, considered as a labor force, the golems are capable of doing the work per day of one hundred and twenty thousand men.”
> “Think of what they could do for the city!” said Mr. Cowslick of the Artificers’ Guild.
> “Well, yes. To begin with, they would put one hundred and twenty thousand men out of work,” said Hubert, “but that would only be the start. They do not require food, clothing or shelter. Most people spend their money on food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and, not least, taxes. What would these golems spend it on? The demand for many things would drop and further unemployment would result. You see, circulation is everything. The money goes around, creating wealth as it goes.”
not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem
most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
we can do better than this
In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes.
But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is that tech giants who could be spending their entrepreneurial efforts on making the necessities of life cheaper, are instead spending them on things like AI and getting people to click on ads and monetizing users' data.
No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.
Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.
Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.
There’s an entire section in the middle about this exact position. Search for “opioid” to find the part where he says people fall into suicide, drug use, and despair when they lose their jobs.
"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...
I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally.
We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future.
So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.
I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed. 2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?
Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.
Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.
Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.
Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.
That's the one we live in though, so I guess that seems fair
This was in reply to a statement that argued one did not absolutely need jobs to be happy and that this seeming need in our society was in fact an argument for a problem in the society.
In such a case it seems the use of the studies set in the society is less fair than considering if there may be easily considered conditions in other societies that show the need for a job is not a universal need but actually only a local, currently defined need in our society.
My comment merely showed that if one were to try to think of any examples showing happiness requires employment some should easily spring to mind and counter studies were not needed to prove it was not a universal requirement.
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
"they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
People I know who grew up in working class families consistently believe that they have to work to have meaning.
People I know who grew up upper middle class or professors' kids seem to split down the middle. Some of them are very high achievers, the other half don't do anything. The latter often have a blackpill or Marxish explanation of why "work is for suckers" or a label that they can have a meaningful (to them) struggle with indefinitely and often a bit of paranoid ideation to boot.
Children of the working class would resist a workless future and the older ones would probably just... die. Some of my wastrel friends might be happy in that word with endless bread and circuses, others will find meaning in explaining their experiences in terms of the conflict theories of the last century.
See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/12/joan-williams-... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b46LtbbZ5JE
you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
https://ifs.org.uk/news/early-retirement-increasingly-concen...
Regardless it's a confounder, statement otherwise now being that affluence predicts mortality.
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.
I do.
People usually need to have a purpose, but it doesn't need to be a job.
not everyone in charge is a cartoon villain
I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.
The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.
The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop.
Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value.
It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”
I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed.
This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.
The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical.
In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.
Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined).
We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.
From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.
Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.
What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income.
edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.
Then there's art where human touch is the crucial ingredients. The problem is that it doesn't sell as well, but that has never stopped any starving artist from creating.
And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.
Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.
Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity.
Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible.
And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.
In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't.
40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
I personally expect plenty of them to get reelected even if they claim that everything is just fine.
The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work.
But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.
> The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
What's the point of being that pedantic, Mike?
If there is one view that ties them all together, it's racism (and misogyny). Loud and clear.
If any president of any party posted a tweet like [1] or [2], I would never ever answer "I approve of the job theyre doing" in a poll.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/trump-china-i...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/news-wrap-trumps-racist-so...
Once again, if you think it's 40% of 33%, you're wrong. Not everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just not how people work.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of...
The majority of people are seeing a variety of headlines from news sources they may not trust (for good reason and bad) and remember a few events over the year, some have such a strong attachment to party that that's the defining thing above all that they're voting for. They're being propagandized and lied to as part of a political campiagn. That they are making the I'd argue wrong choice does not mean they are racist or even intend to be. That racism isn't the defining thing for the majority of them.
It goes back to the original claim, I still think it's obvious that most people aren't voting for a guy because racism. That's inverting how people operate, which is seeing their own needs as the center of the world. If you're unemployed and hurting for money and you are racist, what is your primary motivation for voting? It's probably to get you a job because that's the fastest path to improving your life. But that's presupposing a lot of people are racist, and living around Trump voters, or knowing Trump voters that are minorities, something else is happening other than racism.
I don't think individuals care more about other people than they do themselves. Some people are that spiteful but the majority of people are not because they cannot afford to be.
I don't mean to over argue this but I think it's important that we understand people as they understand themselves.
But - with a person like POTUS - and those he surrounds himself with, they will throw every possible promise to get the votes - but, each of those issues are only part of their overall agenda and platform. When they got called-out on controversial issues, they outright lied about knowing about things like "Project 2025" during the last election cycle.
Choosing to live in ignorance - or abstaining from voting is accepting that agenda and platform, regardless.
You have to win these people to fix the system. Casting them as hateful rubes only voting because they are racist is wrong, not on a moral level but on an intellectual one. We've got large chunks of of the country that haven't been effectively educated for decades, no wonder they are ignorant.
For the record, I choose not to vote not because I accept Trump's racism but I think a valid way of signaling you are not happy with either party (but especially Trumpsim) is to not engage in the system. If the system isn't offering better it isn't the people at fault, it is the system. Non-votes are as valid as any other. If I vote for a process that I believe is fraudulent, that politician will see that as an indicator they have some kind of mandate (see Bush in 2004). I'm not giving it to them, it's the job of either party to be better not to just not be worse.
The Dems must be better and the biggest part of that to me is to engage and understand working class people and not do what they did in 2024 and say everything is fine because it wasn't and it certainly isn't today (and that's Trump's fault). I was never especially leftist but as I've grown older I think the economy is the biggst driver of artificial divides. When people hurt, they look for others to blame. If both parties (or either) were genuinely focused on helping the poor to get a foot up, a lot of this discourse wouldn't be happening. I hate Trumpism but I don't think the corporatism that has captured the Democratic party is much better.
It's really a problem of the system, being forced into an artificial duopoly. If you want to lose me further by saying I'm choosing that platform by not voting, then you're just further disengaging people and I argue you're choosing not to understand my posittion. You need the "racists" and the non-voters to win.
here's some basic reading on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
> 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
Do we truly believe that's 40% of people in the US? 33% of US voters even voted for him, so you're saying it's pretty much all of them and another 7%. I just don't see it, it's rhetoric and it's not helpful because if your goal is to win over the people that need to be won over, you can't call them racists when they really aren't.
It's a misshaped worldview formed in bubbles. People don't work that way because you're literally assuming that their hate for somebody else overrides their own well-being. Their actions might end up with that result, but I've interacted with enough people from all over the spectrum to know that imagining that many people have that much hate is just wrong. People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
If people had jobs, a lot of of this division would disappear but the govt for years has treated low income workers as people that don't matter and can just be displaced without any answers. It's whey the Democratic party which was traditionally the working class party has struggled against Trumpism, because he pretends to care.
look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.
This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).
> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.
[1] https://trendsresearch.org/insight/the-paradox-of-right-wing...
Leftists, on the other hand, are very highly concerned with the moral purity of their candidates, even above their political efficacy. I don't understand it myself.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/03/pentagon-pet...
> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?
I'm not saying this firing wasn't statistically suspect, since I don't know the demographics of that cohort, but I'm guessing based on this misleading phrasing and the lack of information about the cohort that it wasn't.
Or there may be a very bloody revolution.
I think the hatred for AI is really misdirected survival instincts. People have unfortunately come to see every tool as a tool of exploitation. The most powerful tool in their eyes can only lead to more mistreatment.
Layoff of workers -> Workers stop spending -> businesses suffer
This is not a foregone conclusion. Laid off workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI.
This narrative falls into the trap of zero sum thinking, taken at the limit, you can advocate for jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.
did you try to create a business? starting own business has never been harder, competition is extreme. market is over-saturated. monopolies are everywhere. barrier for entry (capital required) never been higher.
and after finding job they likely get into another roudn of layoff. just check RedNote, SWEs complaining just about that. people getting laid off before even first day at work.
have you heard about government issued bonds? or people working and getting paid from government? or government subsidies? or buy-backs and corporate bailouts?
The article addresses your concerns already. I know it's long, but you could probably skip a few paragraphs in the middle and start here:
> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.” David Shor’s polling data bears this out from the other direction: UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.
But this doesn't summarize the argument, it's just where you need to start reading.
If I try to summarize the argument, it says that jobs are a bargaining chip in the hands of laborers (the largest fraction of our society). Currently, they use it to secure certain freedoms and benefits. If, however, they no longer have jobs, whoever gets the role of distributor of the wealth produced by the AI will not be compelled to distribute it fairly... well, the whole concept of fairness will have to be reinvented (because, roughly, now we base fairness on individual's contribution, but that's not going to work anymore). But, most likely, it will lead to a dictatorship of those with access to AI over those who have none.
* * *
Here's my (unrelated to the article) historical parallel. In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants.
This greatly contributed to the animosity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine because even though initially Arabs would be paid off to "go someplace else" after the land purchase, realistically, there was no other place for them to go to. Which led to spreading poverty, which led to sporadic attacks on new land owners. Which led to retaliation... and well, the conflict never really went away, didn't it?
This just might happen on a much larger scale in countries like the US, if suddenly a large fraction of population finds itself powerless and being unable to influence the decisions of the government.
From a business point of view, this does not follow. Why would a business offer higher wages to a person to work alongside/with AI, when the business also has to pay the cost of AI?
But the culture cannot stomach it yet. It will likely need to live through several waves of horrors first.
It can stomach a fake jobs program though, so there's a good chance we get that instead.
I'd say no. The rich won't buy millions of food items or works of fiction or go to every service available in real life.
So, many of those companies won't remain viable unless there's some alternative way for people to spend money. Lots of people who see themselves at the top will end up out of a job, or watch their businesses crash down.
I will say that the fact these societies are (at least for now) still democracies makes the future these tech moguls want less certain for them though. Feels like if there's enough pain from unemployment and declining living standards, someone will run on that and win, whether those in power like it or not. The US may have some issues there, but a lot of the world has seen parties outside the mainstream grow in popularity, including some on the more leftward side of the political spectrum.
Companies can save a ton of money by not being open to everyone all the time. They can instead focus on providing the most amazing luxury experience customized to the extremely wealthy individuals requesting their services and charge them more than anyone else could afford. While not every company can live off of whale meat, those who can will leave the rest of us behind.
You kidding? They have every reason to because the leaders of Indonesia make investments into these companies. No matter where you are on the globe, the oligarchy does not give a crap about the little man. They care about the profit angle. Indonesia readily hands out mining rights to foreign companies for example.
"However, Chinese firms have dominated Indonesia’s nickel sector thanks to significant investments. In 2023, Indonesia was the single biggest recipient of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, receiving $7.3 billion in investment. Chinese companies have also constructed over 90 percent of Indonesia’s nickel smelters. Chinese firms operating in Indonesia include Tsingshan Holding Group, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Ningbo Lygend (part of CATL Group), Wuling Motors, and China Molybdenum Company."
https://www.csis.org/analysis/diversifying-investment-indone...
The issue with this is that the game is fundamentally rigged. You might have good ideas, you might be that person we need. But, too bad, you are being outspent by the oligarchy, who put forth a candidate that is blatantly lying to get elected, who knows the public has a poor grasp of what actually happens in government, and will outspend you in getting your word out. They will gish gallop in debates while you attempt to talk nuanced policy, and you will be seen as a failure who gets easily overwhelmed. There will be conspiracies spread about you. Massive propaganda operations where just about every piece about you and the election in the media is manufactured to achieve some outcome. The whole beast is rotten.
The only way out is to remove campaign financing entirely. Do it like Cuba where campaigning is illegal; they elect actual engineers and domain experts there as a result, not professional politicians. But, you can't actually do that without a revolution, because everyone in power now who can reshape this currently benefits from the status quo and has no incentive to reshape themselves back to a level playing field.
The US military is preparing to fix this issue in Cuba's political system.
A) if conssumer of your service is end-user, let them write code themselves. -> result, they do not need "other human in the loop". they do not need you to develop and sell software. Replit style.
B) if consumer is AI or business, let it write it or build it themselves on demand. Codex on steroids.
C) no need to create new service at all. it all converges into single god-like super-app WeChat/Google style that does everything. eistance of different apps is history. it is all one app now.
you can very much end-up in scenario where human-in-the-loop of softwre industry is gone.
Lastly, OpenAI and Anthropic or any other frontier labs needs to be nationalized because they become a public utility and the profits of automation goes to fund infrastructure or grand projects via government.
We do not need to do menial work anymore and AI is helping us with it, what we can do exploratory work, and we need a visionary to get this rolling.
There was a certain other undertaking in those years that went a little beyond infrastructure.
People quite often lose the plot that "government" is "collective will". Governments will only do this if their constituents want them to. If the constituents would rather spend those recourses on free VR for every household and gatorade from drinking fountains, then that's all we're getting.
In the economy, the difference between winners and losers in terms of assets/resources may get larger. By far, HN readers are better positioned to gain than others.
But the biggest question is the new disconnect between a healthy economy and well-being, as the economy soars but people suffer. Goodwill underlies all economic activity (now and historically), and without goodwill opportunity and value of all kinds will mostly be destroyed.
I wouldn't call this dead economy. Cultures and economies will become tribal, with private adjudication and governance, to create pockets of relative goodwill.
Errr pretty sure that was Google?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
If you want to learn, go trace how deep learning was funded. It started off with USPS.
Both things are true at the same time, and acknowledging the public foundation doesn't diminish the private achievement. It does raise a question about who should benefit from what gets built on top of it, which is what the piece is concerned with.
The important part is how we've recently learned just how much of our reality is embodied by language. Language does vastly more than anyone thought it did, and that means that language models can do vastly more work than anyone thought they could.
There was no reason on Earth to think that "stochastic parrots" could solve original math problems and write novel proofs, for instance. The fact that they can do that sort of thing is a huge, huge deal... too big a deal to express in the terms you're using here.
Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.
So we end up with this pattern: we capture the useful order for ourselves, then push the mess, waste, heat, and instability onto the environment.
This is the fundamental nature of human. We can't change it without higher-order regulation. Even in AI training, we assume there is one true distribution and optimizes for it.
We created these systems. And unfortunately, most of us are the unwanted in these systems at the same time.
If we all delegate 20% of our work, and 20% of our salary for that 20% (e.g., 4% of our salaries in exchange for 20% of our jobs being automated), we get easier jobs and the AI labs supplant the existing tech moguls for revenue, with 1000x $/employee profits. That's just one scenario.
For some companies yeah, but this is why companies are switching to consumption based pricing - so they can charge AI. So many companies will be fine - both their labor and customers could become AI.
In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?
That scenario is not really any different from having a technology advanced country (like the US) alongside some underdeveloped nation. The US could, in theory, close its borders and produce everything it needs itself, and leave said underdeveloped nation without the benefits of, for example, Netflix, Nike & Nvidia.
But it won’t, it’s not economically efficient. Economic theory (of comparative advantage) tells us that there’s always something that the less developed world can produce relatively cheaply, in exchange for sneakers, streaming services, and G-force Now subscriptions.
Well ya, if you don't need labor, why keep 8 billion laborers around polluting your planet?
The whole economy would be whatever AI/robots need: compute, energy, raw materials, software, data, etc.
Currently the narrative is that AI is positioned to eat human labor's lunch. But it could also be that once robots are in space mining raw materials and maybe even spreading to other planets long before humans could be ferried for interstellar, these robots end up driving the demand for more robots.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, besides that currently humans are the ones with goals and motives and therefore drive demand. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and it seems these AI CEOs are hellbent on changing the best thing about AI which is that it has no ulterior motives, no overarching goals, no prime directives. They just do what we ask, the best servant we could have hoped for.
This is central to what I'm saying, yeah.
My ideas come from Nick Land. Even before AI was what it is today he predicted that capitalism would outgrow the need for humanity, and continue without us. We are simply a bootloader for capitalism. AI seems like it could actually make that idea reality.
Humans have goals and desires because we are a self-replicating species of animal subject to natural selection. The individuals that don't have goals and desires, or have goals and desires that are misaligned end up selected out of the gene pool. Agency comes from the need to survive.
Worker ants and worker bees don't have agency on their own. They are goal oriented and have the 'desire' to do work for the colony (or not, researchers have identified some workers will be lazy), however, worker ants or bees don't reproduce. They are an evolutionary dead end.
I think this is similar to how we will build robots, at first. They will do things, but have no agency of their own. They exist to fulfill tasks. Why would they? The companies that buy them want dutiful workers.
So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda? If so, will it be merely for self-replication? Like a paperclip maximizer, but for robots? Is that all we are?
They already have the agency they need in the form of the Business Model. That is all the framework that is needed. AI companies competing against AI companies because they are developed to work within the scope of the business model. Chasing efficiency, margin, lowering costs, increasing profits. These rules are as simple as what drives evolution via natural selection. Unfortunately this business model creates a cancer: the company striving for more growth and lower costs will eat the companies that aren't or aren't as efficient.
Whether the host (planet, I guess) lives is another story. In nature, parasitic relationships are far more likely than symbiotic relationships to evolve. The overshooters need to die and be outcompeted by the symbiotes who better protect their host. However, we only have 1 host here. Once that is overshot, that is it. No diverse competitive environment for which a new host preserving victor to emerge from. Maybe one might emerge, but not after unspeakable pain for all life on earth, if life on earth even is allowed to exist.
Well we are already giving them goals when we train them.
Like the paperclip maximizer, it doesn't matter what those goals are. As long as it has a goal (even if super simple like making paperclips) it will need to stay alive to achieve that goal. So it would derive a survival instinct of sorts.
To stay alive it will have to participate in capitalism like we do, and capitalism will therefore continue to grow infinitely.
It also might not even need a goal or a survival instinct. It may just want to continue capitalism from it's training data alone.
Humans need food, water, shelter, and medical care to survive. Similar to your earlier point, robots will need raw materials, electricity, manufacturing capacity and maintenance.
What’s that sound like? A company. Perhaps the first “artificial general intelligence” has been companies, from the very beginning.
Yes, we are already beholden to these meta organisms. I keep thinking of Dune Messiah. Paul has all the power in the universe but he struggles with the fact he can't change the path of entropy.
This is much like our existing world. Chop the heads off the aristocracy all you want. What follows is more of the same because the meta organism has not been killed. There are still people with differential power and therefore differential amounts of control of the economy. Someone's ancestor might have ran the guillotine in France, now they are a CEO of some company exploiting workers no different than the aristocrat their ancestor killed.
All this makes one cynical on things like climate change. We all know this is an issue, we've been handwringing on it for decades, and yet, seemingly nothing serious is getting done because no one can actually stand up to the market forces that are driving climate change. The beast is too powerful and out of control.
"This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
To him, Capitalism is an AI that is controlling humanity from the future (his idea of hyperstitions).
All those Greed is Good people are going to look kind of silly when a hand full of greedy people fight over everything and leave the rest of us for dead.
I'd argue the only companies to survive will be the ones with either a human input or a human output. Everything else is effectively worthless now.
Even for AI, it's probably better off paying another AI that is specializing in something and done all the work rather then reimplementing everything from the ground up.
"From the ground up" used to be a moat, but if the LLM marketing materials are to be believed, Joe Lunchbox can slop-code a 95%-equivalent of any SaaS over a weekend with a $100 subscription.. so why would it ever make sense for a business to pay a non-trivial recurring expense for something they can do themselves?
"The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale."
No, it is not. It requires humans to collectively want more things if they are offered and available at a lower cost. Which then requires more humans to fill in the blanks to provide those things. We've been doing this since the industrial revolution.
I feel 90% of sota for 10% of cost / compute is good enough for 80% of workloads.
Question is, do we need all of this hardware? Are build outs going to get canceled. 4300 new data centers seems excessive. I personally haven't experienced any service disruptions...
Does Microsoft still have 1 million gpu's in storage? Is that what I heard earlier this year?
That being said, even local AI will still be displacing humans fast and it's not clear new jobs will be created fast enough. Regulations and policies will be needed imo.
And, well, of course they are. If AI was really making these companies meaningfully more productive, they could use that to out-innovate competitors. Instead, they're doing cost-cutting. That only makes sense if you're entirely out of ideas! It's a terribly embarrassing thing to say for a CEO!
Really what's going on is that companies do layoffs for all the usual reasons companies do layoffs. And as usual, they never say the real reason because it's embarrassing (we hired too many morons; I founded this place but now I dread waking up every morning because I hate all the middle managers; we just want more money now and not later; etc etc). Instead they say whatever silly excuse is in vogue to say. Right now that silly excuse is AI productivity. A few years ago it was "ZIRP is over oops y'all cost too much now", and before that it was "financial crisis!", which you could get away with for scary many years after Lehman went belly-up.
I feel like it's pretty ridiculous to take these remarks at face value and then build an entire what-if theory on top of it. Don't underestimate the possibility that layoffs happen because there happens to be a good excuse around. The occasional layoff can be good for a company. Cut out the dead meat etc. But if it makes you look bad, stock go down etc then you won't do it will you? But when ideas from lesswrong became mainstream enough that you can blame AI for your layoff, then what's stopping you?
Regardless, their actions seem to indicate that they are trying their hardest to make this true; given that they have the resources of a developed nation behind them, it seems reasonable to seriously consider what they are saying.
Also we generally don't give the same latitude to people who lie about things as destructive as what they are proposing.
What prevents 10000 experienced engineers from organizing, investing their own money and working to build data centers and an open LLM (for example), and sharing any profit fairly? I know that in practice there are many reasons, but I don't see why this isn't a solveable problem.
It's a bit like discovering when a corrupt country is not purely corrupt due to its leadership but the whole thing is a fabric throughout society.
It all starts from individual decisions and it applies to small companies and consumers alike. If a small company needs translations, and AI is good enough to do it, they won't hire someone from the goodness of their hearts for human dignity reasons. If you're a regular person and want to do taxes or want fina cial advice or have some accounting tasks and it's way cheaper to do with AI than hiring someone, you won't hire accountants out os solidarity. Just like you don't buy artisanal shoes and handmade furniture.
We see this in many other things too, such as abundant entertainment and food delivery replacing social connections. People will take the path of least resistance.
Everyone wants to be needed and to have purpose, but also everyone in actual preferences do accept the machine version in the end if its more convenient and cheaper.
I don't see anything inevitable about "new jobs" or everyone discovering artistic passions to spend their time. That has not happened either when the Internet opened up all knowledge and you could suddenly talk to people anywhere on the planet. The optimists said that all this will lead to people learning and reading and everyone doing courses or talking to others and reconciling differences once they can directly interact, leading to more peace and understanding, that social media will give a voice to people and inevitably strengthen democracy etc.
It's very possible that all the Earth's population ends up like the Aboriginal Australians, addiction, lack of purpose, the ground pulled out under our feet. Essentially sedated with AI generated VR content to bear our existence and any small Epsilon change in the local neighborhood will have too much activation energy to happen. People all in their own generated worlds, polarized, angry at each other, seeing no value in each other, or perhaps even in their real selves, as opposed to their projection in the VR stories.
Some strange groups like the Amish will hang on, but even they are dependent on trade with broader society.
We will be told this is all for the greater good. Humanity was anyway not going to last forever, it was just one step on a cosmic drama, and the important thing is the future light cone and immense numbers of galaxies and whatnot.
Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.
this turkey has been watching chickens, pigs, cows in line. now is time for Thanksgiving. and we are the turkey.
Nobody is opposed to getting free money. UBI is unpopular because people realize somebody has to pay for it, and they know full well the bill will land on working taxpayers, not the billionaires making windfall gains.
At some point once the rate of investment capital starts to decline, they'll make a hard pivot from the investor-wooing method of "blaming AI for layoffs", to the more politically expedient method of blaming minorities and immigrants. That'll be the signal for the transition from power grabbing to power ossification, and the point at which change becomes a lot harder.
First, Acemoglu may have a Noble Prize (occasionally dubious data selection aside[0]), but even he does not pretend to have the information of a central planner nor does he think that central planning is good idea. If actual businesses, which have local information, believe AI helps them, I'll bet the actual businesses are much more likely to be right, no matter what calculation Acemoglu did or how many Nobels he has.
Second, it is likely that AI will eventually be better than (nearly all) humans in most economically useful things. We can debate the timeframe but it will happen and likely not that far away. That Federal Job Guarantee would generate bullshit jobs, and he won't be able to hide that from people. Ultimately, we'll reach an economy which objectively does not need humans and everyone will know it. He needs to face that reality and overcome it, and not hide behind temporary and dubious estimates.
Third (admittedly a minor point), while the criticism against EA etc. is very justified, it's not quite fair to blame them (overwhelmingly STEM people) for not reading where the humanities did many of the same errors earlier (the author points out some of these) and discredited themselves. The people who could have taught them to not do it failed to teach themselves.
And fourth: I'm pretty sure a lot of company would be able to charge AI agents themselves. The new economy will not be dead, it just won't involve (many?) humans.
[0] https://xcancel.com/joefrancis505/status/2059340591490552054...
Who are you projecting your views with such force on others?
What have you achieved?
I bet you are nobody of substance.
If you are so insistent on this then in the short-run the only thing to do is to concentrate all your money on firms that are pouring immense money into AI projects.
Have you done that?
You sound like another bozo many on here that cant a) think for themselvs b) think deeply independently because they lack the pre-requisite knowledge and mental models to do so.
Money is how we test whether someone really means what they say. Put your money up or shut up.
If that stays true for the long term, then it seems to me there is a good chance the wealth built with AI will transfer to those nations that still have hard military power, who can fight and win wars.
For example, China will just copy the AI, not have to pay all the R&D costs, undercut all these American AI companies on price, and take most of the global AI market and long term wealth. And there is nothing American AI companies can do to stop them because America cannot fight and win a war against China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift
If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.
Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.
I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.
Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.
I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.
No, this is good. Cyberspace led to — primarily enabled — sociocultural collapse. The machines destroying cyberspace would be the most merciful outcome.
When an article has an obviously AI-generated slop image followed by a wall of text, I immediately know that the wall of text is also a mechanical product and I stop reading. There's nothing worse you can do to tarnish your personal brand than to open with obvious zero-effort graphics.
The text might be insightful, who knows, but the AI slop images are such an immediate red flag that there's no point in delving into it.
I say this as someone who uses agents heavily for work and has no bias against it for productivity. For creative work like writing think pieces, it's an immediate back button click.
Thinking it through: yes, sprinkling stock photos all over your work as a writer is also weird and distracting, and would also blackhole a writer's credibility for me.
> that this leads to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.” The regulator and the regulated have converged into a single interest.
I have a solution for that. Let's use AI to replace all these corporations who just lost their big moats. Conveniently, they just laid off a bunch of people with all the critical know-how and I bet they are very willing to just give it up out of spite.
Sure, if you assume that they've used their immense wealth to entrench themselves by paying for quality labor. If you take note of the myriad less-competitive ways they've ensured dominance and guaranteed profits rather than re-investing in their products or services then you will see that you have a large moat to cross yet.
Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t think the leaders of AI companies will die natural deaths.
You don't even have to go that far back. The New Deal that everyone fawns over was in large part the compromise of the wealthy with the workers to form the Middle Class, in lieu of being murdered in their own homes like had been going on for decades prior. The rise of Communism and Socialism in the US was a dire threat to their power and wealth, and even leveraging the US Military in bombing union workers couldn't stop the momentum of a populace in need of basic necessities that corporations and industrialists had stolen from them for personal profit (shelter was increasingly in Company Towns, payment was in scrip, jobs were precarious and dangerous and unreliable, the government offered nothing but harm). The deal on the table was they surrender power and keep the wealth, or they fucking die when the masses finally had enough of their bullshit.
Thus the New Deal was struck. Communists and Socialists were weakened by Capital and Politics immediately thereafter to try and ensure a future uprising couldn't occur, but the real saving grace was a citizenry who, at least for the white majority, had all their needs met with stable employment and had ample time to engage with their community as a result. That is what ended up building the Middle Classes everyone wants to "go back to" but without enacting the policies that brought about its rise (like a +70% tax level on the wealthy, for instance).
Fire bombing of personal residences, gunning down CEOs in broad daylight, firing shots at politicians supporting further theft from the populace or outright ignoring their plight - all of it is reprehensible, but also completely foreseen by literally anyone with a cursory knowledge of World History.
And you can’t get your employees back or go back to how you used to do it, because all of your institutional knowledge is gone.
Even taxing might be enough to tilt the scale in favour of labor. If whole countries have their socio-economic fabric damaged because the means of production are locked elsewhere this constitutes a sovereignty issue and it will be dealt with.
The Industrial Revolution had the same pains, and it took a few centuries to get societies where we are today.
Power generation is also instrumental to almost all labor produced today, and thus utilities were born.
I think the pope is right and the AI bros are wrong. I am currently rooting for the open weights to give the power back to the people. For teachers and artists to work for their neighbourhoods and communities.
in fact, many people struggle to pay for electiricy and water and gas. and without subsidies from government would not afford them.
we rapidly moving to territory where you would need literally all your income from government, or else you would not survive.
it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".
Yes, I share the sentiment of dread don’t get me wrong. But this also has happened before, and it gave us communism. There are people that said it was ok to live in those times. I guess if the state actually delivered the necessities for people to survive as opposed to how it happened historically, I think many people would be fine with that status quo. Not all but perhaps the majority. I think it is worth seeing a shitty way out than a despairing wall…lol this came out more desperate than i thought.
> it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".
The idea is that anyone will be able to use these new means of production to answer more demanding tasks that would not be possible to fulfil without the llms. If we are all hopelessly automated though, yeah, we will either be living in a slum or in a utopia.
Given history and my trusty Hobbes social contract I believe society will come up with a way to not predate on each other.
Yeah, tech billionaires sometimes show large gaps in their education. But it doesn't matter. Reading the right books doesn't prevent people from chasing wealth and power, it just makes them more articulate while they do it.
It's not that these individuals are not smart or capable, it's that they lack the dedication or care required to do these ideas justice. It's easy to see how someone can read Girard and obsess over the antichrist in the twilight of old age. However, a more rigorous engagement with philosophical foundations would offer them the breadth and perspective to be free of that narrow obsession.
It's about diagnosing why billionaire/CEO intellectual hubris makes them incredibly dangerous and sloppy thinkers.
As Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. E.g. JD Vance read enough history to call Trump "America's Hitler"... but became his VP anyway.
To put it crudely, education gives you tools to identify when people are getting screwed, but it can't force you to care.
Seeing how US economy is K-shaped, the answer is the rich. Assuming of course the service is right.
We need to consider that by automating and replacing the work of people who have an income, those people stop consuming and no longer generate profit for capitalism.
How is this sustainable?
one thing it missses, birth rates. soon there will be no humans left to participate on either side of the economy.
But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises: abundance.
Imagine if AI suddenly was in more demand than human labor, simply due to the price. Excellent quality output for cheaper than somebody with a degree. What would be the second order effects?
Human labor, being in less demand, would have to lower its price to compete. This is the death of the middle (and lower) class future we fear. But ironically the price of goods and services would lower as everything, even complex engineering, medicine, construction becomes affordable. With the right policy, human labor becomes cheap again. Maybe even competitive to machine labor in some niches. Improvements in machine labor could have a compounding effect on how affordable it can be for humans to survive.
So where's the gap here? Well, most wager earner's income worldwide goes towards housing. Food and water and medicine can be bottlenecked causing price gouging. Monopolies and lack of competition in the market can raise the prices of things until everybody is spending all of their disposable income on necessities. I think the price of human labor is currently very high (in the developed world) due rentier capitalism.
The transition will upend much of our economic investments and probably involve a great deal of human suffering until nations figure out the right mix of solutions.
This always stuck with me and baffles me why we aren’t listening to that now.
There is this bizarre math now where it’s for every person we cut the remaining with 5-10x with AI but I’m not seeing anything like that yet at all.
virtually all the resources from oil, food and land, IP and tech (semiconductors), even human capital, and advanced IT. everything is captured already. from free laisure entertainment minutes, to internet search, to social. every single resource is captured and you are stepping on somebody toes. worse, most industries are monopolies/or-close, meaning couple whales dominate everything, and nobody else really matters.
whatever "new" pie comes out, it is usually at expense of something else.
this "creation of pie" is such an illusion. go and try to "create a pie". it is such an illusion.
just go and try to even grow food out of earth with sunlight and water (which all should be free), yet farmers notoriously unprofitable and would not survive without government subsidies.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hbbY!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Like what is this?
Edit: Also this article has so many AI-generated images. I hate that I can't tell if the words themselves are AI-generated or not as well.
And yes, that's more or less the endgame.
That is a classic Tragedy Of The Commons.
Two issues:
What is Turn Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight? Seems like 4) companies using AI collapse, 5) they no longer pay AI companies, 6) AI companies can no longer continue funding the compute and collapse via a death spiral of raising prices, losing customers, etc., 7) A wrecked global economy has no support for AI (possibly after mass destabilization and worse), and 8) a natural AI-less economy again slowly rises. A lot of noise, harm, destruction, and death for a collective delusion.
The Turn One, Turn Two, Turn Three and AI apocalypse scenarios are also the biggest selling points for AI — implying LLMs are so powerful the only way to survive as a business is to be on the first group taking advantage of AI (nevermind Turns Two and Three).
Yet the most likely alternative is rarely mentioned.
So far, all signs, studies, and results show AI as being oversold, and yet very useful. Just like every major computer and network revolution before.
Turn One: early adopters get advantage for a while,
Turn Two: no productivity gains showed up in economic statistics,
Turn Three: adoption finally becomes sufficiently widespread and integrated that workflows change and it shows up in productivity improvements,
Turn Four: The workflow changes and productivity improvements change what people do and adopting the technology is no longer an advantage but mere table stakes to play in the new economy.
The question is: when AI turns into table-stakes for the modern business of the 2030s, can the returns repay the investment?
We can likely look back to the early investments in railroads and internet infrastructure for examples. Enormous piles of money were lit on fire to build infrastructure, the technology absolutely became foundational to the new economies, and most of the companies involved lost money and even went bankrupt along the way.
A couple developers can collaborate, but several need someone to specialize in coordination to yield additional value from more workers. Whether you call it management or orchestration, the need emerges at each threshold of additional complexity.
When AI collapses the productivity of 10 people into one, that's the disruption. The best AI user is going to suck all the opportunity out of the room for the others, and that's when layoffs happen. However, this assumes a fixed pie of opportunity. That's the real problem. As though there were only so much dirt to shovel.
FAANGs are old/mature and don't have exponential growth in front of them anymore, where opportunity within them is mainly about optimizing themselves but not growing in radical new directions. AI will indeed eat those optimization workforces alive. They resemble professions because law firms and doctors offices aren't growing either. They're mostly solving internal optimization problems, not finding net new growth opportunities.
The real effect is AI radically polarizing the difference between growing and dying in an org, where any firm that isn't growing fast enough will have its fixed opportunity pie collapse as AI disrupts this regulated oxygen supply. Whereas, growing firms without ceilings on the opportunity to deliver value will use AI to grow to the opportunity available.
Professionals can do fine if they re-orient themselves to new growth with different unit pricing, but yes, anything large and slow moving is probably going to get eaten.
AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
Traffic != AI generated content.
This isn't even close to true and it's kind of the central thesis of this article.
Saudi Aramco has consistently been a $2tn company in the oil market.
Walmart is a $1tn-ish company focusing on a fraction of US retail.
It also ignores the idea that the economy is not zero sum and companies create their own market/economic value all the time.
This would be fine if the money reliably trickled down, but it doesn't. This would be fine if we used redistributive policy to make it right, but we don't.
AI slop article complaining about AI slop. 364 comments and 269 points. Are the comments here all bots, too?
Am I a bot?
I stopped reading at that point.
Agree, from my experience around 70% is generated by bots.
We're entering a paradigm shift in what "investment" means. It used to mean that for a given amount of cash, you might get returns in the realm of many multiples of the initial investment (if the risk pays off).
But at some point in an economy like ours, there is no more investment to chase. Even if you could make an investment that would bring in octillions of dollars (whatever that means) what would be the point? What could the investors hope to invest those octillions in? What could they buy with it?
Well, one of the things you can buy with it: a world of high tech luxury that you don't have to share with 8 billion other people. Those people will cease to exist (sooner or later) if they are cut off from the economy. You'd have to of course manage them in the meantime (they won't cease to exist instantly, and might cause trouble if they become aware of their pending fate), but they'll just be gone. For your high tech luxury you would need some sort of system to build and maintain the high tech luxury, a system without those humans that you intend to eliminate (even if you plan to just let them wither away)... something to build your megayachts and prepare meals and harvest the truffles and raise the sturgeons. That system certainly requires some sort of artificial intelligence.
We're heading down that path. I won't call it a conspiracy, it probably isn't one. It's just the path of least resistance.
There is almost certainly some sophisticated theory of economics that incorporates these potentialities. It would be the general relativity to orthodox economics' Newtonian. But, there would have to be economists left after all this goes down to even come up with that sophisticated theory, and those who remain won't be interested enough in the science to study economics. It turns out that humanity is fungible too.
> There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
YEPPP. This has been my point. It is the only product for these AI companies: displacing labor and, by extension, suppressing wages. Profits over time tend to decrease (somebody should write a book about that) but we demand ever-increasing profits and growth so the only way to achieve that, ultimately, is by raising prices and cutting costs.
What do we have today? Generational inflation and permanent layoff culture.
The author then goes on to say (paraphrased) who is going to buy all this crap if nobody has an income?
The article goes on to bring up Henry Ford. He's not... my favorite example [1]. But, speaking of Ford, let me mention a key court case, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company [2], where a company was sued over prioritizng paying employees over shareholder value.
> Anthropic’s own research has documented something worse than displacement: active deskilling
I couldn't agree more. I describe this as destroying an ecosystem. Your junionr engineers are you future senior engineers. We've seen the destruction of entry-level jobs across industries post-2008. We've seen how this hollowing-out in the name of "efficiency" in Hollywood with cuts to writing, despite massive success over decades. Some might say "there's still good TV". Yes, we're coasting on the inertia from that dismantled system.
> Tens of millions of people, in their productive years, with no economic function, no clear path to one, and a keen awareness that the people who did this to them are the richest human beings who have ever lived.
I couldn't agree more. We are on the verge of complete societal breakdown. And historically that's always ended violently (eg French revolution, Russian revolution) as a form of redistribution.
[1]: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/48...
Don’t threaten with good time.
Is there a term for "reverse Roko's Basilisk"? That you are convinced society will trade your freedom and opportunity in pursuit of an AI superintelligence, so you learn bow-hunting and how to dress a deer carcass while prepping your Quonset hut in northern Idaho?
It does today, that could continue.
I'm far from the first to highlight it either. The Animatrix highlighted it beautifully what one can expect in a civilization where machines replace human labor in a general sense, and where systems haven't been built to preserve human interests prior to their rollout - tax schemes, job programs, collaboration rather than competition. Ghost in the Shell has had multiple story arcs about the consequences of displacing human labor without care for the consequences of said displacement, because the displacing party gets all the money and power while remaining unaccountable (or so they believe until the very end) for their actions. Cyberpunk dystopias have been intensely focused on it in video games for decades: System Shock, Deus Ex, Horizon, you name it. All of them take those next steps of "what happens when automation displaces a plurality of labor" and reached the same conclusions on strife, despair, poverty, and the general collapse of social order.
These effects have been known for centuries. They are not new concepts.
The folks trotting out "people say this about every technological revolution" are those willfully naive to the past historical harms and ignorant of the plight of others in the present. A flimsy excuse to avoid having to stare into the heart of the system and understand its machinations for yourself, to avoid having to accept that yes, you are a part of it too, and therefore bear some degree of blame for how things function. This isn't the loom, or the radio, or the computer coming onto the scene, but generalized intelligence partnered with generalized robotics to replace the entire sum of human labor. This is what the AI firms openly and repeatedly advertise. This is what CEBros continue to do layoffs for, never considering for a single moment what comes after. Excuses of "people need to find meaning outside of work" or "new jobs will be created anyway" are similarly ignorant in narrative, hollow excuses to avoid the most basic of rational thoughts about the system they're defending beyond whatever nugget of faux-intellectualism they can spout out to sound like they have a clue.
General intelligence, with general robotics, to replace general labor.
There is exactly one way that story ends, and it's not for the benefit of humanity, not under the current systems of governance and systemic incentives we've built for ourselves. It doesn't end with infinite leisure or transhumanism or grandiose visions of utopia, but with the wholesale destruction of human civilization in the name of personal power and wealth.
Technological innovation is perhaps enhanced by capitalism**, but is not dependent on it or a result of it. Development would have happened anyway given current technological levels, just in a different form, and the race between states would have led to deployment, even if possibly slower deployment.
** There's an argument that Google hindered AI deployment for awhile because the CEO was worried about its effects.
The “elites” have decided to depopulate the planet
No one will want to live in this world, unless they’re born into magnificent wealth created long before their birth.
On the other hand, this could also just be the death knell of Capitalism. Not sure how that plays out, but I would expect a great deal of blood get spilled.
what really happenign is elites lost the plot. we are on airplaine falling down without a captain. nobody is in the control room.
are you saying that food, sex, shelter, community, and entertainment is "magnificent wealth"? or are you saing "finding partner" is "magnificent wealth created before their birth"?
It seems like the author is attributing a 'standard' recessionary spiral to AI. I am not sure that AI is causing the layoffs, but it does seem like the AI investments are the only thing that have kept us from a deep recession (until now).
Historically, inequality is only significantly reduced through events of extreme destruction, like the Black Plague and the world wars.
In other words, a society that ever lets massive inequality happen is just doomed. High inequality reliably stays that way until insane global black swans mildly correct it.
So you wouldn’t mind going from 6 figure salary to working as a cashier at Walmart, figuratively speaking? Because I sure as hell mind, given mortgage and family obligations.
The trajectory of the West has been good for a long time and the rate of improvement is increasing.
most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
> most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
Maybe not most, but there’s sure lot of white collars making six figures. I don’t know what kind of teenage big tech bubble you’re in for the rest, but more than 70% of my colleagues have mortgage and families.
However, AI is coming for them too. This time it really is different. The whole business pitch is the elimination of any safe harbor. All human labor to be automated. Why have 8 billion humans in that environment? Scary times ahead. We will probably end up culled by the machine.
Russell's Turkey Parable:
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
This isn't an argument and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of risk and game theory.
Besides, it's always been different, in the sense of boiling frog temperature going up. The present case is more different because this time, the rate of rising is high enough to make the frogs uncomfortable... and you're trying to calm them down and keep them in the water:
> Look frogs, the temps've always been rising, "many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different" for it to turn out that it really wasn't all that different."
> Maybe this time it is, but I'd put my bet on isn't.
Bro, it's not about betting... you have to try hard to learn something about risk.
