Capitalism doesn’t look that far ahead.
I agree it’s going to be problem. It’s already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn’t pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that’s why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is relatively more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that used to be expensive but are now cheap) and don’t understand how life is more expensive.
Ohhh, oh. So you didn’t see that episode of black mirror yet?
It’s a good one.
Other companies? Companies also need things, so they would also need things to buy and sell. Buying and selling to each other doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, particularly if the goods are non-physical. A company selling editing services for articles to a company that writes those articles for a news company who might be selling stocks to an investment company, and ad space to an ad company, etc.
Realistically, though, that doesn’t tend to be that high a priority, or much of a long-term worry. Most of the concern these days seems to be focused more on the short-term profit more so than anything else, even if it will ultimately harm the company.
Not that it would really matter for most, since a lot of the people who might otherwise be affected would likely be out and away by the time that that rolls around. It would barely affect them.
People in other countries
The rich people don’t care, they’ll have already retired to their private fortress islands and gotten eaten by their own security staff long before the survivors can track them down.
Don’t think of people having money as an on-off switch. It’s a gradual shift, and it’s already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.
deleted by creator
It sounds like the beginning of a cast system, I can’t imagine it not being abused in our current economic system. It’s also essentially welfare + a bit extra so you can actually live on it.
How will this deal with home ownership and paying for your kids education? And then your kids end up being stuck in the same situation they were born into with absolutely no way forward. It’s already like this in a sense but UBI is very likely to amplify it imo.
It’s the same capitalism we have now; Accept the bottom income level, isn’t zero anymore.
Who would be in what Cast?
Where do you draw the lines?My main fear is how this will affect renting and house ownership. Rents will probably go up as UBI comes into play and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit. I doubt UBI will be enough for monthly mortgage payments in any case.
It’s already very hard to move past the renting stage, I imagine it will be impossible once on UBI.
The cast would be comprised of land and business owners. Again, it’s already almost the case, I just think UBI without careful considerations would amplify it.
Rents will probably go up […] and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit.
It’s the same capitalism we have now.
Whatever it does to home and rent prices, as well as inflation generally, would be temporary until the markets adjusts. That can be softened by slowly phasing it in, maybe $100/m each year. The standard supply, demand, price balancing act at play. This time with the income floor not being at $0.
I completely agree with you. UBI is overall a good idea, I just think UBI alone won’t be enough to properly deal with massive job loss and certain aspects of our economic systems are going to greatly reduce its impact. It’s a very complicated problem and we have some serious decisions to make, it’s further complicated by the fact that the best solutions will probably end up dealing a blow to the billionaire class and big corporations and they will most likely fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
I’ve heard people say a UBI is easy to exploit before.
But I don’t see how.If everyone gets the same payment, with the only qualifiers being citizenship and age; How can it be exploited?
Depending on the details of the system… Who cares?
Sure, we can have a couple investigators working on gross abuse of the system, but we spend more money fighting social security and disability claims than it would cost to just pay every request.
You are more likely to be fired due to offshoring
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point. Domestic manufacturing production in developed nations has actually been increasing. They just don’t use humans much. You’re not losing your job to poor people overseas. You’re losing it to robots, and you have been since before the current AI craze.
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point.
Ohh wow really? i guess they can really only off shore manufacturing 🤡
What, do want a shitty graveyard shift call center job? Trust me, you aren’t losing out by not having access to that.
Unemployment isn’t even high right now. Why are you whining about a non-issue to begin with? What good would it do you to have more low paying jobs when the problem is that all the jobs are already low paying as it is? We just saw that if there are more jobs then people they’ll happily crash the economy until there aren’t just to make sure wages don’t go up. What do you hope to accomplish by spreading 30 year old conservative propaganda?
You don’t know what you are talking about if you think that call center jobs are being offshored.
Also, unemployment is low due to demographic shift.
I mean, companies off shore software development all the time.
I see three possibilities if AI is able to eliminate a significant portion of jobs:
- Universal basic income, that pays out based on how productive the provider side was per person. Some portion of wealth is continually transferred to the owners.
- Neofeudalism, where the owners at the time of transition end up owning everything and allow people to live or not live on their land at their whim. Then they can use them for labour where needed or entertainment otherwise. Some benevolent feudal lords might generally let people live how they want, though there will always be a fear of a revolution so other more authoritarian lords might sabotage or directly war with them.
- Large portions of the population are left SOL to die or do whatever while the economy doesn’t care for them. Would probably get pretty violent since people don’t generally just go off to die of starvation quietly. The main question for me is if the violence would start when the starving masses have had enough of it or earlier by those who see that coming.
I’m guessing reality will have some combination of each of those.
In the USA, it would be option 3 all the way. We would see three classes: Mega Rich, the warfighters of the mega rich, and then the rest of us left to starve.
They wouldn’t just pull the plug and leave us to our own devices, they would actively destroy farming equipment and industry to make sure life is awful
I’m not even sure it will be 3 classes because having a soldier class risks them deciding to just take over. This is one of the real dangers of AI, they won’t have any issue going into an area and killing everything that moves there until they are given an encrypted kill command. Or maybe the rich will even come in with an EMP (further destroying what infrastructure is left) and act like they are the heroes while secretly being the ones who give the orders to reduce the numbers in the first place.
Worst part is the tech for that already exists. The complicated kill bot AI is getting it to discriminate and selectively kill. I remember seeing a video of an automated paintball turret that could hit a moving basketball with full precision 20 years ago. Not only that, it was made by a teenager (or team of teenagers).
If ONLY some smart fella had pushed a theory about collective ownership of the means of production or something
That man: Abraham Lincoln.
-Wayne Gretzky
No worries! We can always join the US military! 😀
War will be fought with AI too. It’ll be like that episode of Star Trek where each society’s AI battles the other and whatever death toll the computers calculate, that many citizens must report for euthanasia.
I have not seen that episode ☹️
Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.
Which is why you place hards limits on capitalism with a lotmof oversight like in the north European countries. It can be done right ifnits done right. That is, of you wa to do it right. If you simply want to say “fuck it, I want to get rich” then you go for the no limits no safe wors style that the US is practicing.
My base rule is that if it’s needed or used by a majority of people, then the government should have it (probably exclusively too). Like hospitals, schools, infrastructure like roads and trains, electric grid, eventually the internet.
Now, shops and food isn’t in there, probably because we shop wildly differentt I guess, but some base could be handled by rhe government (which is usually the case, like minimum rights to food etc).
1024: This new farming technology means one person can feed 1000 people! What are the other 999 people supposed to do? Are the lords just going to conscript all us serfs and have us fight for their entertainment?
That’s pretty much what happened tho
Back in the 1980’s they told me it’d trickle down.
…eventually.
They were actually talking about how they were pissing on the living room floor while we’re in the basement.
He peed on the rug :(
I really liked that rug, man. It really tied the room together
Where’s the fucking money Lebowski!
Well where is the fucking money, Lebowski?
This isn’t any different from any other automation , so far. Every time there is a new level of automation, someone asks this question. Yes there can be disruption, even a generation or two lost at the level of “Industrial Revolution”, but so far it’s always come back with more jobs, more opportunity.
So what’s different this time? Do you thinks it’s good enough to replace thinking? That was my fear when it looked like self-driving was coming fast, but that fizzled out, and I have Vern blower expectations for this round of generative ai. Sure, it might be transformative to some roles and destructive to the remains of journalism but I don’t see it taking many actual jobs
We’re arguably already in this situation with outsourcing, smart automation, service industries, where there seem to be fewer “middle” jobs. While some of us can be the higher skilled new jobs, way too many new jobs are just not
If all the money is hoarded by the rich, who is going to spend money to make the economy run?
The rich will live in their bunkers while society collapses and blame it all on communism.
The rich will keep trading with each other. Look at housing for an example.
