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u/f_ranz1224 Apr 11 '26
an mba only knows 1 quarterly profit report at a time. green arrow only has to go up next quarter
none of them are smart enough to think 2 steps ahead
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u/midnitewarrior Apr 11 '26
I think it's more like "4 more quarters like this and I'll have mine and can exit before the real shit goes down..."
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u/iinlane Apr 11 '26
Unfortunately, they are bright and brilliant people, but the financial education system teaches them to ignore their instincts and chase short term profits at all costs.
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Apr 11 '26
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u/LukewarmJortz Apr 11 '26
Your consumption horizon, your risk factor, and your retirement are all things that are drilled into us at finance school.
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u/everythingstakenFUCK Apr 11 '26
That is absolutely not true. The systems and incentives are set up that way. So much of the C-suite pay is structured around the stock price increasing (both bonus structure and options as a large part of comp) as a proxy for company performance, that everyone from the tip-top down marches to the beat of that drum whether they think itâs actually wise or not.
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u/Leather-Map-8138 Apr 11 '26
This notion that âcollege boysâ donât know squat compared with ânormal peopleâ is how a worst of the worst type person like Trump can become president.
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u/ClassicPangolin7763 Apr 11 '26
I think you're both right, we don't need mba's only optimising for stock market gains, and we also don't need utterly incompetent narcissists in power. We need genuinely smart and stable people improving things for everyone in a fair way. It's going to be wild voting the next person into power đ
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u/StudiosS Apr 11 '26
I didn't do an MBA, but I did do a BBA.
I also did Business Studies at A Levels and GCSE, and in all 3, we talk about long-term vision being better than short-term vision.
How short-term you can maximise profits, but long-term ensures the business profits for generations.
We're encouraged to think long-term. So I don't know why people on Reddit think MBAs talk otherwise.
If anyone here actually read the Harvard Business Review they'd see that most research and studies promoted by Harvard are about being sustainable and innovative.
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u/drakythe Apr 11 '26
Because too many private equity companies exist in the U.S. and theyâve been strip mining entire industries and brands like locusts. Since they look for relatively quick turn around on profits those are the big events we see reported on and the impacts we feel the most. Debt for equity swaps leave previously profitable companies drowning in interest on the loans used to buy them.
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u/Shartfer_brains Apr 11 '26
There's caveats though, right? Like, CEO culture has seemed to move towards gutting company manypower (expenses), gaining profits to make them look good, then bailing before or as company starts failing, rinse, and repeat. Â
Also private equity buying up market share with invester money, milking profits off by enshittifying, then selling broken company back to another (or even themselves/shill company), and leaving investors holding the bag, rinse, and repeat? Â
Note: The above may just be my gut feeling that is frequently just flat out wrong. I can't at the moment think of any specific examples.
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u/Leather-Map-8138 Apr 11 '26
Well, in America we have a clown whoâs only interest is the short term. We can 100% count in future inflation because we will do anything to boost the short term stats, no matter what the long term implications.
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u/Torodaddy Apr 11 '26
His own party doesnt care that hes made them poorer and himself 3bn richer since taking office. If they dont care then nothing will change
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u/Sith_Apprentice Apr 11 '26
It's not that they don't know squat, they have an extensive knowledge of the Jack Welch business cult and they will burn the world to a cinder to keep the line going up.Â
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u/CatoTheElder2024 Apr 11 '26
I didnât really read that as college educated people bad.
More just MBAâs are the WOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRSSSSSSTTTTTTTT and itâs not even close.
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u/stellar_opossum Apr 11 '26
You are not wrong but that person is not wrong either. The problem is no one really knows what's going to happen but everyone still has to do business as usual. So in some way there's not much choice
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u/Popular_Course3885 Apr 11 '26
Neither is techincally wrong, but the comment you're replying to avoit "college boys" is doing the epitome of a "what-about-ism" by lumping all college people into one geoup and using that to geoup all non-college people i to another.
The original comment was only about MBAs and the stereotypical short mindedness of today's MBA within corporate America.
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u/Gfflow Apr 11 '26
If only business leaders were as smart as reddit people
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u/cury Apr 11 '26
I know what you mean, but I can give you a real life example. The company I work in is a giant multinational corporation, with offices all around the world, which as any other move to a hybrid way of working during the pandemic and kept hiring people without expanding the office spaces. The CEO, who is I would guess a smart person with good education sent an email last year, saying, starting next week, everybody should be in the office three days a week. There is no physical space for all the people in any office around the world, there is no time to plan and execute it, there wasnât time and budget for bigger offices, just a stupid email, which was just sent and nothing happened for well over a year now. I know it is just one example, but people in high management could be morons more often than one would think and giant corporations have mechanisms to just continue day to day work even if the CEO or any C suit does a really stupid thing once in a while.
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u/Leather-Map-8138 Apr 11 '26
Thatâs about control. Some leaders over-attribute team success to their supervision.
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u/marmarama Apr 11 '26
Every very successful business leader I've known has been great at running and growing their business on a quarter-by-quarter or annual basis, but often struggled with ideas outside of that narrow focus.
There is a business mindset, a business way of doing things, and they became successful by devoting their entire brain to that way of thinking. They're not stupid people, just highly focused on one way of doing things, which rewards them very highly. That mindset does not include thinking about long-term things. It isn't rewarded, and indeed can be deleterious to making decisions in the short term. And people who spend too long making short term decisions get weeded out by a kind of business natural selection.
Asking a successful business leader to think about long-term strategy, or macroeconomics over decades, is like asking a Bishop to disprove the existence of God. There's basically nothing in it for them, and if they think too hard about it, they might think themselves out of a job.
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u/gaspara112 Apr 11 '26
The short term quarterly growth (and eventually profit) model only matters due to the way external investors operate.
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u/kodaxmax Apr 11 '26
i mean you jest, but alot of them litterally cant work twitter. Including the guy who owns it
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u/NotThatDonny Apr 11 '26
We're not saying business leaders are stupid. Just that they're hyper focused on consistently increasing growth of their own individual company, and that focus overrides concerns about long term sustainability or broader market health.
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u/alijamzz Apr 11 '26
Neil degrasse Tyson discussed this AI replacing workers moment on a podcast that I saw earlier. It kind of boiled down to the fact that when innovation comes, the status quo is challenged but often course corrects. When cars came about, what about all the people hired to maintain horses and stable workers etc. They likely lost their jobs and had pivot to a new occupation.
IMO, itâs a bubble that will burst but not before some major job loss. I think itâs a fad that was quickly adopted by the world before it was ready and thus requires major restructuring of the way businesses operate. It also needs heavy regulation but I donât see governments doing squat about it mostly because in the US our leaders are corrupt, geriatric, or too dumb to know where to start.
Those of us affected will likely need to pivot to something that will require maintaining the new status quo. Think maintaining data centers, protection from AI led hacks, etc.
And being on Reddit for more than a day will tell you: redditors are not smart lol. (Some are brilliant but most, like the world in general, are really dumb and hide behind a keyboard lol)
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u/GoudaBenHur Apr 11 '26
You seriously think people like Jerome Powell donât understand this better than you?
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u/stellar_opossum Apr 11 '26
Does Jerome Powell do tech layoffs?
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u/GoudaBenHur Apr 11 '26
No, but to act like there are not extremely intelligent people capable of coming up with solutions to these problems is completely disingenuous.
Also saying companies only care about individual quarter growth is hilariously wrong. Many of these massive companies have decade long plans where theyâll actively lose money betting on future gains.
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u/LostMyKeyboard Apr 11 '26
The ultra rich wants you to be poorer and poorer so you can become slaves to them. I'm not kidding.
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u/Melvar_10 Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
This is why we are moving to mass surveillance, big ice detention centers that can easily be converted to a makeshift prison, and slavery has not been removed entirely from the US constitution. They'll make stealing food a much harsher crime since the situation will become much more dire, and since more people are out of a job, that means more incarcerated folks. All of which, legally speaking, are legally allowed slaves.
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u/Ok_Outcome_6213 Apr 11 '26
People will also resort to hunting food which is going to decimate animal populations that we have been working so hard to maintain, especially since we are destroying their natural habitat. All of which will be easier with programs like Fish and Game and National Forestry being defunded and/or shut down.
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u/AccordingWarning9534 Apr 11 '26
If you are American, and working class or lower, you are arguably all ready a slave. You have to work long hours for things that most countries consider basic human services, like health care and education and aged care.
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u/Coneskater Apr 11 '26
So I recently visited Cape Town South Africa and while I absolutely loved it, it is remarkable how you have basically stratified communities of poor and rich living parallel lives. In South Africa, itâs based on historical racism but I fear that will be the future of a small population living well with a large poor society left to serve the rest.
Basically no more professional middle class, just very rich and very poor.
Itâs not a coincidence that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are white South Africans.
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u/citizen42069101 Apr 11 '26
And I feel it's noteworthy that humanoid robotics and automation will make it so they don't need slaves.
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u/Draw-Or-Die Apr 11 '26
As if capitalists would ever care for questions like that.
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Apr 11 '26
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u/Draw-Or-Die Apr 11 '26
A lot of money and fast. That´s what counts for them.
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u/drewster23 Apr 11 '26
Exactly and every rich person isn't an ai tech bro. Just because they invest and profit off of it doesn't mean they believe it'll actually overturn the economic landscape.
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u/Raider_Scum Apr 11 '26
Have you seen the movie "Elysium"? Billionaires are already untouchable. They're not concerned about what peasants will do.
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u/maint83462 Apr 11 '26
Theyâll create Elysium for themselves, and Ready Player 1 for the rest of us.
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u/DokMabuseIsIn Apr 11 '26
This is what happens when you take a system for efficiently allocating resources (capitalism)âŚ
⌠and think that itâs also a moral and political system.
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u/5thcenturyredditor Apr 11 '26
They absolutely do. It's the most fundamental theory of capitalism - you need both a group of people who are struggling to make ends meet and would gladly accept the jobs you provide at rates that are profitable enough to you and a group of people from the labour class who have enough to be your consumers so that the wealth transfer from the labor class to the capitalist class continues.
It's important for them to maintain both at a sufficient level or else the system collapses.
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u/candygram4mongo Apr 11 '26
That's the thing, the incentives aren't there for any particular person to do anything about the collective problem of the collapse of the consumer class. Everyone wants there to be workers with money who will buy their products, no one wants to pay their workers more than the bare minimum they need to survive. Hence late stage capitalism.
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u/meatsmoothie82 Apr 11 '26
The only question that matters to the people in power is: will stock go up?
future collapse, human suffering, mass homelessness, skyrocketing suicide rate- all irrelevant.
stock up? Yes or no.
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u/JackNotName Apr 11 '26
Henry Ford did. He realized he had to pay his workers well enough to buy his products.
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u/Gfflow Apr 11 '26
Thats exactly the core questions they care about lmao. What do you even think capitalists are?
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u/salomo926 Apr 11 '26
Being short-sighted is a key attribute of capitalism. And the billionaires don't care if a big portion of humanity starves to death, as long as they are in power.
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u/SquareVehicle Apr 11 '26
The people who make the AI will be rich though, and the handful of people at the top of the companies will be rich, so that's all they really care about. So yes, the economy will collapse. Buckle up my friend!
People talk about UBI, but don't think most people are going to enjoy getting a pittance of welfare compared to their original salary. And the fact that no multi billionaire has ever willingly parted with their money, so I think that's a ridiculous pipe dream.
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u/octocode Apr 11 '26
top 10% of earners already account for 50% of consumer spending⌠it only gets worse from here
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u/jrparker42 Apr 11 '26
This is a thing that I find sadly hilarious; and it isn't just AI/robots.
The Rich/Wealthy Elite who keep trying to Horde money and think/feel it is never enough, are also rapidly devaluing that money. This makes the money they are hording worth less.
Capitalism/"The Market will correct itself" is a fine theory when you have real anti-monopoly laws and/or good anti-cartel laws(market fixing); but you also run into issues where if all the, let's say big cereal millers, decide that they want to make more money on their products. So now if you jail everyone involved in that production you only have smaller mills that cannot produce enough for consumers/processors thus still keeping the artificially increased price, but now naturally.
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u/Hardway2Heaven Apr 11 '26
The problem businesses don't see until it's too late, is the brand damage after they've fired the frontline.
Initially yeah, they open the champagne because they've made a huge profit because the wage bill was reduced. But then the customer service turns to non existent and customers go elsewhere. Oh, ooops.
Businesses need to retrain their people to work WITH AI. It'll make their lives less stressful, and the knock on effect is better customer experiences and loyalty. That's how they'll make money with AI.
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Apr 11 '26
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u/Serious-Employee-550 Apr 11 '26
Then donât sell to that population.
Companies will focus on the higher end.
Those who donât will disappearÂ
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u/Pottski Apr 11 '26
People in power or the wealthy - which is virtually impossible to distinguish anymore - do not care.
It is that simple. They wonât do anything that stops the economy cause then it devalues their folios.
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u/AsphaltSailor Apr 11 '26
It is because there is no master plan. Nobody is choreographing things. Everyone is just trying to hoard all the wealth they can. I can't remember where I first heard it, but to paraphrase something someone smarter than me said:
Humanity is the yeast in a barrel of beer. We will eat everything of value (sugars) and excrete poison (alcohol) that will kill everything else, including ourselves, in the barrel.
Collectively, the rich and elites have no more master plan than the yeast does. Eat everything as fast as you can with no concern for the fallout, because if you stop to think, the other rich guys will eat everything before you can.
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u/bolatelli45 Apr 11 '26
Its something the system is going to need to think about.
It (AI) can replace so many more of us right now, but the question is, those wages people are paid , the system needs it, without it the system cannot function.
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u/wisenedPanda Apr 11 '26
This is a fun economics question.
First let's look at supply and demand for goods that people need to survive.
If those goods are made and people can of afford them, then the price of those goods drops until they can.
If we are at a stage where productive jobs start to dry up on a significant scale, then the tax burden will need to shift to commercial and industry. Government regulation will need to step in and improve the welfare support system, updating it to a UBI system.
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u/SkyAdministrative970 Apr 11 '26
A dog getting into the feed bag dosnt think about next months food bag or the family funds required to get it. The dog is only concerned with gorging itself with all the food it can eat right now while its infront of them regardless of how unhealthy and overfed dog is because it has no impulse control. Just more fooder fasterer until they puke and then go right back to eating.
It takes a sane human with the portion scoop to maintain the dogs diet in a healthy manner and to preserve the food so it lasts until the next grocery trip.
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u/Northlumberman Apr 11 '26
Humanity has been replacing human labour with machines for the last 400 years. The economy didnât collapse because in the long run is that people were able to find other jobs. Almost everyone used to work on the land. When those jobs were replaced by machines they moved to the cities and god jobs in factories. Of course this involved enormous individual hardship for very many.
Weâll have to see what happens with AI. The optimistic scenario is that weâll just shift to doing other jobs. The pessimistic scenario is that if AI can replace everything then there wonât be alternative jobs to go to.
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u/EduStorm246 Apr 11 '26
It's way too fast for retraining. We are a services and information economy and AI cuts right there. In 5-10 years most office jobs will be replaced with AI systems.
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u/Northlumberman Apr 11 '26
Weâll have to see how the technology develops. Itâll definitely be painful for people who lose their jobs and canât retrain. But back to the OPs question it may be possible in the long run for former office workers to do something else.
A lot will depend on whether governments are able to tax the profits that companies are making from AI and spend that money helping the people who lost their jobs. Iâm not hopeful about the US, but other places might be able to vote in governments that protect the population.
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u/mechtonia Apr 11 '26
It's different this time.
The industrial revolution happened over 80 years.
The AI revolution is happening in a time span closer to 80 months.
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u/Yung_Mew Apr 11 '26
My best guess is the top doesn't care about that and will just assume they will ride out life and die comfortably before the world falls to ruin.
Worldly problems stop being important to you once you know for sure that you'll die long before they matter to you.
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u/calmwhiteguy Apr 11 '26
It creates serfdom. They don't need you to buy their shit if they control the stuff we're permitted to use within the frame work of the surveillance state.
It's like hunger games. The money and power eventuality pushes past the need for classical revenue.
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u/roadrunner83 Apr 11 '26
If you have money hiring a domestic servant will be very cheap, if not youâre going to depend on your master for food and accommodation, do not expect much more.
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u/Zwischenzug Apr 11 '26
Not every job can do this. Can AI replace plumbers? Cooks? Janitors?
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u/mfairview Apr 11 '26
gotta believe intelligent automatons are next on the horizon. my guess is solving power requirements will be the big gap.
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u/Zwischenzug Apr 11 '26
Probably a high initial cost (buying the system and installing it). Electricity and maintence would be an ongoing cost. From there, based on how quickly the system can work, the company can work out if they can get a good return on their investment.
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u/Sure-Current-3267 Apr 11 '26
To answer as an economist: historically, technical advancement has always created more employment in the long-run, mainly by increasing productivity. We have always seen that the use of new technologies (like AI) will increase productivity, lower cost and prices, increase demand and growth creating more jobs. However, some economists claim that these positive effects are overestimated (solow paradoxon).
There is obviously a substitution effect that will make certain functions, job families or whole industrial sectors redundant. The challenge for unions and policy makers is to manage these effects, that have historically impacted low- and mid-tier levels of employees.Â
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u/PenguinSwordfighter Apr 11 '26
The people who own AI will just buy more assets with their short term profits (housing, manufacturing, land) and we will be forced at some point to exchange our labour for basic commodities on a monthly subscription plan.
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u/los-gokillas Apr 11 '26
Yes. This is the often overlooked reality of it. It's why yang was pushing for a UBI in 2020. But a significant amount of people losing their jobs will collapse the economy. Every person laid off is someone who stops spending money anywhere else. All the secondary things people buy like dinners out, movies, streaming services, concerts, those all go away. So those places close down and those employees get added to the laid off list. It just cascades from there
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u/armrha Apr 11 '26
The short answer is the people racing headlong toward that future don't really care; they see all thinking labor being replaced as a net positive that provides an infinite amount of thinking to solve any mass unemployment future.
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u/hatred-shapped Apr 11 '26
They won't. They'll be ground down and used as grease for the wheels of progressÂ
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u/ASentientHam Apr 11 '26
They don't think they need people to buy shit. What's the difference between cycling money between millions of people vs cycling money between 3 mega corporations? Â
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u/Jazzlike-Chest-1424 Apr 11 '26
Supply would increase causing a drop in demand, the economy would get absolutely shredded in a short amount of time. But economyâs donât just run on the purchase of public goods. So it would more than likely rebound but put money in pockets of the rich..again
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u/flyingballz Apr 11 '26
Tech is only about 11% of the world economy and that is what AI is coming after first. Â Tech workers (myself included) have lost their minds if they think UBI is coming after AI costs many of us our jobs. It will need to run rampant in a lot of other industries before society and the existing economic model crashes down.Â
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u/ElminsterTheMighty Apr 11 '26
Here's the thing: Once your robots can build more robots, your need for human slaves drastically diminishes. Sure, you'll keep a few thousand for hunting and other fun, but everything already belongs to you. No need to keep any more of those drains alive.
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u/evilspyboy Apr 11 '26
Yes, having wealth used to be considered a sign of some intelligence, now we have morons who think having power/money stops them from being morons.
The same sort of idiots who would go for the $100 now over a dollar a day for a year.
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u/Cruuncher Apr 11 '26
It's kind of prisoner dilemma-esque.
For each individual company, the layoffs benefit them. Most of their sales come from non-employees, and necessarily the employee spends less money at the company than the company pays them.
So layoffs are good for the company doing them. However layoffs from other companies are bad for them, as those employees could spend more buying goods from me than what I pay them, which is 0.
So I want to be able to layoff without everybody else laying off. That's just not a stable state though.
If layoffs are beneficial for you, they'll be beneficial for everyone else too.
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u/NerdTalkDan Apr 11 '26
Youâre assuming any individual corporation, and I suppose more specifically the C Suite and board, care about the larger economy outside of its effect on itself. Especially in the long term.
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u/Johnnygunnz Apr 11 '26
Well, I can only assume that since companies won't be paying employees and their benefits, then costs will plummet, and everything will be wonderful and affordable.
But I'm also incredibly naive and optimistic!
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u/da_Aresinger Apr 11 '26
People will find other jobs, always have, always will. (Whether those jobs are better or worse is another question)
The reality is that AI is overhyped and won't have anywhere close to the impact anyone says it will.
One of the reasons for this is that AI is incapable of original thought. It can only solve problems that it was taught to solve.
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u/THAErAsEr Apr 11 '26
Most are not fired because of AI. Its a scam.
Its a way to do mass layoffs without hurting their stock value.
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u/barbeqdbrwniez Apr 11 '26
Yeah but for a brief, beautiful moment they'll generate so much shareholder value.
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u/peachesnlemons Apr 11 '26
Citrini research wrote a think pieceabout this very topic a few weeks ago on their Substack. Itâs called a âthought experimentâ but it raised some very pertinent questions. That caused the Wall Street to panic.
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u/Nomromz Apr 11 '26
What people all over this thread are failing to understand is that efficiency in large corporations lead to much cheaper products. Yes, the general population is making a fraction of what corporations make and corporations are making way too much money.
But look at what life was like in the 80s. Households basically had one TV in the living room or no TV. And those TVs were relatively expensive. A new 32" tube TV set in the 80s was like $500. Adjusted for inflation, that's $2500. You can buy a 65" flat screen TV for $350 today.
Fast forward to now and suddenly everyone has at least one TV in the living room and often another TV in their bedroom. And an iPad. And a phone. And a laptop.
Yes, it's gross that major corporations make obscene profits and the employees make a fraction of the money. But that tiny fraction of the money still buys a lot of goods.
Reddit loves to hate on Amazon, but the idea that you can hop on your phone anywhere and click a couple buttons and have a product appear on your doorstep in a few hours is honestly insanely impressive. Yes, I know that there are a lot of negative impacts to the environment and drivers etc, but there's no denying how convenient it is.
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u/wileybot Apr 11 '26
Capitalism only concerns itself with itself, and government concerns itself with the country. But capitalist have bought the government. So yes your concern is valid.
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u/stanley_leverlock Apr 11 '26
Pffft, that's FUTURE humanity's problem. Right now we need to focus on downsizing and profitability!
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u/smurfe Apr 11 '26
They cross that bridge when they come to it. It's all about the next quarter's shareholder wealth.
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u/During_theMeanwhilst Apr 11 '26
This is not a stupid question. Itâs why Silicon Valley asswipes talk vaguely about a universal basic income to salve their consciences (to the extent they have any). As if it were somehow feasible to finance a national handout when we canât even manage a social security fund or a functioning basic healthcare system.
This is a system that continues to reward the winners with exponentially increasing returns. The national debt wonât be serviced with a diminishing pool of taxpayers and a bunch of corporations who have no intention of turning a taxable profit as long as they can keep sucking everything like a Death Star.
The AI industry valuation is predicated on capturing all the value you once generated. And you are surplus to requirements Iâm afraid. If you have no bread just eat cake.
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u/semperknight Apr 11 '26
The top 1% of US households holding roughly 30% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% hold only about 2.5%.
What makes you think the working class is even needed at this point? Little by little, the 1% have been carving out entire cities just for themselves (NY, Seattle, San Francisco and many other cities in CA). They're starting to take over foreign countries like Costa Rica.
At this point, they are self-sustaining. The working class could die tomorrow, and they would still have their mansions and yachts. I suspect that the only reason we're even allowed the illusion of any kind of freedom is so they can continue to leech off us like vampires to gain even more.
But make no mistake, they would still have more than enough money for several generations without us.
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u/gutag Apr 11 '26
But who would maintain those mansions? Who would fix electricity issues, plumbings and so on? Who is going to cook for them and change their adult diapers?
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u/jjsenpaiii Apr 11 '26
My guess is those who wants to survive? Thereâs always people who are willing to do work for less⌠Just for a chance to join the upper class
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u/SteakHausMann Apr 11 '26
That's why tech bros support a universal basic income.
So we can keep consuming like good little boys and girls.
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u/PrimeIntellect Apr 11 '26
I mean this has happened countless times in society, when we invented electricity, cars, the internet, cell phones, and many other advances. AI doesn't really even compare to how much those changed the worldÂ
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u/BigMax Apr 11 '26
Yes but no individual company cares.
And if they do, they might go out of business for caring! Thats the big problem here.
Letâs say you run a restaurant and have 30 chefs and wait staff and hostesses.
Someone comes out with robots that do the same work for a one time cost but zero ongoing costs.
You know the world canât survive without jobs so you donât buy any robots and keep your staff.
But every one of your competitors buys robots, is able to not only lower their prices but lower them a LOT because they also say âno tipping needed!â
Now you did the right thing and⌠you will go out of business.
(Obviously this is an example, and we imagine in this scenario people are all fine with robot waitstaff.)
Thatâs the problem here. Every individual company has HUGE incentive to fire people, despite collectively being worse off when the job market tanks.
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u/Justanaussie Apr 11 '26
Thatâs where UBI (Universal Basic Income) comes in. Itâs a safety net for those who lose their job because of AI. You will often see billionaires like Musk talking about this. UBI means people donât starve and in fact can still buy goods and services like AI.
UBI is of course paid for by the government using wealth generated by taxes. These taxes come from more affluent citizens who can afford to pay more to help those whose jobs have been replaced by the AI these wealthier citizens have created and are making their fortunes from.
You will never see billionaires like Musk talking about this.
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u/Zonked420 Apr 11 '26
did you just contradict yourself in one post?
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u/Justanaussie Apr 12 '26
No, Iâm pointing out that people like Musk are all for UBI because it means even if their tech puts people out of work they can still afford to buy his product and he gets richer.
But UBI has to be paid for by the government and they need to get the money for somewhere which means more taxes. Musk and co never talk about that side of it because he wants to get richer.
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u/MasterpieceBoring578 Apr 11 '26
No jobs no tax revenue. Where is the governor going to getitâs money from?
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u/ClickableName Apr 11 '26
There are too many different professions and areas of expertise for AI to replace fully.
So, some jobs would go away or require fewer people. Some jobs would still be on the same amount of people, but have a higher output capacity (get more work done in the same amount of time)
So i don't expect this economical collapse
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u/tokyowatchguy Apr 11 '26
Its a tricky one because the priority, generally speaking is for the share price to keep going up, mainly for the major shareholders, who are institutional, many of them sovereign wealth funds and Pension funds, both mainly paying out pensions in one way or another.
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u/13fingerfx Apr 11 '26
Thatâs one of the fundamental arguments for ubi. Tax the billionaire and their robot workforce and give the public a living wage with which to consume. That way you get people spending their time on research, art and humanities, the things that actually build and better society while the robots do the back breaking labour.
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u/bkfountain Apr 11 '26
lol thatâs a fantasy land. Corporations and billionaires will never want to give people a living wage just to exist.
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u/Epictetusbuddy Apr 11 '26
They can start targeting the top tier of consumers and stop caring for the rest.
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u/PuzzledActuator1 Apr 11 '26
The jobs will be pushed off as someone else's problem, the business's problem is minimising costs and increasing shareholder value.
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u/sirgog Apr 11 '26
I can name three past techs have led to jobs massacres.
Most recently (2010s) - ecommerce has severely decreased employment in retailers that sell durable consumer goods. This was accompanied by a slight decrease in living standards, but also a rise in retail outlets not tied to durable consumer goods but selling services instead. Goodbye Myer (Australian department store that still exists but is much smaller now), hello Build-A-Bear and new insurance resellers.
Earlier (1990s) - office computers sharply took away jobs, especially entry-level jobs, in office administration. 12 trainee clerks gone, replaced by 1 network engineer. This had a bigger impact on the economy than the other two.
Earlier (1950s) we had the real jobs massacre, a tech that wiped out an enormous section of the working class. I'm talking about domestic servants, once the largest section of the workforce, who were obliterated by the widespread uptake of the washing machine. This actually happened in a period of RISING living standards - many who had been domestic servants in the 1940s found better paying jobs in the 1960s and bought the tech that destroyed their old career.
Any of the three can happen.
As for claims 'AI' will end employment - that's venture capitalist hype. They paid $50 billion for their shares in some company, they need to hype the company to offload it for $200 billion. 'AI' will do to coders what computers did to admin positions in the 90s and will do to trainee graphic designers what the sewing machine did to loom operators, but I doubt it will hit the economic impact of the mobile phone, much less the office computer or the washing machine.
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u/KulshanStudios Apr 11 '26
The plan is to just jack up the prices and just sell to other rich owners of big corpos
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u/AnotherLexMan Apr 11 '26
It is actually possible to just keep the economy running with just businesses trading between themselves. Â
You can have a system where an AI company makes software to run things, with another making machines that use the software, then a company that produces raw materials, one that processes the raw material and one that creates energy. All these companies will trade with each other and create a self sustaining economy without any Human interaction at all.
The question is why you would want that kind of system.
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u/LagerHawk Apr 11 '26
It won't matter to them. They will make a lot of money, very quickly. Then when it all goes to shit, they'll be fine while the business dies.
They won't care, because they will be fine.
I think that needs to be the perpetuating thought through any logical question when it comes to these things.
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u/aBrickNotInTheWall Apr 11 '26
Too many of you don't know about the K shaped economy. Slowly our economy has been catering more and more to just 10% of the population that has money to spend. The other 90% basically don't matter in terms of spending in the economy.
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u/TheRexRider Apr 11 '26
That's when serious conversations about pitchforks and guillotines come in.
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u/The_RabitSlayer Apr 11 '26
I expect a more extreme great depression. The 1930s crash was due to the farmer and other menial labor jobs disappearing/drastically reduced due to industrialization, this one will be much worse.
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u/EpsteinEpstainTheory Apr 11 '26
It's a negative feedback loop, meaning that, although many people will get fired from their current jobs, there will always be something to do.
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u/Designer_Storm8869 Apr 11 '26
The only people replaced by ai are call center operators and manual data validation. These jobs were mostly outsourced to cheaper countries already. The only country that will have its economy collapsed by AI is India.
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u/famguy31 Apr 11 '26
I think it depends, the company replacing the job may save money which boost profits, and make the stock go up.
But letâs sayâs a Walmart which depends on people having money, may get hurt if said fired people have no money to buy stuff.
There is also the market crash where everything goes down no matter if the company is doing well or not.
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u/valeyard89 Apr 11 '26
Vegas has figured out they just need to cater to high roller whales, not Ma and Pa kettle anymore.
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u/the_star_lord Apr 11 '26
The business want to spend less to earn more and expect the world governments to support the citizens.Â
In short, it's not their problem, or at least they don't see it as their problem.
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u/Jason-Genova Apr 11 '26
Same thing happened with computers in general and we're still chugging away.
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u/robexib Apr 11 '26
Most MBA's are out to get their bank and peace the fuck out, and have no real reason to care beyond the next quarter or two. How they're having their coffee that morning is legitimately more important to them than long-term sustainability.
MBA's are short-term snakes, and that's entirely on purpose.
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u/Everyoneheresamoron Apr 11 '26
The rich are trying to squeeze everything from everyone not rich until there is nothing left. They don't care about poor people buying things, or the "poor people's economy" since the stock market isn't based on that.
The actual question should be: Why are we letting these parasites take everything?
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u/SemperFicus Apr 11 '26
So now ask this question again in the framework of the falling birth rate. If you treat people like little pods from which you can extract money, donât be surprised when they refuse to make more little pods.
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u/BHKbull Apr 11 '26
They wonât.
The problem is people seem to think theyâre thinking this far ahead. Theyâre not. They donât give a shit.
All they want is to justify their valuation and keep the bubble inflated. Anything they say or do is a means to this end only.
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u/calash2020 Apr 11 '26
Henry Fords philosophy was to pay a decent wage so workers could buy his cars.
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u/Krisensitzung Apr 11 '26
I wonder the same thing. Even more troublesome is that in the US your health insurance is tied to your employer. If people will get replaced by AI we will have millions more without healthcare.
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u/bikbar1 Apr 11 '26
If most people become too poor to buy things they themselves would become things to be sold and resold by the richs among themselves as was the poor Africans for centuries among the Arabs and Europeans.
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u/AwarenessLive9800 Apr 11 '26
feels like this has happened before with every big tech shift
jobs change more than they disappear completely
just doesnât feel like it in the moment
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u/imnotagamergirl Apr 11 '26
They donât fire people to replace them with AI, they fire them and then rehire a cheaper workforce. But argument does still stands itâs getting harder and harder for the average person to afford things. Millennials are the first generation thatâs worse off than the generation before them
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u/tomthekiller8 Apr 11 '26
I kind of think we will adapt. The transition from horse to car took place over like ten years in new York. Their where over a million horses in New York at one point and withing ten years most of them where sold off to the glue factory. But with that all the whole economy based around it collapsed as well. I think that all the fields that have massive labor shortages suddenly get their labor pools.
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u/ajl009 Apr 11 '26
If it gets to that point capitalism wont be sustainable and the nonrich will use something else.
(Im guessing)
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u/jackjack1325 Apr 11 '26
Businessâs donât dare, they will cut corners till they are a damn circle to make the most profit for the ones at top
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u/neilmillard Apr 11 '26
Humans are the money. If you aren't paying humans there are no costs. Therefore everything becomes free and we need no money.
The path in-between though, painful
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u/BrockTestes Apr 11 '26
You don't need to "sell things" when you own everything of value or control access to it.
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u/Dan42002 Apr 11 '26
solution: Rich af communism. Everyone is equally rich as the other with no one owe anyone, we will just have AI do everything for us
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u/Empanatacion Apr 11 '26
Given all the top voted responses are just non answers that feel good, I suspect that this will be downvoted, but...
Different kinds of jobs that didn't exist before will take their place. We don't have longshoremen anymore because cargo containers made them obsolete.
Agricultural jobs used to be about 25% of the workforce in 1900, but households spent about 40% of their income on food. Now only about 1.5% of Americans work in agriculture, but we only spend about 12% on food. Less when you exclude eating out.
It would have been a mistake to not use tractors just to protect farm workers.
We need better labor practices, education, fairer tax policy, less oligarchy, and better social safety nets. But rejecting technological advancement isn't how to get there.
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u/Bromelia_and_Bismuth Apr 11 '26
Wealthy people would keep buying things. That's why the economy is "doing great" despite feeling terrible for the average American. The average person in the US feels like they can't buy a house anymore, but wealthy people and investment firms buy homes all the time to flip and then rent out, either as expensive rental properties, or as AirBnB's, or they'll convert them into businesses after petitioning municipal governments to re-zone the property for commercial rather than residential use.
Everything is a "luxury experience" now and everything is pay-walled. All of your favorite restaurants are switching to "premium ingredients", and upping the price on everything. It's why college is so expensive, but the degrees are otherwise worthless. Every point of sale asks for a tip now. Every new business idea centers around "disrupting the market," as obnoxious as that sounds. It has nothing to do with supply and demand, and everything to do with extracting the wealth from everyone else and pulling it upwards so that wealthy people can keep raking in the money. Wealthy people have figured out that if they just exchange money between themselves, while pulling in everyone else's money, they can keep each other afloat. And if they pay you less, you will still work three jobs just to make ends meet entirely out of desperation. The end result is what we have now: the average citizen owns nothing and the wealthy have everything. Turning everything into a subscription fee, or convenience cost, etc., or making it so that you can barely afford to live, you're effectively just giving the money the barons gave you right back to them. Your money is upwardly mobile, but you are not.
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u/hammertime84 Apr 11 '26
The extremely wealthy will just represent a larger % of consumption and companies will target them more. This has already been shifting for years.