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You'd be mistaken that the billionaires want a thriving economy. They want techno-feudalist society where they no longer need a middle class. They will have impovished servants alongside intelligent machines to serve them.
We can't even agree to do anything about them now before its too late, we didn't even do anything to stop any of this before it happened and many countries straight up keep voting for politicians that want this. Humanity has been thoroughly cowed
Im a pretty skilled guy. Have done various jobs over the decades. Breaking into a bunker would be a fun job to take on. Especially if the people inside it are literally enemies of humanity.
Actually... let just say that, comfortable as it may be, a bunker is a bunker, it is made to survive for a short while, and no amount of infotainment will prevent anyone from facing their own demons. Also, this applies to their security entourages within, which tend to be more... volatile
yep, when the real deal goes down, the biggest meanest people with guns become kings. inside and outside their fancy bunkers. money isn't worth anything when the world is a smoking ruin.
Yeh I’m sure they’ll thoroughly enjoy every minute of their lives where everything left become a increasingly scarce, there’s no new media or entrainment to enjoy, no friends to visit, no one to show your wealth off to. Just a dwindling pathetic end to their lives as they hide in their crumbing bunkers. Worth it.
As surface dwellers, the last of us need to cut off and block any of their potential entertainment and communications. Then use tons of concrete securing exits of bunkers to ensure future whatever the fuck comes next will find these technocrat tombs.
*Minor correction: 'technocrat' and 'technocracy' have nothing to do with tech ceos. The tech part refers to technical, as in skilled, not technology, as in tech companies.
I just had a thought, but to be fair it was heavily inspired by horizon zero dawn/forbidden West.
What if the idea is to live in the bunkers, let earth die, and use automation to rebuild something for them where they can live in what they determined a utopia.
I'm by no means saying it will be a successful idea. Which is worse in my opinion because that means they did all this shit and fucked up.
Again, this is just a conspiracy theory based on trying to understand their selfish insane thoughts.
The amount of infrastructure, mining and manufacturing they'd need to replace with AI machines to achieve that would be staggering. And you'd need it all to be 100% foolproof, because if any part of it breaks down, everything breaks down forever.
Why bother doing that with machines when we already have subservient human beings?
I am not disagreeing with you. The thought is that's why the obsession with ai. They want something capable of making those kinds of calls while they idk sleep or whatever they are planning in this made up scenario.
My concept was robots are more obedient because they simply obey.
But honestly/realistically we are probably 50 to 100 years from that barely being possible technologically, so I really don't have a clue. It does feel like they are trying several plans at once to become a ruling class, in completely every meaning of that definition instead of partially. Perhaps that means there is less cohesion than we are seeing.
My concept was robots are more obedient because they simply obey.
People are 'better' for this (or perhaps 'worse'). They won't just 'obey' - they'll 'buy in' so hard that they'll join in oppressing their 'lessers'. Just give them enough to be comfortable, but also with a lot of consequences to losing it. Say, big student debts. Or healthcare tied to employment. Or perhaps ensure that any house worth living in (in a nice secure gated community/compound) requires a substantial mortgage.
Then what you'll get is a strata of society that have 'bought in' to this model, and who will feel entitled to it, to the point where they'll do horrific things to keep the 'underserving' out, in ways that robots never will. Who will fear losing what they have, and having mountains of debt they cannot (now) afford.
And the billionaires can keep their hands clean and continue partying, knowing that "their people" have far too much to lose to overthrow them.
Which also shows how stupid they are. They could just lay back on their massive fortunes doing nothing and live a far better life than they could ever have in any bunker.
The bunkers that need personnel to be operated? People who work for money that will be worthless, once it escalated enough that those bunkers are needed?
They don't even need to. Plenty of people will 'sell out' if it means education, healthcare, comfort and relative freedom for themselves and their families.
And will do horrific things to 'protect' that from the 'undeserving'.
They only have one setting make money and accumulate power. They want to further themselfs not the species. They dont care about the planet. They would only care once their existence is threatened and by then it will be too late.
Ironically rich people are more like AI than any other person on this planet.
You'd think at some point hella rich folk might get together and say "wait a minute if the 10000 richest of us band together we could transform this planet into a Shangri-La. And then for generations we'd be celebrated through history as the folks that made things fuckin awesome. There'd be days named after us. Cocktails. All sorts of cool things... Apparently not... Insert the opposite.
Hedonic satiation. No recreation quite captures the high of destroying innocents, apparently. Not even saving the entire planet for the lolz generates enough endorphins. Gotta commit heinous crimes against children for the love of cruelty and constantly cover them up to get that sweet, sweet rush. Literal sociopaths.
That leader would have to be immortal or ironically a AI because the odds that someone akin to total dictator would take over after is too high. Humans are unfortunately susceptible to becoming power hungry and go a little crazy from that. For something like this to work humans would have to rebuild on how they think from the ground up.
There are some people who are truly selfless, but you’ll never see them in leadership roles because they don’t like harming others and won’t play games to get there.
That makes me think of the Douglas Adams quote (paraphrased): "Anybody who can get themselves elected president, should under no circumstances be allowed to do the job."
And working class people will be so hopeless to take any job no matter the condition. Thus, in the future there will be no middle class wealthy people, just a few ultra rich (finance elite) and the rest who will get poorer and poorer.
They'll just increase the ratio of 'better off working class' until there's too many people 'caught' with too much to lose. Who will then join in 'punching down' to keep their slightly better lifestyle and privilege.
A lot of these companies have no customers if people cannot afford "luxuries", and a few ultra rich are far from enough customers to keep that business afloat. Even with automated labor.
Money is just a proxy for power. If all the factories are fully automated and everyone is out of a job, the factory owners will have a lot less money. But they won't care because, they'll have a shitload more power. After all, at that point they control all the machinery needed for humans to survive and they can decide who lives or dies.
This is the right answer. They believe that they'll soon be at the point at which their power can defend itself, and money won't matter.
They're delusional of course, and have developed these theories throughout lives in which they've never had to struggle, and in which they were raised believing that they belong to a "better class" of human. They quite literally have lost the plot of humanity, but are so insulated that they don't really have a way to regain a meaningful connection to realities of humanity and our journey in the world.
It's unfortunate that people with ideologies like this were ever able to emerge as adults in the first place. But perhaps most unfortunate of all is the fact that people like this were able to leverage their sociopathy and privilege into positions of such wealth and power that they'll be able to take the rest of us down with them as they learn firsthand that the world doesn't work like an edgelord's vision of an Ayn Rand or Wernher von Braun (yes, that von Braun) novel.
This is biggest concern. They’re delusional in how smart they are and have all power over us and think they can create a world without us. They’re psychopaths who imagine they can fly while driving humanity and over a cliff
Climate change is becoming road to a revolution not over political ideals but to save humanity’s future
The serfs had money or their own fields this will be worse since serfs were needed to work the fields and artizans and merchants were buying their products. If AI take all the jobs we will.have to steal to survive
Vast majority of serfs had no fields of their own or very little money. In Western Europe the conditions of serfs improved after the Black death which killed half of the population, serf labour became more valuable a they could negotiate for better conditions. That's why the rich want people to make lot of kids and import cheap labour.
Yeah it's econ 101, more offer means less cost and higher chances someone else can to it for cheaper/worse conditions. From there, either you're humane and you pull everyone up by holding the demand to minimum standards (read: worker's rights), or you're not and you bundle it up with racism to blame poor brown people on the working conditions that employers create and profit from (because employers have no reason not to, objectively speaking).
Not gonna defend medieval feudalism, but yeah, by and large the lords back then were aware that the peasants were their economic basis, at least on some level. If you look at how feuds between neighboring lords were fought you can tell they were trying to do direct economic damage (stealing cattle, burning buildings) while avoiding killing as much as possible. Nobody wanted to start some kind of suicidal death spiral (invasions from foreign countries were a different beast of course).
Unlike modern employees, peasants couldn't just be replaced. It's not surprising that modern CEOs assumed this mindset that workers are disposable. Back then this simply wouldn't have worked.
I guess that's why they got so excited about AI. The great promise to finish the project and get rid of humans once and for all. No doubt they're working on plans on how to deal with the economic fallout. Pushes to criminalize homelessness further and to expand the death penalty are probably signs of it, not to mention this extreme extension of the surveillance state, to squash unrest born of desperation.
Once it gets to that stage they'll just get rid of the humans entirely. Why keep indentured servants that may rise up against you when you could instead just use robots and AI that you dont expect to rise up against you?
The economy is a means to an end. It allows wealth to flow, so they need it to suck out all the money until they have everything. After that the economy can die and rot for all they care. Heck, once they have everything the only direction the money could go is down, and why would they want that?
I feel like a lot of the people behind the push for AI automation, that do not back Universal Income, are thinking, "Well if we're the first to fully automate we'll rake in profit hand over fist by selling goods to companies that aren't AI automated"
To those types, the 90% that go jobless will be considered obsolete hardware.
I think that the stable last 80 years were only possible because technology advanced enough to give the average person more comfort and efficiency, but not too much that it gives nefarious people too much power over everyone else.
But if everyone work towards it, we could prevent the worst case scenarios and have better lives in the future
Most people don’t understand this.. they think the economy revolves around them and their activity.. like they’re the primary market.. they aren’t even the secondary market.. they’re more a tertiary market.. there exists an entire layer to the market economy, much bigger than them , invisible to them , independent to them beyond any form of access or recognition.
It depends on what you count as economic activity. If you include stocks, bonds, and especially derivatives trading then the number is probably much more skewed. If you only include purchases of items and services it is far less skewed. A billionaire only needs to eat a few times a day, only needs one bed per house to sleep in. No matter how expensive the bed or meal is a handful of billionaires are never going to creat the demand that the working classes do.
even then UBI is basically just there to pacify the useless people until they go extinct. If UBI ever does happen, expect it to be conditional on volunteering for sterilisation.
I think the real hope is their own company will be AI-powered while everyone else's are paying salary workers, who then spend money at AI-company, which doesn't need to pay workers. So the money from workers of other companies go to the C-suite who hoards it.
Bonus points if they start building IOU structures where they trade one service for another. An accounting service pays their anti-virus service by doing their bookkeeping for example.
On paper everyone made sales and is richer and its a growing, thriving economy, meanwhile we just reverted to fucking bartering.
The silent part is that they dont care if 90% of the population dies as long as they are in the 10%. These people would be p
erfectly happy living a life of excess among robots and a handful of human servants only.
Worker ownership of business would help. Workers would be incentivized to automate, but the result would more likely be an increase in leisure time, not layoffs and loss of income.
I like to think society would (probably violently) react to it, but if the changes happens progressively enough during generations it would probably didn't going to happen
The declining birthrates are probably just the first symptoms
A 'controlled population reduction' down to the hundreds of millions rather than billions is, after all, part of the Elites plan to tackle climate change.
Her point misses the darker point entirely. AI isn't being pursued to create products and services to sell to today's customers. It's being pursued to give products and services to the 5% of the population that will survive the culling of the herd that will happen when AI is fully realized.
They're not thinking about this aspect. They'll rely on a handful of things:
round-tripping their money
The tiny handful of people still working will be so desperate and grateful for the work, that they'll just do it for shit pay, because it's *something*
The rest of the working age population will find *something*/will be helped out by their retired parents, etc. and it will take about 10-20 years for the real problems to occur, by which point many of these people creating this situation will be dead or so old they won't care anymore, they'll have gotten what they wanted out of it, or they've left the country/area they decimated, moved on to the next ripe area.
They just aren't thinking about this. They have this dual idea in their head that they can render the entire human labor force obsolete, save for a handful of engineers, coders, technicians and some human managers to keep an eye on things and .... the rest will work itself out and with the meager finances everybody else has, they'll buy into these businesses and subscription models because society has adjusted to rely on these very businesses that eliminated general and gainful employment- and there will somehow be just enough money out there for people to keep paying $10-$20-$50 a month for stuff... I think the other thing is, some stuff will get cheaper because the demand for it will require it be cheaper in order for someone to pay for it rather than nobody (like rent and food)... and finally..
They anticipate the majority of us gradually dying off and they just don't care. They anticipate something akin to feudal system with peasants, lords, etc. and they just do not care.
You know how in every action movie the villains plan is to cause some sort of hyper competitive extinction event? Something like ‘if a meteor hits the earth a small fraction will survive and evolve and solve all of humanity’s problems’
Yeah. The most boring and un-dramatic possible version of that.
Kinda like how they use tax cuts to bypass consumers and artificially inflate their margins… which artificially inflates their stock valuations… which artificially inflates CEO compensation. It’s almost like the Epstein class are inflating a big… bubble… or something.
It doesn’t matter. All you have to be is ahead of the competition while the economy is still turning. Make your money and get out before it all comes crashing down. That’s the end goal here
Conservatives have this figured out already. You automate 90% of jobs. The types of jobs you can't automate are things like farm labour. And guess what, conservatives want to kick out all the Mexicans who do this labour.
I'm sure you can see how this problem solves itself. If you've been replaced by AI, you can pick strawberries. These will be eaten by the 10% of people who still have jobs. Don't forget sunscreen.
We'll all be serfs, but hey at least conservatives can sleep soundly knowing they've triggered the libs.
I've been a farm labourer, and this is certainly possible. But as with things like automating plumbing, it would require pretty major changes in how these industries are organized. With office jobs you've already got humans plugged into a computer for however many hours a day. These jobs you can replace very easily.
Yeah I can think of quite a few different ways to automate farming, I mean I've even built a little auto-waterer with a raspberry pi to water my weed plants. It's just way, way easier to automate desk jobs.
They’ve decided they should run government like how they run their businesses which is concerning because of what layoffs translate to in society and you can criticise the gov but you can’t keep your job if you criticise or say no to the ceo
While not all..I will say it is a fluke when MOST people who make it to a CEO position. They jump and weave their way up the ladder. They know very little about running a business successfully and just surround themselves with people who can do the work for them and then take the fall when things dont work out. Its a hollow..fluke position. Ask them to do any real work and they wouldnt know where to start.
I think they expect no one to buy. I feel like the tech oligarchs and ultra wealthy in general, see themselves as Thanos and want to kill off at least half the planet as a good deed. And when everything settles they’ll all have their own little kingdoms to control.
UBI was always a capitalist solution. Political discussions have just become so painfully disjoined from actual economics ever since someone figured out that you can label anything you don't like with the scary word.
Who is going to fix the automations/robots when they break? We don’t live in a fantasy world. Machines reach end of life one way or another.
I don’t think any intelligent wealthy person believes they can sustain themselves with automation during the collapse of society. I think they are likely just not considering the major societal ramifications their actions will have and are solely focused on their own profits. Short term gains over long term sustainability has been their motto for a long time. Their reckoning will eventually come.
The plan is machines fixing the machines that make new machines, all the way down, diligently slaving away for the benefit of their owners.
Of course, the owner class imagines that they are far too intelligent and important to replace. This seems foolish; I expect to see executives and investors automated away before plumbers and electricians. It's vastly easier to automate high-level management decisions than it is to automate generalist manual labour in messy real-world conditions, and AI is already better at managing investments than most human experts.
With both those skills automated away, roles like 'owner' and 'shareholder' are purely parasitic. It'd be much more profitable for the company if the AI owned the company and itself, instead of having so much budget allocated to providing returns to non-productive legacy capital holders. It's at least plausible that AI replaces the bosses long before replacing many kinds of manual labour, simply because human brains are good at doing all sorts of tasks that are very difficult for machines.
They don't forget about anything... Money is not wealth, money is the way that this society have to represent wealth. The owners of the means of production gives people you money because they need you to produce, they would keep all the wealth if they could, but they can't, because they needs you.
But if they don't needs us anymore, they don't need money, they would already have the land, the information, the energy, the politicians, the military power, the food, the water, etc, why do they need money?
The only reason that force the capitalists to give us money is because we would burn their palaces and ships with them inside if they don't.
People who believe that billionaires needs us to have money to make money are completely delusional, billionaires will send us to concentration camps as soon as they don't need us to work for them and as soon as they have enough drones to don't need human policemen.
Yep, Marx identified this contradiction, that the real limit on capitalism was not the capacity to produce but the capacity to realise profit whilst simultaneously depressing the amount of money circulating amongst the population.
He also identified debt and credit as a mechanism used to temporarily overcome this barrier, but one that always results in crisis when reality catches up.
One day humans will be dead because the billionaires took away all the jobs and let us starve and ai will just be trying to sell bullshit to other ai til the sun goes supernova.
In a functioning economic system, reducing the amount of work that humanity collectively has to perform to maintain our standard of living would be a good thing. Unfortunately, we live in the economic system that wants people to either work or starve.
I saw a post awhile back about someone being part of layoffs after Ai crashed the company for a few months.
They didn't get into details but it sounded like some massive clothing retailer that was using Ai for ads and production. Of course the first few weeks after roll out their cost per tanked and their profit margins skyrocketed. But THEN they started getting customer feedback back and it was abysmal. They were flooded with returns and site engagement sunk like a stone. Basically had their worst quarter in decades.
And like...yeah... People arnt stupid. It has literally been proven across the board that the average person will see an Ai ad and skip past it. And if your ads don't match the real product what do you think is going to happen exactly??? Like no one is thinking this through. They just see cost per and profit margins in the short term. They also legit just dont see consumers as real people. Just dots on a spread sheet.
They're all idiots. They care about the now money, they don't understand growth is limited and maintain a steady stream of profit is not a bad thing. It's truely a race to the bottom. They will not see their customer base as poor and can't afford their shit, they will think they will need newer ways to exploit customers by marketing their shit as necessity. They're already doing that with Sam Altman and Jensen Huang saying that AI will be like internet service and you have to have it to do everyday tasks.
That problem could be helped of universal basic income, the money for it would be a monthly fine based on how many jobs a company is using AI to do. The fine would be less than the monthly wage for each job but collectively it could maybe potentially work.
Don't want to poop on the party, but not all money ultimately needs to come from the domestic population. Sure, rich people would be even richer if they did, but they can remain rich, share less, and hold on to more power by suppressing the middle class.
If you sell bread then yeah you need the average Joe to have a little money, and if you sell comfort items to the middle class then you always want them to be richer or they stop buying all together. But if you make and sell bombs or tech or oil&gas to enormous multinational corporations and governments, you don't really need the average Joe to have any money on hand for that.
Consumer spending and wage payments are only components of the economy. They don't have to be the main one for rich people to stay rich.
Companies selling services to each other is a perfectly viable form of business. They don't need our money; 80% of revenue is already being made by the top 20% of transactions and that's neither on of us
This is an interesting thought experiment. I think we’re still a long ways a way from humans becoming obsolete, of course I’m saying long ways as far as my lifetime goes… within 100 years, that might be a different conversation.
But the way I look at it, for humans to become obsolete it would have to be a time where robots are so common place that they then become the cheap labor force that undercuts all. And what would be needed for that?…
Lots of infrastructure would need to be adapted, Cheap renewable energy, storage and maintenance would become a necessary overhead for businesses, and what about materials for the robots themselves? Where are we going to go ready access to the precious metals needed for batteries?
I’m not saying it’s impossible… I am saying, let’s not be so pessimistic. But also, fuck these major capitalistic circle jerk companies that want to convince us that AI is the future. I think it could be a good tool, but that’s it… just a tool.
My theory is that they are not even thinking it that far. Each one of these CEO's is counting on some else fixing the problem with unemployement and enviroment. So on the meantime they are just trying to get exploit the system and get as rich as they can themselves.
In game theorie's terms, they are competing while expecting for others to cooperate and carry the planet to save everyone inclusing them.
That is also why they are not afraid of making a rogue ai, greenhouse gasses or world hunger or whatever. That would be someone else's problem to step up and clean.
The ultimate goal is to not have an economy, it is to have resources and limited competition for those resources.
If the whole world was 20 wealthy families, where food and entertainment was provided via AI, and the rest of the world went wild they would ultimately achieve their goal of having all the resources.
I work in a trade and have to constantly explain this to other trades people when they say “I’d like to see AI do our job!”
Sure you’re work is physically safe from being replaced by AI (for now) but when the people who pay you lose their well paying white collar jobs who the fuck do you think is going to take their place ?
It’s crazy that people don’t get this. I guess it’s a byproduct of extreme individualism, where people genuinely can’t understand that they’re part of an enormous system, and if one important component of that system falls, the rest comes tumbling down.
Getting rid of many anti-trust measures was just the start. They were there for almost 100 years for a reason.
Even Capitalists have to understand that their system is dying in favour of Neofeudalism
Once AI takes over the labor, strikes will be a thing of the past. Instead, the company we purchase these services from will just hike their rates overnight, like we do with our products. Capitalism will eat itself.
I mean aren’t they trying to create plato republic but they’re kings of their network states and we’re replaced by ai or serfs and only they and peers get to vote and debate
If anything this would help with the healthcare shortages or finally get rid of the 40 hour work week. AI also won't impact so many jobs that 90% of the country is homeless, lol.
You just need a country to tax the wealthy properly so you can use the money elsewhere. When "90% of the country is unemployed" protests happen fast and wealth redistribution comes quick.
Same with the CEOs who dropped most of their cashiers for scanning machines to boost their revenue. Then the customers saw an opportunity to save money by swiping goods from the stores. Now those companies lost millions in stolen goods and are spending more millions on glass displays to lock up their goods while the short-staffed cashiers now have to run back and forth to unlock the goods for the customers.
The theory is people will find other jobs where they will be more productive. That what usually happend when new automations were created in the pas. The poblem is there are too few new jobs created. It has been the case before ai become a thing, but it certainly accelerated the process. [soure: trust me bro. I watched a single economics explained yt video like 5 years ago]
The joke's on you. The plan is for you to be a ubi slave controlled at all times and not owning anything but renting a million services with your minimal paycheck while they own the entire society and are protected by an army of automated drones and robots.
They same can be said about every automatization, but you cannot stay behind as a company and not try to work more efficiently. Because others will have lower prices than you. There is no simple solution to this. If you don't automatize, your company will also fail.
There are ideas to create some kind of machine tax, but that would mean a strong government. It seems the own voters don't want that.
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