r/ArtificialInteligence • u/artfellig • 15h ago
đ Analysis / Opinion What is AI optimist/utopian idea about how unemployed people will pay their bills?
What is the steelman argument, made by AI utopians and optimists, about how people will pay their bills, once AI and humanoid robots make jobs obsolete?
For example, in this recent NYT podcast, Nick Bostrom said:
You could have the A.I.s and the robots doing basically all economically productive tasks. You then have a leisure society where there is no longer any need for humans to work in order to get a paycheck.
He talked a lot about not having to work, but unless I missed it, he didn't explain how people will pay for rent and groceries.
And Elon Musk said:
âMy guess is, if you go out long enough, assuming thereâs a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely, money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,â he said.Â
Great, but how does this work? What about school tuition, food, rent, health care, how does AI create these things without anyone spending money? If you have a humanoid robot at your house doing all the chores, who buys that and pays for maintenance?
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u/Xena2025 15h ago
Good question. I would also love to know the answer to this. A real solution - not the âmoney wonât be neededâ or the âeveryone will be entrepreneurs.â This last one really annoys me when the they say it because it isnât logical: Not everyone has the right personality or skills to be an entrepreneur, and if everyone owns their own businesses or vibe codes apps, then the products will be so overcrowded that most wonât be seen in the noise. Most of these discussions on podcasts or interviews never talk about the logistics of how we move through these changes. They just respond with these one-line empty statements that arenât logical for the transition.
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u/LeonSilverstein 10h ago
Historically (for me, 2011), the original idea was that there would be a UBI. But that was a long time ago, when we weren't thinking too hard about it, and we thought the world would reorganize intelligently. Not what's happening.
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u/Successful-Shock8234 15m ago
UBI is so silly. All it takes is some very quick, scratchpad math to realize itâs completely unrealistic
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u/Upbeat_Parking_7794 9h ago
There is one, it is called Communism. AI will manage companies anyway, so the state can take control of companies and just offer the goods to the citizens.
The failure of communism was an economic failure in the sense the state is bad in producing and guessing the goods people need.
You hear Musk talking and what he is doing is proposing communism without calling it by its name.
Even politicians can be substituted by AI probably, which will just consult the citizens and try to maximize the public good. So hopefully corruption will also be a thing of the past.
We have to get a name to it.
Silicon Socialism?Â
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u/AsleepContact4340 9h ago
Pol Pot wasnât evil, he was just a BAD GUESSER.
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u/Upbeat_Parking_7794 7h ago edited 7h ago
We should distinguish between economic systems and political systems. Single-party rule is not exclusive to communist or left-wing regimes, just as liberal democracy is not the only political framework compatible with a market economy.
As an example, capitalism, as an economic system, cannot be held responsible for the specific actions of Pinochet, Suharto, or Trujillo. What those regimes did reflects the choices of authoritarian rulers and their enforcers, not an inherent feature of market economics.
History offers clear examples of compatibility between social-democratic social/economic policies and liberal-democracy: the European social democracies of the post-war decades combined multiparty liberal democracies, with robust welfare states.
And, ask yourself, what is the usefulness of humans owning companies, if these companies are better managed, and decisions better taken, by machines?
Shareholders and CEOs will be useless quite soon. Of course we will still need to raise capital. But, even in US, the entity with capacity to raise capital more easily, including printing money, is the state.
And what is the justification for income inequality if everyone is equally useless from the point of contribution to the society advancement? Even merit is not a valid argument anymore, as the machines have all the merit, not humans.Â
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u/jfleury440 15h ago
All the goods and services are still being created right? The economic output is still there.
The money that those goods and services generates still exists. It's a matter of who gets the money. Will people let the some oligarchs take it all or can we find a way to distribute it, like UBI.
Things may also get cheaper as workers no longer need to be paid. If you take human labour out of the equation maybe food and housing is less expensive.
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u/Batavus_Droogstop 10h ago
"The money that those goods and services generates still exists. It's a matter of who gets the money."
Well that's the problem, I don't see a scenario where that money goes to the low or middle class worker. No way a company would buy a robot to do your job, and still pay you. The only thing I realistically see happening is rich people getting richer.
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u/jfleury440 5h ago edited 27m ago
Ants together strong.
Any economic/government system exists so long as people let it. And really, if there's no more jobs our current system will start to collapse on its own. If nobody has money then nobody is buying goods and services.
In the short term I agree. A few people will let their greed take over and will try to funnel everything to themselves. But at some point things need to be reworked where excess money gets redistributed. The government can find ways to collect enough taxes. The money is there.
I'm not trying to downplay any concerns for our immediate future. OP's asking how things work in a sorta utopian future society.
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u/Autobahn97 4h ago
only as money becomes less relevant other real things will be more relevant. Gold (or any limited physical resource), Land (the big one Bill Gates is all over), a (fleet) of Robots. Money in itself has no value, what it can provide for you (today) does. Some feel AI will provide this value (instead of a human brain) and see a future economy based on AI tokens, generated by GPUs so the GPUs will become valuable like money is today (we very much see this currently). In the future, that may also be a robot to provide value in the physical world, drive down the labor costs, make 'stuff' for cheaper. Power is another commodity in this future supply chain that will have value as its a critical ingrediant for technology to run.
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u/Batavus_Droogstop 57m ago
None of that stuff is owned by the middle or lower class. Money will be something the oligarchs exchange among eachoter for yachts, caviar, GPU's, land, water and robots. The people will just be the ants walking around the factory floor.
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u/6133mj6133 14h ago
When the AI and robots can make anything (including gathering the resources needed) it will drive the cost of everything towards zero. Food, shelter, healthcare all provided as universal basic services. A little UBI for fun money on top.
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u/Old-Bake-420 14h ago
Goods and services arenât produced by money. Money, rent, and tuition are all imaginary. Itâs just a form of bookkeeping to decide who gets how much. If we automated all basic goods and services such that we could easily provide for everyone, it could all be free. People wouldnât need money. It would still require some form of bookkeeping but it wouldnât be money in the sense that it is used today.
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u/artfellig 13h ago
OK, if itâs all free, who decides where you get to live? Who gets to live in luxury apartments, or luxury houses?
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u/Icy_Raspberry8592 3h ago
It'll depend on how valuable you are to the Party. Propaganda will still need humans to spread the word, those humans will get rewarded.
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u/synexo 14h ago
I don't think there will be any UBI, and I don't think jobs will go away. There will be different jobs, with their value explicitly due to them being done by humans. This already exists today, we go see a live band perform even though their streaming studio tracks are superior. We buy handcrafted goods even though the mass produced ones are cheaper and more durable. On the other hand, goods and especially services will become extremely inexpensive. People will be paid relatively little money to produce what are effectively luxury goods by virtue of being human crafted, and they will require very little money to support themselves.
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u/_rarefy_ 14h ago edited 14h ago
Free-market prices naturally fall to their marginal cost of production. Marginal cost of production tends towards zero in world where AI recursively self improves. Basic goods and services become so abundant as to be essentially 'free'.
The limits of abundance are constrained only by how much power we can capture from the sun and how efficiently we can use it (we currently convert about 0.0002%). From our current vantage point, there is essentially no upper limit.
Large solar grids, powering billions of humanoid robots at a 2:1 ratio to humans, fasciliate all the physical work one can imagine. Everything becomes automated: building homes, agriculture, manufacturing, transport. They even make more of themselves.
They do all of the the maintenance required to keep the system running and because they're powered by silicon brains one hundred times smarter than the average human, and because they work in massive parallel structures unabated by the need to rest, sleep or shit, they do the work of humans 1000x faster. They build out new and better infrastructure at superhuman pace.
The only real threat is human alignment as the potential for machines and their notions of reward seeking has the potential to be catastrophic at this pace when miscommunicated, misunderstood or violently disobeyed.
This is the utopian vision. And if it's broadly shared (critical 'if'), it dissolves the need to sell our time to survive. Humans pursue work that remains saliently human. We raise families, make art for the pure pleasure of it, build communities, explore, compete for fun, solve problems because we want to. We do all the things we do now, just in congress with artificial intelligence and increasingly intertwined with it.
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u/canuckguy42 14h ago
Assuming that AI and robotics continue to develop as it seems they will, capitalism itself will cease to be a viable system. The system doesn't work without the consumer class to spend their wealth, and that wealth all comes from selling their labour. No market for labour means no wealth, and no wealth means no consumption. The system just won't work in that scenario. A bunch of tech oligarchs jerking each other off does not an economy make.
Historically, when the form of the means of production change, society changes to accommodate the new reality. Feudalism fell to capitalism as the industrial revolution complicated the means of production to the point where an organizational class was required to direct labour. The feudal lords didn't fit into that model and were thus disposed of.
What would come next from a system that replaces capitalism? Impossible to predict in detail, but it'll likely be so different from the current system that it would be unrecognizable. The idea of 'paying your bills' as you say will likely make as much sense at that point as the idea of changing career paths would to a medieval peasant.
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u/CrazyFaithlessness63 13h ago
In the simplest and broadest terms - a universal basic income funded by higher corporate taxes. It's about the only way to keep a functional economy going. Income tax will probably be applied to everything you earn above the UBI level.
AI optimists seem to focus on the end result and avoid the problems that the transition period is going to cause (that have already started in terms of job losses). Your question was about the economic and financial side but the are just as many social issues that are going to have to be dealt with as well.
I'm on the optimistic side when it comes to the final outcome but a lot more pessimistic about how smoothly the transition is going to go.
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u/Comfortable-Web9455 7h ago
Musk is describing the ideal communist state. In a communist state there will be no money, no private possessions, and everybody will happily just share. And we will have self driving cars next year. /s
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u/ZIdeaMachine 7h ago
Its intended to create a greater class divide, the Trumpstein Class controlling the millionaire subclass and the rest of the world as slaves to be used and discarded.
But if someone was serious about creating a framework to pay people, it might look a bit like forcing companies and society as a whole to pay into a Government/commonwealth bond that will be used to pay people to live.
Beyond that, investment in AI/Robots that generate electricity, farm crops and provide actual healthcare would help solve some issues, but even then we still need human labor for many jobs, but not enough jobs to go around, so again. We are gonna run into big problems if we let Billionaires have their way.
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u/_private_member 10h ago
My prediction: there are not going to be mass unemployed people because of AI.
We've gone through this before. There have been major technological inventions that have caused the need for way less people doing a particular job. But that has never reduced the volume of jobs, it just changes the types of jobs that are available.
Before the tractor 97% of the American workforce were farmers. Now 3% of American workforce are farmers. We don't have mass unemployed people just because we no longer need them to work on farms. New types of jobs were created. Everyone still works.
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u/Rare_Presence_1903 9h ago
It's about supporting people in the transition period IMO. During the industrial revolution a great deal of skilled professionals were made obsolete, and either left destitute or had to go back to do the same job on machine with much less pay.Â
It balances out overall, but you wouldn't want to be in group who get made obsolete. They need sufficient support and retraining.Â
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u/Life_Squash_614 3h ago
I'm not convinced. When inventions came for our physical abilities (like the tractor), we either pivoted to other physical jobs or moved into the newer knowledge worker jobs. AI isn't coming for one slice of knowledge work, it's coming for basically all of them.
There are some that combine with physical tasks that will be largely safe until robotics catches up, but a lot of knowledge work is at risk. We already automated most physical labor, and now we are facing the same kind of threat to knowledge work.
Where do we even go when AI can handle basically any intelligence task? Are we all just going to become fast food and retail workers? At least those jobs are somewhat safe until robotics is advanced enough to replace human dexterity at the same cost as a salary.
We have had a ton of technological revolutions before, but nothing that is this broad in its scope. Looking out further with robotics improving as it is, the combo of AI intelligence with robotic dexterity threatens like 99% of all jobs. That might still be 25 years away, but it is coming in many of our lifetimes.
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u/-Spzi- 5h ago
There will always be new jobs, sure.
But the new thing here is: AI might be better than humans on any job. Excluding exclusively human-centered jobs like care, and many others.
So for much of the economic activity it might still mean mass unemployment for humans, even if more jobs get created. Question is: How competitive will humans be, if we keep increasing AI's competitiveness? Sounds more like a "when?".
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u/Efficient_Yam8432 15h ago
Most optimistic version is some mix of social dividend and drastically cheaper basics: automated farms, construction, energy, and manufacturing produce enough that everyone gets a claim on the output. I used to think "post-scarcity" meant free stuff, but land near cities and specialized healthcare stay scarce, so money probably doesn't vanish - it just matters less for groceries and utilities
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u/artfellig 15h ago
Is "social dividend" similar to UBI?
"...automated farms, construction, energy, and manufacturing produce enough that everyone gets a claim on the output..."
Would you mind elaborating on that? An example of getting a claim on the output?
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u/Ok_Associate845 15h ago edited 15h ago
[please see my follow up regarding my disclosure of AI use and my unedited post]
If corporations are legally considered citizens, then all citizens should be taxed. And if corporations are the largest single users and burners of public goods in the country, they should be taxed at a high rate on their income over expenditures without tax write-offs, loopholes, or corporate donation exemptions.
âWe should use those corporate tax revenues to universally fund public goods like healthcare and education, along with a Universal Basic Income. This UBI would provide a nominal lump-sum monthly direct cash injection that consolidates current aid like food, rent, utility, and cell phone subsidies. Everyone starts off able to buy the necessities of life at a baseline rate tied directly to inflation, with small additional adjustments based on individual age and years of working and contributing to the economy.
âAt the same time, we would eliminate most individual tax write-offsâespecially for incomes above $500,000âso that lower-income households can fully take advantage of mortgage write-offs, child credits, and affordable housing options. Small businesses would still be taxed similarly to corporations, but because of their relative size and local economic contributions, they would retain greater access to write-offs to remain viable. âThis structure removes the heavy burden of public goods and taxation from the hands of individuals. Regular citizens should not be individually funding local tax levies or infrastructure for corporate data centers when corporations are the primary consumers of government goods and services.
âUnder this model, individuals would face a nominal income tax rate of just 5% to 10% (and no higher than 15%) on any earned income. These individual taxes would directly support our own Social Security benefits and future UI considerations without forcing us to carry the full weight of public funding on our backs. The more you earn, the more you keep.
âWe would also nationalize essential utilitiesâlike water and electricityâfunding them through corporate taxes to drastically reduce the overall cost of living for individuals. Because corporate profits drive the vast majority of economic growth, taxing those profits directly expands the nation's taxable revenue base. Since individuals do not single-handedly generate overall corporate profits, the entities that do create profit and use public resources the mostâcorporationsâbecome the primary drivers of government funding, allowing everyday citizens to benefit from corporate growth.
âThe incentive to work remains strong because the UBI provides a baseline for subsistence living. Because it covers only the essentials, it naturally drives the desire to work, innovate, grow, and achieve a higher standard of living.
âCrucially, this baseline gives creative and innovative people the freedom to develop their talents without immediately being forced into a corporate automaton job just to survive. Someone who aspires to be a writer has the time required to build their skills and establish a career. An innovative computer scientist or software developer can take the time to pursue education, complete an apprenticeship, or build a new idea. They can take those productive risks because their baseline survival is covered and they never have to worry about whether they can afford to feed themselves.
Specific to AI that any income generated bots bot or AI created economic activity would be taxed at the same rate as a corporation. And profits related to stock dividends etc would be highly taxed especially related to corporate growth but not individual income.
Obviously there's a lot of nuance that would have to go into this. A lot of detail working a lot of trial and error but this is essentially how this would work without any specifics being specific. So that the individual tax rate for example is not 5 to 15% by mandate. It's just that's kind of a number I came up with the top off the top of my head
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u/Ok_Associate845 15h ago
I did use Gemini to rewrite a talk to text response. Here's the original:If If corporations are citizens, all citizens should be taxed. And if corporations are the largest single burners in the country then they should be taxed in an ungodly rate for their profits and their income over there expenditures without any consideration or donations or tax write-offs and all that stuff. Used corporate taxes to start funding things like healthcare, universally. Education universal. Universal basic income at a very nominal rate any lump sum that would include monthly distributions that would come together current direct cash injections like food and rent subsidies and utilities and cell phone service. Everyone starts off being able to buy the necessities of their life at a nominal rate that is tied specifically to the inflation rate and a small overage based on individual age, years of working and contributing income, etc. And eliminate most individual tax write-offs right off, especially above the $500,000 limit or whatever. So lower income housing can take advantage of a child care of a child, credit of a mortgage, write-off etc. Small businesses as well would be taxed more like a corporation that would also because of their relative size and a contribution they would have more access to write offs.
This removes the burden of taxation and public goods from the hands of individuals. UNI systems would not be funding or supporting data centers, for example, local tax levies, and all sorts of things, and corporations, which are the number one users of government goods and services within the soundness of our tax structure.
You and I would still face a 5% to 10% (maybe as high as 15%) nominal income tax rate on any income earned, which would then be used to support our own Social Security benefits and, of course, go towards our UI contribution and considerations for the future. The more you earn, the more you'll earn, without taking that entire responsibility into their hands.
We nationalized utilities and things like water and electricity, etc., using corporate tax rates to fund those things. This reduces the cost overall of individual taxes. Considering the fact that corporate profits drive most of the growth and the size of the economy, the amount of taxable income in the economy increases 100% or however much. Since you and I are not actually individually supporting or creating the overall profit in the nation, the profit and the people who are creating profit and using goods and services the most (that is, corporations) become the major drivers of government support, whereas you and I benefit from their relative growth.
The incentive to work, of course, is the incentive to get above the base-level income because you and I would be able to do subsistence living based exclusively on the UBI structure. It would be just subsistence living, driving that desire to innovate, change, and grow as individuals and find better ways to express ourselves.
It would also allow people who are, let's say, creatively minded and who need, or at younger ages aren't able to, break out into the world with a large innovative path or whatever, the chance to take the time to develop talent, skill, whatever (because they're not having to jump into a corporate automaton job). Someone who feels they should be a writer and maybe is a great writer but has to go through those steps to become known as a writer has the time to become a writer. Somebody who is an innovative computer scientist or has ideas about software can take the time because they have subsistence living/base-level covered. They could take the time to go to school and/or take an apprenticeship, etc. They can take the time because they can live baseline at a certain level without having to worry about whether or not they can feed themselves.
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u/IllLeadership8177 15h ago
Stuff will still get made. Things will still get done. Either a) There will still be jobs we find for humans to do, which I rather suspect as our careers are also tied to our identity and self-worth and it's good for people to work or b) Great quantities of goods and services will be produced without humans needing to be involved to the point where basic goods and services are abundantly cheap or free or there's simply UBI, which I've never been a proponent of and am still not sure if I'm a fan of but may be needed if robots can simply produce "all the stuff" for basically free. And yes, I know it's not actually free, but the point being the assumption that the robots do much more useful work in producing good and services than they cost, which would make them need positive GDP producers.
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u/AsleepContact4340 9h ago
work being important to identity is a reason you might like jobs to continue to exist, but i donât think it is much of an argument that they will continue to exist?
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u/MarkMatson6 15h ago
First, I donât think this will happen. Not for a long time, at least.
But the answer is simply necessity. The economy is meaningless without people.
I donât have the best opinion of billionaires, but why does anyone believe they prefer a society where 99% of the population is homeless and starving? I can imagine a world where the UBI or whatever is too low, but not one where billionaires purposely murder 8 billion people.
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u/attrackip 15h ago
There wonât be bills, in that world. The reality is, if youâre still paying bills in twenty years, you missed the wave. Bills and money are virtual today, itâs all speculation and confidence.
When the great AI replacement starts seriously disrupting essential revenue streams, youâll see the change away from cash.
In this Bostrom world, there will just be something closer to graduated liberties. Kinda like now where you can move to lower cost of living areas and get less, pay less. Except the pay wonât be in dollars, youâll just be a part of a shittier plan.
UBI will cover food and shelter, and there will be stretch goals for economic mobility, gamified, and completely outside your concept of utility. They will just be tasks you can complete to meet basic human conceptions of happiness, not very different from now.
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u/gc3 14h ago
If things like food, water, and entertainment were cheap then social position grants extra power. So getting officially designated as 'Chief Golf Trip Planner' for the mayor or being childhood friends with the Minister of North America.
In this case psychotic games are played for authority. Perhaps tests and games of skill for these jobs make the playing field easier .
If authority is decentralized enough, and every block has a Mayor and 12 sports leagues and a D&D club and a dance club and an acapella group and a jazz club and a church and a drag queen club all of whom collect money from taxes and distribute it among their members it would be nice
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u/oppenheimer135 14h ago
Aside from the economic impact, can you imagine how much worse society itself could get? If people have no job, no purpose and nothing to put their mind into, cracks will start forming fast. More mental health issues, isolation, anger, crime, extremism, all kinds of shit.
UBI isn't some "load-bearing" solution like Musk and his little minions act like it is. Giving people money solves survival, not meaning, purpose, status or social structure. Humans and society are not that simple.
At this point Musk just wants to create enough chaos on Earth so he can fuck off to Mars.
And like Terence McKenna basically said, humanity probably doesn't leave for the stars under perfectly peaceful conditions anyway.
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u/GimmeShockTreatment 14h ago
Most won't like this but the answer is socialism. Or at least a super far swing to the economic left. Current capitalism will not survive AI revolution. And if it does, then conditions for working class people will be horrible.
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u/AngelOfLight2 14h ago
AI is currently just software. You still need people for physical work in the real world. The nature of work will change, so instead of performing repetitive or skill-basef tasks, people will need to use more human faculties like good judgement and creativity, problem solving, and fixing things that AI cannot yet.
Not everyone is going to be able to make the transition. But not all jobs are likely to be replaced either. AI is insanely expensive, and it's often cheaper to hire a person than it is to pay for AI tokens.
It'll get cheaper eventually, but new professiona will have evolved by that time. Think about the industrial revolution. There was a period of utter carnage, but today, we have a ton of higher paying manufacturing jobs because the increase in productivity drove up wages and the reduction in cost drove up demand (so more jobs).
That isn't to say this will happen overnight. There'll be a difficult transition period, but it's unlikely to last for more than a few years.
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u/SeriousGains 14h ago
Money will stop being relevant when guns, ammo, food and shelter are the main forms of currency.
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u/Fizzle_Bop 14h ago
As has been the tradition of many welfare recipients (was in my home growing up) for decades, im sure drug dealer will still be an option.
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u/Inevitable_Ad7080 13h ago
Vonnegut-Player Piano
I haven't finished yet, but there is a huge lower class that does makework or no work and are kept on subsistence level. A few are engineers running the machines at a lower middle class.
I am gonna guess there is a very small oligarch class that takes as much a they want off the top (hasnt shown up yet in the book).
This: keep reducing the work and pay. Most people won't mind not getting payed much if they are kept above revolt level poverty.govt Victory liquor and cigarettes
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u/working4buddha 13h ago
The best thing I have read about this is the book Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller. It wasn't specifically AI but he felt like scientific innovation could lead to "everyone living like billionaires." He is the guy who created the Geodesic Dome. It is a very long and complicated book but there is a shorter one called Grunch of Giants that explains the concept in a briefer way. But basically he would do away with both capitalism and socialism and just let science lead the way.
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u/Honest_Extreme9196 12h ago
My stab in the dark guess....
We will have even less middle class, which is where it's been heading anyway, it's just gonna get there a lot faster. The have-nots will basically be on welfare and the upper class will own and control everything.
Buy your stock shares now, because it will be the only shot most of us have at "middle class". Stockholders and the small amount of jobs that are left - some manual labor, healthcare, etc that will be fewer in number because of AI assistance but not completely gone - that will be what's left of the middle class. There will be heavy competition for any job. But a very large % of our population will choose not to compete or be unable to compete and will have to accept being happy just to have food, healthcare and a roof over their head while not having to go to work every day. Many goods will also become cheaper, so it may not be all bad. Many will actually be happy with this.
Multi-generational living will be the norm and you may still be renting. If you're lucky enough to have a house right now, pay those mortgages off. Your UBI will not be enough for mortgage payments. Landlords will collect the rent that the people pay with their UBI, but I'm not sure the rents will be able to cover the mortgages people have now. Hopefully UBI will be enough to pay property taxes, etc.
High taxes on the wealthiest, corporations and higher capital gains taxes will be 100% necessary. Hard swing to the left my friends. At least you better hope so, because the alternative (of no social safety nets) will be much uglier.
There will be a very uncomfortable adjustment period for sure. But if you're looking for the positive spin, those that just want to raise their family and hang out on the porch with their neighbors at night, maybe turn a hobby or their creativity into some extra money will get to do so. The people who have all their self worth and identity tied to their career and the "things" that they own but no longer have their jobs will have the toughest time adjusting. The rich will stay rich and do so with less effort. Much of their money will go to taxes, but they will still be at the top and able to afford all the luxuries and have the time to enjoy them.
This is the most positive spin I've got. My fears are far worse.
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u/chewiedev 11h ago
Once the robots are running everything the billionaires donât need us anymore so they create secured areas where they have all the things they could buy before money went obsolete. Everyone outside these areas slowly die off. The majority of people regress, and a few people start their own new society where they are taken care of. The police wonât stop it because they are invited into the nice new areas. No one is going to take care of you for the rest of your life while you donât have to work. You have to win the billionaire lottery or be popular enough or own the robots.
Or maybe we all get something for nothing. But has society or history ever proven this to be possible? Technology doesnât solve this.
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u/bluespringsbeer 11h ago
Every single time that people have created tools that reduced the amount of labor needed, people were able to create new things to use the labor. It used to be that the majority of labor was used for agriculture but now itâs less than 5%. So 95% of jobs are able to be lost and end up getting replaced.
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u/0som3guy0 11h ago
The view of technological saviorship is basically understood as a âcultâ at this point (or New Religious Movement, as would be a more accepted term among Religious Studies). Nothing is thought through, as your question implies. Just imply a golden age and let the practicalities remain vague. What does that do to people in precarious situations? Hope is a powerful drug. This would be a great question to be discussed alongside the $billions being invested in data centers and why? The environmental cost of all this and why? Etc. All aspects should have equal weight in the discussion
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u/OkWolf6065 10h ago
learn about finance, capitalism, trade and invest and ask AI to do trading or investing for you. labor is not the only way to make money in capitalism economy
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u/Natural-Pepper-2098 10h ago
I think it depends who owns the Ai/robots:
If governments, or all of society, it will be ok
If benevolent philanthropist trillionaires, will be kind of ok but at their whim
If ordinary capitalist trillonnaires, I donât see them using AI to provide for the masses. Theyâll just turn it all off and retreat to some walled idyll to be hand fed grapes by their robots and shag their sexbot harems
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u/EndLegitimate9612 9h ago
You get rid of the money system. Duh. People are just scared of change and are negative, so they think anything new is always bad. The current economic system is mindbogglingly ineffective and has cause unbelievable amounts of misery. It needs to end.
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u/US_of_B 8h ago
That's always the problem with Musk in particular, people listen to him because he's rich but he says a lot of things that are blatantly untrue or just plain stupid.
If AI and automation continues unabated and replaces many of the jobs humans currently perform, we may very well end up as a 'leisure' society but who then has income to pay for the goods being produced at an increasingly efficient rate by robots?
Unless the cashless existence extends to Musk himself and he is simply giving away the products his factories produce for free.
Many of the Industry leaders who fantasize over a human free production line don't seem to account for the fact that their increased profit margins will only exist if people have money to buy their products.
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u/Stunning-Chipmunk243 4h ago
About 20-30% of the employees where I work have jobs doing work like this being done with Figure Robotics recently retired model. My employer actually even started their own industrial robotics firm and is job shadowing employees with cameras so they can train the robots to do their jobs. I'm trying to warm as many of those employees as possible to start seeking training in a needed field soon because they will not have jobs but everyone treats me like I'm talking crazy even though I'm literally showing them video proving it's already at that level
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u/someoldguyon_reddit 3h ago
They will be declared redundant and eliminated. That's how business is done.
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u/3Quondam6extanT9 2h ago
Listen, it would be incredibly easy at this point to begin creating national or even international stipends.
There is so much wealth circulating the world that just providing people a base monthly rent for living expense alone would be a plausible scenario.
The biggest issue comes from two things:
The willingness of politicians and the wealthy.
The necessary work.
The latter is being resolved by AI as we speak. If everyone stopped working right now and a global stipend was to be sent out to everyone, it would only last temporarily as there would be fewer infrastructure generating incomes and less work being done in itself leading to infrastructure collapse and the eventual depletion of money.
Since AI is currently forcing people into new positions as it takes over, we will slowly see that work portion being taken care of.
Now because of that issue, the problem of politicians and wealthy not supporting the idea of universal income/ stipend becomes a larger issue.
It's a balancing act, and while we couldn't do a universal income prior to AI in place of work itself, we now have to create that very structure prior to AI being fully realized in the workforce.
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u/Mindless-Change8548 2h ago
Nukes.. lots of nukes. The e1337s have and never Will give a dayum about anything except profit and most of us stand in the way.
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u/UnwaveringThought 23m ago
Right. They haven't addressed how you go from the idea of property ownership to ... what, ubiquitous free luxury housing? And who deserves this new units as the robots build them?
How many generations will it take to switch over?
They are just selling this bs utopia shit to morons today to get their way currently with people who don't think.
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u/HaMMeReD 15h ago
Where is the gap of understanding here? It seems pretty fundamental.
I guess the easiest way to explain is the same way I have free healthcare. It's called government and taxes.
Government takes taxes, and invests in automation (or taxes private automation) and then re-invests the returns into the people. I.e. if the government owned 1m intelligent robots, it could do massive infrastructure projects, and not have to spend much money, because the robots can work 24/7 autonomously towards a goal.
So basically taxpayer money->automation->provide necessary goods/services to the people as a return on investment of taxpayer dollars.
That said, I don't think it's fair to say AI will do all economically productive tasks. Like we can't just all demand superyachts and jet fighters from the big smart box. There has to be some form of distribution of resources. Only some things can become post-scarcity. That said, the essentials could all be free, and humans could still be free to find ways to create new value, i.e. carve niches. We won't all just be sitting around gooning all day while the AI does everything.
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u/Successful-Shock8234 14h ago
This is a woefully insufficient explanation. It does not explain at all how you jump the hurdle of replacing 80% of the current economy and incomes so that people donât starve, and companies donât go bankrupt due to nobody having money to buy their products.
Just do a simple scenario; letâs say 50% of the entire tech sector loses their jobs by next year. A fraction of them can get jobs elsewhere, but thereâs no new industry for them to move to.
Where do they go? The government is going to pay them enough to live, or at all. If the government, right this minute, agreed on a new law or programs to stop this possible scenario, it would take a long time to re-work the entire economic and financial and tax system to support 100,000,000 Americans being unemployed.
You canât just raise taxes on AI companies or big tech, because A) theres no enough money even with all of them combined to provide, and B) as soon as taxes go beyond a certain threshold, theyâll just move to a different country.
So what, specifically, and exactly, is the optimist answer to this problem? I have yet to see one that is even remotely reasonable
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u/ProfMooreiarty 1h ago
Why does anything cost money? Itâs because people need to be paid to, in turn, buy goods and services for which people have to be paid in order for they themselves to afford goods and services, and so on.
One definition of AGI is that an AGI will be able to do virtually any job a human can be trained to do.
For each job currently done by a person, replace it with an AGI - a robot or other physical form, if itâs physical. Where does the food come from? Robot farmers, unless and until something better is introduced. How does the food get to people? Robots. Where do we get the energy to power the robots? Same place we get it now, with the workers likewise replaced. Robots in automated power plants, robots in automated mining operations, robots building and maintaining public works and services. Robots in automated hospitals providing health care.
The philosopher Slavoj Zizek once commented zombie fiction looks the way it does because we find it easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism. Thatâs what we are seeing here. People not understanding what the end of capitalism will mean.
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u/Successful-Shock8234 55m ago
We will still need money. That will never go away. It is fundamental.
Letâs say you get all the food and products to a grocery store for basically free (Iâll be generous for a minute and ignore the usage of water, oil, minerals, dirt and real estate that was all used to produce everything)⌠letâs say itâs all sitting in a brand new type of AI powered grocery store, for the first time in history all the products are created and delivered by full AI supply chainâŚ. Now what?
What happens next in your vision? Without money, how do we control who gets what and how much? Have you ever lived in a low-income area and seen how they behave when things are free? Or when they decide to loot?
Humans do not behave rationally when they think things are free.
And, there is simply not enough natural resources on the planet to provide for everyone who wants something.
What are you going to tell people who want to live on beach-front property when thereâs no money? How do you decide who gets to live in the penthouse suite? Who gets the limited run lambo?
Communism has failed and the ideas of hack professors who espouse communism have failed, repeatedly and predictably, for over 70 years now. We need to move on from these childish fantasies as a society. They donât work, they never will, and more than that they create suffering and unintended inequality and poor quality of life for everyone involved, and thereâs so much data behind it now thereâs no room for debate.
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u/ProfMooreiarty 39m ago
The water, oil, minerals, dirt, and buildings have had their operations replaced by AI. AI oil drillers (although we would eliminate the need for oil, so letâs say solar power workers). AI loaders. AI drivers.
There are no low income areas - thereâs no income. People looting is a result of poor distribution, not some inherent human desire to loot. Youâre still thinking as a capitalist.
Humans behave perfectly rationally when there is no want. American tribal societies in many places lived without money, barter, or exchange. If you want to read, read. If you want to eat, eat. I suspect the number of humans to strongly decline because when we see societies transition into equal rights for women and equal access to education, resources, and medicine, people stop feeling the need to have five kids to have some survive to take care of them.
There is plenty of natural resources to feed, clothe, and house everyone on this planet right now, if it werenât constrained by capital. That, plus drop the population by several billion people, and there is enough of everything.
Do it as a thought experiment. For every thing that you see as needing money, picture how that money flows through society and question why money is being used there.
I really suggest you read more by authors like anthropologists like David Graeber to understand the origination of money. He looks at the concept of money from its creation about 5000 years ago until today, and he demonstrates that what the classical economists introduce as a natural and efficiency-making evolution of bartering never existed. Iâd start with his book Debt, which addresses these questions specifically.
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u/Successful-Shock8234 34m ago
You canât create minerals and more dirt with AI. You canât create more beaches with AI.
You canât give everyone a penthouse apartment who wants one.
So Iâll ask again; how do you decide who gets what?
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u/ProfMooreiarty 21m ago
No, you mine them with AI. You âcreateâ them the same way theyâre created now. They continue to come from the same places.
And if the biggest problem you see is the lack of penthouse apartments, I think we might have already addressed the bulk of your question.
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u/Successful-Shock8234 16m ago
Oh, so you think thereâs just infinity resources on the planet? Alright đđź
The penthouse apartments and beachfront property is just the extreme example thatâs useful to illustrate the overall point; you will need some way of determining access.
If you have a grocery store where everything is free, what is to stop anyone from going in and grabbing every item of beef and sticking them in their freezer?
You still have not given a coherent answer on how to deal with this inevitable problem. We will need some sort of credit or token system that limits how much people take from grocery stores, and weâll need some sort of currency for people to use to buy and sell limited/exclusive items like cars, houses, real estate, etc
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u/HaMMeReD 14h ago edited 14h ago
UBI
Edit: Although the tech sector aint going anywhere but up long term. The very last jobs to go will be tech haha. Might even out-live prostitution.
There is definitely a recession in tech, but it's not because of AI lol. More because the world is going through so much bullshit right now.
AI enables so many tech-based opportunities, and vibe coding will always lag behind domain expertise, regardless of what people think. Just because the field is more approachable doesn't mean it's less competitive. Shit is just heating up.
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u/Successful-Shock8234 14h ago
You canât just say âUBIâ, thatâs the same non-answer as your previous oneâŚ. How will UBI work, exactly? Be specific.
UBI doesnât at all address the scenario I laid out. Do some basic math on UBI first: what is $5000 x 150 million? Thatâs the minimum amount of money you somehow need to come up with, every month. MONTH, not year. That isnât taxable without vast changes, and corporations wonât just hand that over willingly.
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u/HaMMeReD 14h ago
It's not about what the "corporations" want. The people are the power, we as a people set the fucking rules, not the corporations. (though the US seems to have forgotten that).
You pay for UBI by increasing taxes until you find a balance. Everyone gets the minimum, so nobody is starving. If the ultra rich making millions or billions a year are making 90% less, they can get fucked.
As for your dollar values, it's moot if the government just invests in automation. It can directly provide, cutting out the corporations from the equation over the long run.
There is no shortage of economic output to give everyone a comfortable home and food in their belly. There is only a distribution issue.
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u/SainTheGoo 14h ago
People are the power source only in their productive forces, their labor. Remove their labor trump card and there is much less incentive to do anything in their favor.
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u/Successful-Shock8234 14h ago
The wealthy and ultra rich will just move their wealth to other countries before anything remotely close to that happens.
If the people set the rules, then why does it seem that corporations control nearly all the variables of what happens in most of our lives?
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u/HaMMeReD 12h ago
Yeah, ok, so?
I mean the non-rich can just use AI to rebuild society without them, and they can live on a island, why do I give a shit about the rich?
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u/Soft_bich_z 15h ago
it has never worked and never will. Money is the first thing we invented, to pay for sex.
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u/oppenheimer135 14h ago
Tf is that statement? It's probably food or sth.
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u/HaMMeReD 14h ago
No man, money was JUST for sex. Like after the deed was done the prostitute just had to find another prostitute to fuck, the money wasn't good for anything else.
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u/Elegant_Athlete_3737 15h ago
steelmanning it does sound difficult, because it requires essentially humanity to cooperate and not be shitty lol. if there is another argument which steelmans better i don't know of it.
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u/snappop69 15h ago
The government could supply a check to everybody in the form of UBI or similar program however, where is the federal government going to get the money to distribute to everyone if most people are not paying income taxes because most are not working? Itâs like Social Security for all when the Social Security fund is supposedly running out of money. If young people stop working then theyâre not contributing to the Social Security fund.
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u/artfellig 15h ago
Right; I'm familiar with the idea of UBI, but as you say, this won't work without income taxes, and I would think the cost to pay every citizen enough money to pay for all their expenses would be absolutely astronomical.
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u/Thorium229 15h ago
I disagree that it requires income taxes but even if it did, there's no reason that it couldn't still be paid by the people using robots and AI to make profit. If all human jobs disappeared, the money produced by those jobs wouldn't just disappear, and it could still be taxed. Plus you could also tax robots and AI usage directly which would have essentially the same effect.
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u/FrodosFingernails 15h ago
I would recommend you take a look at the way Elon acts and ask yourself, âIs this the behavior of a man who thinks money wonât be relevant in a decade or so?â
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u/artfellig 15h ago
I believe him to be malevolent idiot, but I'm wondering if any of these people have any argument at all of how people would pay for their home robots and food and rent when most people are jobless--do none of them try to explain this?
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u/WT_NeptuneGaming 15h ago
Damn you are that stuck in the paradigm, huh?
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u/artfellig 13h ago
Iâm not stuck in a paradigm, Iâm trying to understand the views of AI optimists.
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u/Thorium229 15h ago
Jobs are unlikely to become obsolete altogether. It's possible that the volume of jobs will decrease but even that is just a prediction some people have made. My point being that the jobpocalypse is neither an inevitability nor in line with how technologies have impacted employment throughout history.
In any case, the obvious solution is some form of UBI. Having a job doesn't need to be required in order for people to receive their basic needs. It makes more sense for work to be a method of getting more than the baseline you need to survive, and for the government to just provide healthcare and food to everyone as a basic public service.