Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment.

No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions.

Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services.

UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.

It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?

The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently.

The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going

Wealth and Power are linked, but power is the goal for the wealthy, not the wealth itself. The moment the relationship of wealth and power is uncoupled, they will discard it in favor of whatever comes next in their accumulation of power.

It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them.

On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.

We’ve seen this before when the mines and factories closed.

Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.

This is one of the biggest questions as the singularity compresses the deployment of capital and material resource allocation: if the majority of people aren't competitive with machines, who provides for them and how is that structured?

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but here goes...

The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy.

It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital?

For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all.

The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers).

It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science.

During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines.

These are all overall good things for the world.

By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.

One of the theses of JM Keynes (of "Keynesianism" fame) in his General theory was that the rich save and the poor spend. That's been an ongoing assumption of state policy for a while now. One factor to consider is that today we seem to have a mid-level consumer sector - a group of people with high ($100K+) incomes who still spend nearly all that income. This group may provide the demand to support the investments of the super rich while still allowing a large percentage of people to sink to the underclass.

I think the whole, “If we all lose our jobs who will buy things?” Question is like the nuclear scare of the 1950s or the concerns of environmental collapse and the end of the world of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

No, it can and will get so, so much worse.

I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA.

Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere.

This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents.

And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get.

You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory.

Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected.

You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy.

Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class.

And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing.

And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget.

And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.

Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?

We have an economy like this:

producer => provider => consumer.

What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?

1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00

This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.

The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.

Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.

It's interesting how people stubbornly remain locked into the existing systems. Every time something about automating jobs comes up there's the inevitable "how will people afford X??", and then one of the responses is usually "UBI" or similar. It's like people are literally unable to see beyond some system based on getting money. And AI will ultimately push the status quo beyond that. Even though UBI might be helpful, it's just a stopgap in the face of 100% of human labour eventually having 0 economic value. But the very concept of money, on which income is based, is rooted in the idea that human labour has positive economic value.

People are confused.

The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.

Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.

NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.

The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.

It seems pretty clear that the economy all of us grew up in is a historical anomaly; and it's ending. There has never been a sustained large and dominant middle-class, and ours is disappearing right before our eyes; with little chance of saving it. There will be the ultra rich, a privileged few who make a good living as their minions, and a huge majority of the underclass or serfs. The power dynamics seems unflexible and unforgiving. Most of us have to beg and hope our government will care for us and do the "right-thing", while the powerful continue to accumulate, isolate, and undermine us.

Wait, if I had a company, why would I want to pay my workers more so they'd buy more? That just sounds like I'm keeping my money with extra steps?

Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"

I'm confused. Is the article arguing that UBI leads to more inequality rather than less? What would then lead to less inequality?

> modern citizens under this system are freed from work only to be permanently trapped as captive consumers.

Wat? Trapped in what? This makes zero sense to me.

> The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations.

What is the proposed alternative? The (rather bad) alternative I see is no UBI and let the masses starve...

I'm not sure I follow

Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth?

In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those

The real danger is that many humans never learned how to justify their existence except through labor.

Who will vote against seizing your assets if you fire us all?

Im surprised ppl still think the elite “needs” us for anything.

If work can be offloaded to machines and thinking to agents.. there is no need to keep this thing we call society.

Its way way cheaper and faster to build highly guarded enclaves to fance off from worse part of humans.

Ppl at the top dont even think about us as real humans. We are sub spieces to them.

Elyzium is more probable future for us. This or civil war and big reset. Depends who wins.

I don't believe that shared ownership of AI, though a noble idea, is an attainable goal, no matter how much anyone wishes for it to happen. It's naive to believe it will happen when there is just too much money involved. I do believe that an UBI plan should be, at least, prepared, ready to be implemented, in case the situation arises. It never hurts to be prepared.

Thank you for letting me in!

Sol Roth

PS:

Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.

Average American workers provide in-person services that don't scale and can't get much leverage from technology. Retail, hospitality, construction, care work, etc. They have not seen the kind of wage growth that accrued to the laptop class, but for the same reasons they are not as vulnerable. Probably we will end up alongside them. Plenty of demand growth coming in the elder-care sector.

Here is the answer:

Why You Don't Matter Anymore (Economically Speaking) https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY

Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.

This is a good article with good historical context, my only issue with it is where does this UBI come from? It sure as hell isn't gonna be taxes from large corporations given how things are going.

But yeah, once the buying power dries up, who is left keeping the lights on?

> The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations.

This is the reality we lived in already pre-AI.

Farmers won't be fired. AI won't replace plumbers. Hairstylists, chefs, landscapers, escorts, nurses, fisherman, etc. There are and will be plenty of people with jobs that AI can't do.

No one. Wouldn't it be better if they let the population of the world drop to say a 100 million? they don't need the human resources like they used to; they will have robots doing the work.

There’s an alternative not mentioned: company scrips. Historically Such as in coal mines, workers were “paid” in tokens they could only use at the company store.

> who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment.

Very optional consumption.

That's the greatest contradiction in our current system.

Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.

You can almost map each comment to a kubler ross stage

Society has managed a transition from gold to fiat and also towards a world where the majority live paycheque to paycheque and still diligently work ever harder.

...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion

We need global UBI but it's not going to happen.

So much of the conversation here has a shared premise that AI stuff can and will replace human labor.

There are certain types of AI that will, and they are amazing: weed identification and laser zapping as a replacement for toxic pesticides, for example.

LLMs? I'm skeptical. I think we're in the middle of a mass delusion that stochastic parrot token extruding machine slop somehow equals "productivity".

From what I've seen it's just making the age old "activity over achievement" problem worse, while degrading skills.

One of two things is going to happen. Either we collectively find ways to recognize the limits of these things and use them in appropriate, limited ways or we devolve to Idocracy.

There's a third option that everyone seems to be breathlessly betting on, that the models improve to the point of human reasoning, but that seems like the most improbable outcome to me.

Are we still doing labor theory of value in 2026?

Nobody will sell anything anymore when nobody can afford to buy. Which is great because those with the money will simply demand slavery in exchange for survival.

"If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?" - Henry George in 1879

It's a frightening thing to realize that utopian abundance and abject poverty can co-exist in perfect harmony. One does not contradict the other. Heaven and hell are next-door neighbors. If anything, this is the default state of affairs for most civilizations throughout history.

I think this is legitimate concern that a lot of well paying jobs will essentially ruin prospects of more upscale services.

Why is everyone having eschatological dreams these days? The entire zeitgeist seems to be in mass psychosis/delusion. The idea of compressing concepts into statistical models with a human language interface is very interesting and even useful, but we have seen zero evidence that this can reliably, broadly replace human thought and skill. The idea that it could eventually work is scary, but it’s important not to let scary turn into lived reality before it’s objectively real.