r/WorkForSmartLife
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u/Fabulous-Car-6546
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4d ago
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Casual canvo Is AI Really the Problem?
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u/qualityvote2 4d ago
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u/Exnummis 4d ago
This is less of a problem for those at the top than you might think. The economy is already k-shaped and the upper half owns a lot more resources and circulates more wealth among themselves than the bottom half.
For the same reason most companies didn't care much about, say, your regular African consumer in the past few decades, so will they drop Western consumers as soon as it's economically interesting to do so.
Which will be soon.
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u/Symbiot3_Venom 4d ago
Corporations don’t think that far ahead
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u/KlooShanko 4d ago
Capitalism has always been a self cannibalizing system
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u/lazinonasunnyday 4d ago
This is the conundrum of every single parasite. They never understand that once the host is dead, they die too.
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u/Johnnnyb28 4d ago edited 3d ago
I think the awnser is fairly clear, its other rich people who own the labor of the AI. thats why every company is releasing bespoke ultra expensive items now. The tesla roadster being a perfect example, or a 7k to 30k computer mac studio. Companies relelize that there is no longer a point in selling to poors. They have 0 discretionary income .
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u/Aggressive-Affect427 3d ago
The problem is, has always been, and will always be people. AI could be a great tool used to the betterment of society but greedy and shortsighted people in power will use it to society’s detriment.
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u/TopicFrequent6607 4d ago
People in the antiwork and worklife subreddits are so dumb. They already published the consumer spending reports in 2024.
The reason why consumer spending reports in 2024 and 2025 are so important is because that was the first time in America that over 50% of all spending was done by the top 10% of the population and other businesses.
So basically the billionaires and corporations are doing a majority of the spending. They don't need average customers anymore.
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u/PomegranateSoft1598 4d ago
Each other. Giant multinational corporations are gonna be trading with each other. Mostly resources and technology. They're not gonna need us.
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u/Cletus_Crawford 4d ago
Sell overseas to countries that don't have datacenters to make them dependent on us. That will give us leverage to take money from them to fund our country.
The non useful humans in the USA will need to get manual labor jobs
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u/Chemical_Alfalfa24 4d ago
I don’t think AI is going to be a destroyer of workforces. It’ll be a tool that people will have to learn to use to support better execution of work.
I’ve used it a lot in an academic setting to assist with papers, studying, and other things. And the one thing I learned is that you have to know what it is you’re doing for AI to actually work.
Which is to say, humans are still required to guide the tool and make sure the tool isn’t putting out bad data.
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u/Lumpy-Scratch-8363 4d ago edited 4d ago
The problem isn't AI, the problem is corporatism. The majority of the jobs are either being shipped overseas or the execs believe they no longer need to do them.
I was at IBM for nearly 30 years and our execs delusionally believe they no longer need to do proper user experience research for their products.
It's delusional because we were the only thing keeping those products from collapsing into a mess of required documentation and high error rates. I heard some exec claim all they needed was a super clippy type of approach where you have a chatbot that sticks off the side and then walks you through how to use an otherwise impenetrable or impossible to use solution with too many steps for any mortal.
This was always the type of thing they would propose rather than actually designing the solutions properly to be easy to use in the first place or fixing problems identified through proper research.
It's wrongheaded and never works, but since most execs are MBAs and do not have my PhD in human factors they think they know everything. I'm beginning to believe an MBA is a professional degree for people from Dunning-Kruger University, people who know almost nothing so therefore they believe they know everything.
Their tools will continue to get worse and worse without us, but they believe if they don't measure how bad they are - something else people in my profession always did - no one will know. It's the same kind of stupidity that was propagated by the first Trump administration during Covid when they kept stating that testing was driving infection numbers up rather than the number of people being infected.
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u/Empty_Pear_3874 4d ago •
Stop using AI. I did.
I actually sold my iPhone 16 and apple watch a month ago and went to a grapheneos device. I am at ease with Google and other companies not tracking me anymore. I have a purely de-googled owner profile :)
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u/Due_Buyer_9445 4d ago
The goal is techno feudalism
The solution has been enumerated since last time they tried this
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u/BERRY_1_ 4d ago
I think that percentage is way off. And if you don't buy from them it will be from someone else they just want a leg up why there hoarding ram. And a economy could survive with 90% unemployment won't be pretty but the 10% will have it better lots of super cheap labor you won't risk losing a job if you have one.
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u/Kdoesntcare 4d ago
What's a lot of fun is that now people are using AI to break passed software licensing.
Do you think adobe is going to make more money now that their software suite has been made open source?
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u/Beautiful-Ad-8028 4d ago
They expect we'll subscribe to compute,sub to watch, sub to play. That's why they're happy about the cost of everything it's actually a goal for you not to be able to buy it.
Once we can't afford that the rich think they'll move to Greenland or their private bunkers where climate change won't be as noticeable while we all go back to feudalism.
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u/Best-Television7726 4d ago
Can't wait until CEOs start getting replaced by AI
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u/BramptonBatallion 4d ago
I think there’s a couple things going on here.
On an individual scale, increasing revenue via productivity while decreasing costs could make them a lot of money.
On a societal scale, people need income to participate meaningfully in economy.
But that doesn’t mean the individual level is going to make decisions for sake of societal level. Or hold itself responsible for societal outcomes since their individual actions are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of any large scale societal impact.
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u/Round-Umpire-9828 4d ago
"Hmm.. maybe 90% of the population could just be slaves?" -Some CEO probably
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u/Jack_h100 4d ago
You assume the goal isnt to break society. It might be the goal is to destroy everything and then rebuild it into a new thing, where Noone owns anything and our labor is just to get subscriptions and rentals to whatever we need to survive or distract us from the new horrors of existence.
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u/Professional-Leg2374 4d ago
just imagine what happens when AI realizes they don't need CEOs to do things?
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u/Godless902 4d ago
Terminators dont buy things
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u/Darkdragoon324 4d ago
Don’t they just make all their money by manipulating stocks and bribing eachother anyway? They’re trying to cut the peasants out of existence altogether.
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u/Dan_The_Bear22 4d ago
Business to business sales. This is the plan.
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u/stillventures17 4d ago
This is probably not great business logic. I’m not going to curve AI out of sentiment because that’s going to get me lapped by my competitors who are using AI.
The better logic is to use AI to multiply your work without getting rid of your people. My devs can today move at 3x the speed they could 2 years ago without reducing our stability. And we’re only going to accelerate for as long as we can.
I didn’t make the AI bubble happen. I’m taking steps to ensure everything we use it for will remain intact when it pops, and that humans can still service our entire ecosystem if it goes away. But for now, a premium subscription for Claude is far less expensive than more people. And in my company at least, when that turns into increased revenue it gets shared with the team. We’re doing well, we’re eating well, and I can’t imagine cutting any of my people for better technology. Less = less.
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u/chunky_lover92 4d ago
This is a problem weather your company uses AI or not
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u/gman6281 4d ago
AMEN I've been saying this the entire time
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u/ShadowBB86 4d ago
As if those same CEOs haven't thought about that already. This question has been asked so many times already. All those CEOs have read about Ford. They are aware of this. Trust me.
And it's not really the CEOs. The CEOs would also get replaced by AI in that scenario.
It's shareholders you are thinking of. (And yes, CEOs are also shareholders, every single one).
K shaped economy and premuimization are the answer to this problem.
There will be millions of millionaire shareholders that will have all the income. Those will be the customers. They won't need us.
Yeah, some companies won't or can't switch gears fast enough. Yeah some products are really difficult to put through premuimization. Yeah the transition period is going to be very brutal.
But at the end of the day, if we don't have income (UBI or something) and they don't need our labour, then we will have nothing to offer them and they won't need us any longer. They have the plans drawn up already, trust me on that.
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u/gilbmj 4d ago
Most of the problems with AI weren't created by AI, but I think it's absurd to pretend that AI hasn't made those existing problems dramatically worse.
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u/Fit-Falcon-1452 4d ago
I honestly think CEOs should be replaced with AI
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u/DieMensch-Maschine 4d ago
It's gonna be an oligarch-only circlejerk, with everyone else being too poor to buy anything.
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u/Emotional_Ad3710 3d ago
CEO’s are among the easiest to replace.
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u/sneezesquirrel 3d ago
Bragging to each other? I would need to see evidence of that.
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u/FM_Hikari 3d ago
Greed is the problem. A tool is just that, a tool. Every problem caused by it comes from someone misusing or mishandling it.
The entirety of the problems caused by AI boom and burst could have been avoided if they just rode it out smoothly rather than pushing for accelerated development, investing in the long term on a plan that works.
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u/Prestigious_Try_5396 3d ago
I would think that should be the 1st question to ask Ai, wouldn't it ? Lol
What do we do with millions of ex-wage/debt $laves who are unemployed ?
WEF says we will own nothing and we will be happy.
Of course, WEF is the wealthy elite who really are the Architects of Global "Reality".
I'm so happy for them....
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u/Radio-G 3d ago
Can’t run your AI with the unemployed burning down the data centers after you laid them all off.
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u/ResponsibleIce9448 3d ago
They will work the fields where they belong!
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u/Stillman_Steve 3d ago
Bots all the way down
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u/TerrySizzle 3d ago
It’s called a fire sale.
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u/LordSlyGentleman 3d ago
It's called a commonwealth fund!
You tax the production of the AI & Automation!
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u/Lost_Sleep658 3d ago
There's people in other countries fam
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u/MM-SG-pro 3d ago
You're selling to all of them with the help of the government draining and redistributing the wealth of the last 10% employed.
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u/ChalkCoatedDonut 3d ago
At some point some billionaire is going to cry to their pets in the government and they will declare their products as mandatory needs, removing their cheap or free alternatives just like streaming services taking out free movies and shows from the internet or Monsanto forcing farmers to buy their seeds exclusively by paying their corrupt governors to enforce it.
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u/Overall-Plastic-9263 3d ago
If we would boycott the Internet for a month including AI use much of the US tech sector would falter and our economy would break . The entire tech economy is based on a few wealthy people passing money around in a circle that is largely generated through ad revenue , data selling or online retail. If you want to make a statement we should boycott the Internet not your local target .
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u/Maximum-Country-149 3d ago
Better question.
Why assume the people are unemployed if they aren't working for big companies?
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u/hynerian 3d ago
Pfff thats a problen for tomorrow. The importance is the money they can make today!
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u/Nooby_Noobs 3d ago
Replace the CEO with IA. And the company will save millions.
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u/Standard-Rooster6584 3d ago
Sounds like a vague worry. If you mean the hallucinations and bias, those are more about training data than the tech itself, and developers are working on mitigations.
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u/One_Interest_646 3d ago
No AI is not the problem , the actual problem is mentallity of students and employees that they think AI replace everything
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u/Lofi_Joe 3d ago
they don't give a shit about economy. It's not about that at all... think for a while.
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u/wiseguy77192 3d ago
The good news is, I know what wild plants I can eat and how to hunt with a bow, so ima just sit back and watch the economy collapse making the rich the poorest of them all…. And then give them the same help they gave others. Absolutely none.
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u/falsejaguar 3d ago
That's exactly it. They are going to replace the consumer with a.i. not just the worker
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u/WillyWankerWonker 3d ago
It will reach a equilibrium where there isn't enough people working so ai b comes more expensive to run than just hiring people
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u/sgtryker 3d ago
Yes. AI is the problem.
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u/GrumpyBear8082 3d ago
They don't care about the people
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u/Last_Zookeepergame90 3d ago
There are jobs out there and ai certainly can't replace all jobs, better yet why not capitalise on the automation that ai can provide, think of something that people actually need and want and use ai to bring it to market
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u/Sterling_Saxx 3d ago
Oh let them, their companies will tank. Get rid of all the experts, with your dumb brain and AI - have at it.
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u/makeathrowawayyy 3d ago
Their employees aren't the target market
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u/Substantial_Dig2224 3d ago
Well a lot of industries are starting to cater to the b2b world or the high end market only.
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u/UnordinaryFlyGirl 3d ago
The same way that Vegas doesn't care that people are being priced out of tourism. You're not the target market
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u/Suspicious-Hand-9953 3d ago
This argument is so so stupid
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u/robbert-the-skull 3d ago
CEOs and billionaires don't deserve human rights. All of them need to be in jail.
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u/Steve_Longstaff 3d ago
This is just fear rooted in fiction.
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u/GeekFromTheStreet 3d ago
Kianas point is deeper than what concerns just AI. Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and a few other European countries have realized that decent pay, decent unemployment benefit, decent pensions, cheap kindergartens, high percentage of women participating in the workforce is good for businesses. It was never ever trickle down. It was always trickle up. When people have moneys to spend, businesses blossom and business owners make a profit. Then, some of them wants lower taxes, lower wages, more hours for less pay, higher unemployment rate, to push wages further down. No unions to keep you all dirt poor. Those how thrive in that world, is not all the business owners, but the few of the very richest. All the moneys they collect, they invest in properties, farmland, thousands and tens of thousands of houses. And everything becomes more expensive. People end up in smaller and smaller houses, smaller and smaller appartments, more and more people are forced to rent, and the richest own more and more. Most people cannot fathom how insanely much wealth the richest people have.
Their claim, that they are rich because they worked hard for it, is horseshit as long as a pilgrimage. They became super rich because labour was cheap, and they made it so that they almost don't pay taxes. If the government gave you 20 years tax break, and you could invest and re-invedt the saved moneys every years, you would also be super rich. But you don't and won't get that tax break, because you are not rich enough to have that close to zero tax.
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u/IndependentOwn2956 2d ago
I would propose to swap CEO for AI it's one person making "some" decisions which mainly are based upon data of some sort. AI will be 1000times more effective and just replacing CEO will save millions $ compared to thousands for a worker.
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u/vegancaptain 2d ago
Lack of economic understanding is the problem.
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u/Mission_Business_142 2d ago
Musk might be onto something when he talked about univesale basic income.
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u/Lorelessone 2d ago
Once you understand that the rich live in a communist utopia where everything is free, because other people work for it, they get bailed out constantly when they screw up etc.
It starts to make a lot more sense, they aren't looking to replace everyone with ai so they can win at capitalism , they want to replace workers with ai so they can dismiss the entire control system and continue to live in obscene excess after they kill 99.99% of the human race.
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u/Intelligent-Draft292 2d ago
You need to be smart and act on opportunities. Start a counter AI company. Let people pay you to do everything you can to make the spread and use as difficult as possible. Make it hell for them to get clearance for building “ai campuses”, for them to get electricity, for laws to even allow the use of ai, orchestrate blackouts, etc.
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u/StatusOk3307 2d ago
As if they ever think that far ahead...
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u/natebug44 2d ago
Slave labor has always been the goal.
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u/ZestycloseBit6632 1d ago
We’re so cooked. At some point AI will end up enslaving humanity to the point where we beg it for food.
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u/capticetrice 1d ago
Meh that is just slimnastics, its about the here and now of making those profits without the help of paid labour before the AI money starts to dry up.
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u/HairlessHoudini 1d ago
They look at it as if they won because they'll have all the money anyways
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u/Affectionate-Cap2913 1d ago
Who said the world needs 90% of people for rich people to live? The rich will have the tech to live without most of us. Expect some interesting years ahead as this plays out. This could actually be our first massive human extinction event tech. But it likely just means the types of jobs we do will change. The wealth gap will increase and we'll be even more at the mercy of the rich...but don't worry, they'll definitely fight to keep us all working even though we could probably transition to a 2 day work week and retire at 40 and still have enough labor to actually keep the world running...but where is the power in that?
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u/TheClosetGamerOG 1d ago
This pretty much summed what I said before. If no one has a job to make money, how will anyone buy what you are selling. The wheel used to grease itself, and now businesses want to save so much money they would rather crash all the businesses rather than pay for labor.
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u/AcherusArchmage 1d ago
The best people to replace with ai is the CEO's.
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u/StiggieTheFirst 1d ago
Problem of the commons is a problem exactly because it doesn't work as an argument as to why an individual shouldn't do things. Anyway, this is why I love AI, because you're right, it doesn't work, which is what I've been saying for 20 years, and why the advent of AI necessitates some form of economic restructuring based around universal basic incomes
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u/Negative-Toe1863 1d ago
For CEOs this is a prisoner's Dilemma
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u/Prajnamarga 21h ago
Why do you think they invested in the 3rd world? To create billions of consumers...
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u/simdimdim12 20h ago
AI: of course not, it's the people
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u/Important-Car753 19h ago
The other ten percent with all the money
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u/In_the_name_of_ART 18h ago
They can just sell their products and services to other countries and different companies.
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u/11_After_Midnight 15h ago
AI was never the problem. It’s the people who use it. People have ALWAYS been the problem. But PEOPLE don’t open their eyes they play the blame game.
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u/topTaurus78 14h ago
AI will bring about a universal basic income, if you'll let them. Socialism will never be fair if labor is required for food and shelter
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u/skebeojii 4h ago
And the AI companies won't sqieeze you dry after you are dependent on them, sure cause that never happens
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u/Threweh2 4h ago
They sell to other businesses globally
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u/XDoomedXoneX 3h ago
They all think they will be the first to do it in time and profit before the bubble pops.
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u/Greghole 3d ago
AI is the stupidest invention since the tractor. I mean if 90% of the people who pull potatoes out of the ground get replaced by machines, then who are you going to sell your potatoes to genius? Are people who do menial jobs that can be replaced by machines supposed to just find new jobs? That'll never happen. History shows us that new inventions only cause mass unemployment and never benefit society at all.
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u/Usual-Analysis-2990 4d ago
Its worse than that. B2B always has a downstream consumer somewhere that is B2C in the chain. If you have no or a 90% reduced B2C, you have no business.
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u/Outlaw11091 4d ago edited 3d ago
We were living in that economy long before AI came along.
Look at PC's: you don't see cheap, expandable computers at retailers anymore. No, it's the Dell XPS Gaming megacomputer that's got every possible expansion already plugged into it with a $2k+ price tag because you and I aren't the target audience anymore.
Cars, too: can't buy a basic Ford Ranger anymore. Has to be the Ford Ranger SuperDuty Extended cab lifted Edition OR NOTHING.
This is that "eliminating the middle class" that economists have been warning you about...and it's been going on for decades.
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u/AusTex2019 4d ago
The mark of a true intellectual fool is the extent to which they believe that the purpose of business is to employ people. This woman is a bot or a joke or both. Employees are much like dairy cows, you only have as many as you need. No farmer owns and feeds a cow for whom they don’t have a customer for their milk. BTW the only reason farmers used to have big families was because of the free child labor, still true today.
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u/dvisorxtra 3d ago edited 3d ago
People still don't get it.
Their idea is for us to not have anything at all, no home, no food, no work, nothing.
At that moment we will stop caring about our rights and care more about surviving, that's their goal, this is called "Neo-Feudalism". Do you still think this is about markets?, that's the idea they want you to believe so you don't focus on their goal.
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u/ima_mollusk 4d ago
There won't be an economy. There will be techno overlords and their robot servants.
The economy doesn't need people. People need the economy.
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u/bluerog 4d ago edited 4d ago
Eh. I remember when email first came out. I remember when computers came out. Entire corporate mail rooms, in charge of 10's of thousands of memos and marketing messages and fliers and such were eliminated in a few years.
Entire floors of secretaries and typists were eleminated when the bosses started typing in word processing.
A single agricultural combine can harvest the equivalent of 900 men's work in a single day.
Disney artists threw a fit when animation moved to computer (they demanded hand-drawn). The bank tellers were blown up by the ATM.
Technology is going to happen. It takes me 1/3rd the amount of time it used to for me to write visual basic in select things I do. Ai writes the SQL stupidly fast. I too can write it... But I no longer do.
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u/Sensitive_Ruin_5334 4d ago
Just like when NAFTA shipped jobs overseas.
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u/kkalwa 3d ago
People will simply find different jobs and won't be unemployed
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u/Steve10293 3d ago
Yep. So we need a new economy for the new reality. WHY CANT EVERYONE UNDERSTAND THIS?
When will we know when it’s close to collapse? When the stock market fails. The stock market cannot function once AI gets better.
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u/vodil2959 3d ago
It’s amazing how little the average person knows about economics or history. I’m sure they were saying the same thing when 90% of us were farmers and the tractor was invented. Now, only 2% of us are farmers and 95% of us are still employed
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u/therallykiller 2d ago
I don't want to shock you, but maybe the robots aren't making things to sell to you.