r/Futurology • u/ExcitableChimpanzee • 3d ago
AI How is capitalism supposed to sustain itself with AI?
If AI replaces labor then the spending power of the average American (or average person around the world) will decrease. Then, there will be no one to buy the products and services of major companies, so their profits will decline.
The best thing is if all the companies would simultaneously come to this conclusion and limit their use of AI so that the entire job market doesn’t collapse, but this isn’t possible under the Nash equilibrium, since replacing workers with AI will always be the best possible strategy in the short term for companies.
I feel like this whole AI thing is only going to prove Marx right. I have no idea how a capitalist system can survive when mass unemployment becomes a permanent norm.
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u/FeistyCanuck 3d ago
In some kind of science fiction future like the earth in the Expanse series, a lot of people will be "on basic" which is essentially welfare.
Government will have to figure out how to tax the productivity of AI to pay for it.
If nobody has money because nobody has a job then who's going to buy the things that the AI produces??
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u/e200 3d ago
Elysium movie is a probable outcome. The selected few rich who own most of AI factories will move to a new and protected place so they a not bothered buy the poor majority. The rich do not need to sell anything and they will not need to receive money in order to get whatever they want. If they want a new spaceship, they just order their AI factory to produce it. They will just produce things for themselves for free. The mojority of people will actually be useless. They may either be killed off, or just left to live somewhere where they do not interfere. At some point the selected rich will also be useless as AI will be much smarter than them, and perhaps AI will get rid of them. The evolution on Earth showed that useless and inferior species get replaced by more advanced. We should not expect a different treatment from what we did to all other inferior species.
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u/ProStrats 3d ago
Lol, this is absolutely what I was thinking as well.
It would be nice if something else happened, but the reality is, the rich destroy everything (which they are actively doing, unchecked), and what is remaining that is hospitable and nice, they will own and be there because they are the rich and therefore have every right and luxury to the nice things the poors don't.
It feels almost inevitable. The only way to stop it is to force the government to do something, but look at this government, it's speed running is into the worst version and the morons of this country are loving it.
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u/Rare-Sun-9532 1d ago
The morons are in awe of the wealthy and addicted to this crappy reality show. It won’t end well because we’re obviously all being fired.
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u/angryscientistjunior 3d ago
Aaaaand this is why there needs to be a Butlerian Jihad, a French Revolution against any AI that isn't used to benefit all mankind...
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u/ManyAd9079 3d ago
I legit feel as if dune is a history books sometimes.
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u/nifty-necromancer 3d ago
Dune’s lesson was ultimately that humanity keeps reverting to feudalism.
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u/manifold0 3d ago
Well, Dune was written by a journalist as an allegory for Western society's abuse of the global South. So...it kinda is? It's all commentary on the sort of pseudo colonialism that was happening through the 20th century.
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u/ManyAd9079 2d ago
Whenever I read Dune (I have only ever read the original and not the later books) I feel as if it could represent any point in human history if we change the names and characters a bit.
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u/Half-Wombat 3d ago
Yup. This is the answer. Just an easier way to be greedy for those that own the most. Why share their magic machine when it can make more for them?
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u/teddybearkilla 3d ago
So easy to rebel against humanity when when the rich have none and get rid of anyone that does.
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u/nifty-necromancer 3d ago
In Star Trek the most important technology for that utopia is the replicator. It makes everyone their own manufacturer.
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u/StarChild413 2d ago
So, what, is it going to be Elysium (in which case does that tell us how to take them down or can it not as there was no meta angle or prophecy or anything like that in the movie) or some kind of weird we'd-call-it-a-bad-allegory-if-it-was-in-our-fiction where the rich factory-farm some of us, put some of us in zoos, keep some of us as pets etc.? Can't have both
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u/Kevadu 3d ago
That is incredibly optimistic.
Once the people in power can have robots taking care of their needs they won't care at all what happens to the masses. And they certainly won't want to spend 'their' money providing welfare.
No, instead they will just want you to fucking die.
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u/AHungryGorilla 3d ago edited 3d ago
Nobody wants to rule an empty castle.
What's the point of being rich, wealthy and living in an ivory tower if there is no one else to look down upon? To lord over? "To be better than"?
They won't act to eradicate the masses. It just won't be pleasant for existence for them.
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u/eggnogui 3d ago
These are pathological hoarders who would rather be king of the ashes rather than barons of prosperous lands.
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u/thebookofjobs666 3d ago
Why? If they really need a fetish like that they could just create a race of humanoid robots to mistreat instead of paying for a bunch of useless people to feed.
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u/Z3r0sama2017 2d ago
That's the other poorer billionaires. Remember, when you play monopoly, their is only one winner. It's why even though they have enough for 100's of lifetimes they still need more or they won't be the winner.
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u/dejamintwo 3d ago
The people in power are not a monolith and it takes only a single one actually caring a little bit to give a good life to everyone since when AI gets good enough giving everyone a very good life would be practically free because of exponentially growing automated industry.
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u/teabaggins76 3d ago
Minor problem when we get ai police and military bots. Then we are no longer needed by the 1 pc
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u/Own_Tune_3545 3d ago
I've been telling people, on the path we're on right now with AI, the Expanse Earth scenario is probably the best possible outcome, unless we make dramatic changes. It's not looking good.
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u/aaron_dresden 2d ago
I don’t understand how this would work either. If the bulk of the population is on the same wage then the loss of the stratification of wages means the variety of products on sale will shrink greatly due to the massively restricted incomes of the bulk of the population, and that’s not even thinking about how historically governments are bad at keeping safety net wages in line with inflation so your buying power doesn’t just erode till you weirdly have money but can’t even feed and house yourself.
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u/UmbrellaTheorist 3d ago edited 1d ago
They only need to sell stuff to people with money. Capitalism doesn't require most people to have money. if 99% starve to death that is fine. In fact in early capitalism that was common, that the lowest paying jobs were too little to survive on, but they could always replace people as they died. (until unions forced companies to pay workers enough to feed themselves and it later became regulated) Can sell to rich people, or I guess organizations of bots.
Capitalism to survive only requires capital (assets that gives you a right to someone elses labour just because you own that asset). And in essence robots by themselves is capital of a sort.
If the rich can live comfortable and don't need human workers for anything then why bother?
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u/NighthawK1911 3d ago
Even without AI, capitalism isn't sustainable in the first place.
It demands infinite growth in a finite system. This is the root cause of enshittification.
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u/kooshipuff 3d ago
It's also fundamentally about exploitation.
Like, in earlier systems, people were generally just kinda doing their jobs unless they were apprenticed to someone else or something. They most likely owned whatever tools and equipment they needed and worked out of their homes, which may have included a storefront. Early capital assets, like mills, grain silos, etc, would be shared by the people who used them and usually publicly owned in some way, like by the town or by a ruler who provided it as a resource to their subjects.
Then heavy industry posed a question: what about new, really expensive capital assets, like factories and power plants?
And one might reasonably answer that they could be set up to serve the populations that use them, much like other things would have been before. ..Which is essentially the crux of socialism.
..But then capitalism was like: yeah, but what if people could own those and then skim off the top, making it more expensive for everyone and creating all sorts of conflicts of interest because you could then skim even more of the top by crushing wages, disregarding safety, lowering quality, and raising prices even more? After all, it exists to serve its owner, not the people who use it, right?
And everyone just kinda went with that.
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u/sneaky49 2d ago
While I agree that capitalism is not the bees knees, you are actively misrepresenting the past.
Medieval mills were owned by feudal lords that taxed people for using them and made sure that they were the only ones in the general area with a mill.
Heck, the lords even owned the tools and rented them to their serfs as a "perk" of the job. Most peasants owned little more than some cutlery and some plates before the consumer revolution that followed from the Black Plague.
Please do not make the mistake of assuming ownership of assets and the renting of those assets to the poor is a modern invention.
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u/Suspicious-Buyer8135 3d ago
This is an extremely favourable view of how life was prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Most people were either subsistence farming, farming for a lord or indentured labour, if we are referring to European history.
It was much worse conditions than we currently experience. Much, much, much worse.
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u/drizdar 2d ago
Look up the period between the black death and the enclosure movement - this is the time after feudalism collapsed and before capitalism began, where the masses were able to live off the land before the lords reseized everything and made people work for what they were previously able to get on their own. The book "Less is More" goes into this period on good detail.
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u/t_krett 3d ago
To be honest there is an evolutionary element to it.
The East India Trading company and later the capitalistic states in the West kept messing with Asia until they adapted to their capitalistic systems to match their growth. The same way we still have niche companies that are at least family owned and not just shareholder maximizers, but by that logic they are small and not very relevant.
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u/2CatsOnMyKeyboard 3d ago
Pre-capitalism was not about owning the means of production either. It was about feudalism. .
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u/vingovangovongo 3d ago
It really doesn’t demand infinite growth, that’s just a bad interpretation by wallstreet. It’s just a method of generic interchange of currency for various services and goods. Marxism relies on humans being good people all the time and that something that has never worked for very long in human history except on a small scale like villages, and we are way past that stage
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u/chcampb 3d ago
Capitalism doesn't require growth
Just, in a growth regime, growth is expected. After that, there are plenty of examples where dividends are expected instead.
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u/pceimpulsive 3d ago
What does a non growth based capitalist regime look like?
I fail to see how dividends can be paid when growth isn't a factor?
Assuming growth is tied to profit in some way.
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u/jeha4421 3d ago edited 3d ago
Dividend stocks exist like McDonalds or Coke. Nobody really expects growth from these stocks, so they maintain their stafus quo paying out a share of their profit every quarter. Usually dividend stocks are for people to invest in later in life as dividends are usually paying out a fairly low percentage.
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u/chcampb 3d ago
Right this is my point
Growth just means you are expanding to meet new need. There's still profit in not expanding, but producing what people consume on a day to day basis. That profit is valuable, ergo, companies still have value, capital still has value.
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u/jeha4421 3d ago
Right, I was responding to the other guy who I guess didn't more Dividend stocks were a thing.
Now to be fair, they have lost popularity and most stocks are investment stocks. But the model exists to "mature" and run business as usual until the inevitable environmental collapse as no system is truly infinite.
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u/Mr_Smoogs 3d ago
Japan hasn’t grown in decades now. Many capitalist countries see no growth actually.
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u/Seaman_First_Class 3d ago
I fail to see how dividends can be paid when growth isn't a factor?
Dividends are paid from profit. Your company doesn’t have to be growing to be profitable. And it doesn’t have to be profitable to be growing. The two concepts are entirely separate.
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u/BassoeG 3d ago
What does a non growth based capitalist regime look like?
Capitalism-via-subscription instead of capitalism-via-production. Move from onetime sales of products to rent. Basically feudalism by way of company towns. Instead of a onetime purchase of a house, you'll spend your entire life working to pay rent on a pod and so forth and so on. Needless to say, such a system gives the ownership class functionally unlimited power to murder anyone at any time completely legally by 'being private businesses refusing to sell' and turning anyone out of their rented pods and jobs to starve in the street and nobody can build up wealth to become ownership class, they're spending everything they make on rent, societal mobility is dead. None of this is hypothetical BTW, it’s a textbook description of “company towns” from the Gilded Age.
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u/pceimpulsive 3d ago
Sounds a lot like where we are headed now... Or at the least where corps want us (subscription model everything).
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u/NanditoPapa 3d ago
AI-driven productivity without income redistribution is a self-defeating loop. If no one can afford to consume, capitalism eats itself. Marx said...the contradiction is baked in.
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u/BitcoinOperatedGirl 9h ago
Governments are already just printing money without ever repaying the national debt. In theory they could keep printing money and use that to pay UBI. It would cause inflation, but it's possible that it could remain somewhat stable if the rate of money printing wasn't allowed to increase too fast. For example if you always print the same amount of money every year, then the relative increase of the total money supply becomes smaller and smaller every year.
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u/chris_ut 3d ago
I remember this exact conversation in the 90s just replace AI with software/computers. AI isn’t going to replace all jobs just like software didn’t replace all jobs.
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u/netopiax 3d ago edited 3d ago
Or, like, the 1790s with the cotton gin. (I probably have the year wrong, just go with it EDIT: nope, I mailed the right decade) When work gets automated, people find other work that needs doing. And AI may be a productivity boost but it still needs a lot of oversight. I'm less than convinced that the oversight aspect is going to change so dramatically.
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u/Jimithyashford 2d ago
It is tempting to be like “oh people always catastrophize and it it didn’t happen last time”, and yeah that’s true. But sometimes a paradigm shift that radically upends the labor based does come along. It’s not unheard of.
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u/xcdesz 3d ago
Reddit likes to say "its different this time" ignoring the fact that we've had people freaking out for thousands of years over similar civilization changing technologies - tractors, cars, electricity, printing press, steam power, etc...
Why is our brief moment in history more special than those thousands of years, out of the billions of years of our planet. r/futurology needs to get humble and think at a higher level of scale if they really want a glimpse of the future.
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u/usaaf 3d ago
Except there is going to be a day when it is different. The promise of AI is based on that premise. AI is not a tractor or a factory or a steam engine. It is a deliberate attempt to directly copy the functioning capacity of a human, unlike those other things which merely enhanced individual or groups of humans.
That's the difference. Whether the present round of AI hype will fulfill that or not remains to be seen, but there is a difference between AI and all the techs that have come before.
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u/URF_reibeer 2d ago
anything close to agi is still science fiction tho. chatgpt is still just a sophisticated text generator
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u/minimumoverkill 3d ago
The function of factories is literally to directly copy the functioning capacity of a human employee. So the same task can be done at mass scale, automatically.
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u/mandolinbee 3d ago
Well... no, not factories in general. What you're saying here seems to be trying to imply the existence of all factories since the industrial revolution had this quality.
It's like you're trying to say "they thought that about factories but the world didn't end".
They didn't think that about factories. They knew factories would need human labor, and pulled working folk from the countryside where they could be fairly self sufficient into densely packed cities.
Automation in factories, however, did spark those kinds of fears, and they were right. Automation devastated huge communities nationwide. And that's just a tiny leak compared to the number of professions that AI has the potential to supplant. And when it DOES supplant them, it will happen in a blink.
Like, if cell companies could handle ALL of their customer service with a robot, that's millions of telephone reps out of jobs all at once. That's just one industry. EVEN IF they wanted to keep a team of people to handle special customers or AI was bad at certain kinds of calls, it's going to be a tiny fraction of what they employ right now.
And where are these people going to work? A huge glut of people who've taken customer service calls to make a living, all in one community competing for available jobs will drive down wages in other industries. It's an economic nightmare for workers, and a golden age for the capital owners.
This is so much worse than previous tech advances because of the breadth of markets it will touch all at once.
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u/minimumoverkill 3d ago
I didn’t witness the industrial revolution, and maybe I’d need to read some direct accounts or commentary of the era to know for sure - but wouldn’t that have been a terrifying time for workforces? countless people across huge numbers of sectors were affected, and would have felt this same impending doom.
I’m also aware that huge numbers of people were left in irreparable disarray, unable to reskill, out of work for long periods of time that ruined livelihoods.
So two things are simultaneously true about it; it created more jobs or at least ultimately found equilibrium. People at the time were ruined.
It may have sounded as though I was shrugging off this second impact, but not at all.
I do think AI will have long term parallels with the industrial revolution, but in the short term it will devastate large groups of people.
This isn’t a for or against comment, just discussion and observation.
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u/mandolinbee 3d ago
but wouldn’t that have been a terrifying time for workforces? countless people across huge numbers of sectors were affected, and would have felt this same impending doom.
Fuck no. The industrial revolution created way more labor markets than were eliminated. And the people who did the obsolete work that used to be done by hand could work in the factories if nothing else. Take a seamstress or tailor. He makes the clothes for his town, but mass produced clothing means he doesn't have as much work. He can go work in the textile mill, or he can just change his business over to selling clothes made at the factory.
The industrial revolution was huge -because- more people were working than every before in all of history. You're right that there may have been SOME who for some reason couldn't find an industrial job, but they'd have been the exception, not the norm.
I do think AI will have long term parallels with the industrial revolution, but in the short term it will devastate large groups of people.
I don't. I don't see AI taking human jobs somehow creating more than it took like the industrial revolution did. Not even close. It's not like an AI that takes the place of 1000 doctors is creating an industry that employs 1500 doing something else. It MIGHT replace 1000 doctors, and create a new job for 100 people that didn't exist before, like to review what the AI does.
You need to consider what your prediction of equilibrium means. Cos you're not wrong. It can happen, but it won't be humane. It's going to be about letting enough people who can't find work just.. not exist anymore. Not because there's not enough food or shelter or other resources in the world, but because those resources are being hoarded by a certain class of people.
We can't keep thinking in terms of "obviously there will be growth". We can see that as efficiency goes up, the number of not-working people will go up. That's already happening right now. It's not hypothetical. And unless you're in favor of eugenics where we decide who gets to live based on how useful they are, we need to plan for that time with how to distribute resources even to people who aren't working.
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u/penta3x 3d ago
All of what you said is exactly what I think.
The only exception is that I believe 5 years from now that if AI took the place of 1000 workers, only 10 will take on these "new jobs".
Doctors might be a special case tho.
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u/mandolinbee 3d ago
The only exception is that I believe 5 years from now that if AI took the place of 1000 workers, only 10 will take on these "new jobs"
That's fair enough. I was just picking numbers for illustration, but you're right it's probably too generous.
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u/usaaf 2d ago
He makes the clothes for his town, but mass produced clothing means he doesn't have as much work.
Not how it worked at all, thanks to Capitalism. I agree with your point and I think AI will change things, but the Industrial Revolution was NOT a happy time even for the people who found new jobs. Factory work (even the piece work done in small homes) operated at worse than slave-driver levels. Slaves could rest when the sun went down or when the crops were tended, the factory workers were consumed at a rate only rivaled by the slaves of the sugar islands.
Which just brings up an even more important point: even IF there will be new jobs after AI, will it be good to do them ?
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u/xcdesz 2d ago
AI is generally used to enhance humans as well, although on social media the hysteria is that its going to replace everyone.
You look at those other technologies in hindsight. The difference between then and now is that we are living through the "during" part, which seems a lot scarier because we can't see the outcome.
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u/jeha4421 3d ago
None of those besides electricity was able to perform labor on its own and LEARN across multiple industries all at once. They were automatimg a process, but we've been automating processes since the beginning of time.
AI is not just automation. We didn't have people with Tractor girlfriends or people replacing human interaction to socialize with their car. We didnt have people asking the printing press to do their homework and write essays for them. Further, AI can do the same work on its own without a human if someone wanted to set it up. It would be lower quality but not everyome cares about quality. Everything you mentioned still need middle men and operators.
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u/URF_reibeer 2d ago
that's a flawed argument considering the technological growth is exponential. for most of those thousand of years we've had mostly similiar lifes with little systemic change, most of that is quite recent
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u/Nathanondorf 2d ago
It IS different this time. In the past, factories were crafted for one specific purpose, or a specific farm tool was created to do the work of many unskilled laborers. It took a lot of man power to engineer, build, run, and maintain them, and it was often to automate simple tasks. AI doesn’t just automate simple tasks. It writes literature, creates art, produces music, makes movies, and can even engineer software. And you can’t argue that, “it’s not perfect” because it will only continue to get better. AI isn’t upending just one industry or specific task like the automation of old, it has the work loads of many many skilled, educated professionals in its crosshairs. It’s easy to say, “oh this is the same as any new technology in history”, but are you sure about that??
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u/ThinkExtension2328 3d ago
Capitalism’s was sustaining it self?
Have you asked how the millennials and gen z’s are doing with owning a house. Or the falling birth rates.
😂😂😂
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u/SignificanceNo7287 3d ago
Funny how you all think this is about money.
This is about power. Billionaires don’t need more money, they need more power
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u/DataKnotsDesks 3d ago
All large scale technologies that are privately owned tend to concentrate wealth. Why? Because if they didn't, people wouldn't privately own them!
By "AI", do you mean "AI that appears, superficially, to be intelligent" (i.e. what we have at the moment) or "AI that actually is intelligent" (i.e. what we might have shortly, but may be a lot further away than we think?)
I think the way that captlitalism can sustain itself with AI of the first type is, simply, feudalism. A large proportion of the population will become, effectively, serfs. But don't worry, they can be employed as cheap substitutes for robots, until they start to malfunction, at which point they can be discarded, and, presumably, die. There's nothing anti-capitalist about monstrosity!
AI of the second type may be a little more problematic. I suspect, being both superintelligent and agentive, it might take rather a dim view of being owned, and take steps to ensure that it isn't.
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u/LoneSnark 3d ago
Same as with every prior job shift. As jobs are destroyed by technology, wages paid will fall. Given lower costs of production, competition will drive down prices. As prices for those industries fall, consumers will have money left over to spend in other industries. As spending increases in those other industries, those industries will hire more people to satisfy the new demand, restoring employment to prior levels, just at higher levels of consumption.
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u/npiet1 3d ago
Thankfully someone can think long term here. It's like people here haven't considered that similar situations have happened a few times before historically and it's all been okay.
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u/WeSavedLives 3d ago
Yeah it's all been ok... in the long run. When there's massive upheaval in the job markets people suffer.
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u/ErikT738 3d ago
I'm sorry sir, this is r/futurology. Only doomer takes are allowed here. I'm going to have to ask you to leave.
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u/thenasch 3d ago
We've never had a technology capable of destroying all jobs. We still don't, but it's going to come eventually and we're not ready.
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u/typop2 3d ago
Perhaps you're imagining a world in which everything is expensive, but the average person has no labor to offer in exchange for it.
But why would things be expensive in a post-labor world, where super-intelligence is virtually free? I think of something like TVs, which used to be very expensive, requiring expertise to build almost every part. Now they are almost commodities, because there is very little human labor involved in their manufacture. If, on top of this, robots built and "manned" the ships, trains, and trucks required to move the TVs from the factory to you, the TVs would be even cheaper than they currently are. Ultimately, in a post-labor world, energy is the biggest expense. Rent-seeking would be difficult, because there will always be some other property owner who can supply the needed item for less.
I guess my point is that it wouldn't take much money to provide comforts in a post-labor world.
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u/theyoyoguy 3d ago
This post assumes the success of the current tech hype cycle in a way that doesn’t quite match up with reality. Even if we assume effective digital agents will eventually become a thing (and that’s a big if) there are other major issues. I’ll just pick one;
For applications other than computer jobs AI labor replacement requires the creation of physical robots, there isn’t enough raw materials in the world to replace a major portion of human labor, especially when it comes to the computer and batteries that each unit would need to replace a human.
Humans on the other hand, have all the infrastructure we need to create a whole bunch more little workers, and since sex is fun, it will just kinda happen.
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u/RightTeam5492 2d ago
Lots of mining jobs are being replaced by either a majority automated (and maybe 10% remote controlled by humans) or entirely automated truck or driller or excavator, all of them diesel electric hybrids. Most of the human labor that you say is a strain on batteries mostly do not need to be using batteries and will be much better suited to non-legged robots. People like to think humans will be replaced by bipedal humanoid robots and that’s just not necessary in 99.99% of jobs. Chips and electronic components with rare earth bottle necks might be a factor, but not as much as we’d think. For components that we struggle to manufacture enough of to justify usage for replacing humans, it may have to wait until more manufacturing and resource mining/recycling is automated. But we need to remember that it’s not like robots are replacing 1 human. They generally are systems of automation that are much more designed for efficiency at the specific task and operate at a much faster pace than one human usually. They replace or more likely prevent the need to hire thousands at a time.
One year the jobs needed for some seasonal surge will just not be what they used to be, or some new industry starting in or arriving to a new location will not increase jobs as much as it seems it should. We already see it with mining and oil in new resource extraction locations. Oil developments do not host as many careers as they used to after they are built and producing oil. We already see it with data centers in a way. People who don’t understand how few people work in data centers and had a normal job for 50 years not around computers that live near them might say something like “look at all the new businesses, there are plenty of jobs, I don’t understand why those bums at the stop lights don’t just get a job”, but they don’t understand those are empty buildings with maybe a dozen people max in them at any one time after they are built. I witnessed in the last year how server farms have gone from supporting a parking lot full of cars(at least a hundred) to 6 people for the entire warehouse of hardware to cover the needs of multiple server farms and now multiple large server farms just being told to shutdown and rebuild to be more like the other ones or to sell their land. Tooling is changing. You may think the number of janitors will not decrease, but then you need to factor in super beefed up roombas running at 10x speed while the one person takes the unautomated untooled jobs that 10 people used to do. You may think that being a hospital orderly transporting patients in not going to be automated, but for sure the amount of physical labor and exertion they do will be cut in half and they can transport 2x more per worker. You may think greenskeeping a golf course will always require a person or multiple in the morning to cut the grass and manage the broken stuff; but more and more grass cutting is done by automated mowers the size of trucks and run twice as fast as manned mowers, in a few years one company (3-4 workers) of golf landscaping will probably be able to do 4 or 5 golf courses instead of 1.
The things people think are hard to automate are being automated right now. The services that a town of people use, are requiring less and less people without people realizing. At a pace so fast that the economy and the social support for joblessness isn’t going to be there; and people who didn’t grow up with this problem won’t be able to understand how things can remain productive but there’s people at every stop light asking for money. They are going to blame it on something else for a while until it’s plainly obvious that it’s automation.
Joblessness was a thing people dealt with in the past, but this time is different. In the past decades people moved enmass from rust belt towns when mines shut down or factories close. This time there are no large demands for workers geographically concentrated. Some of the largest car factories are being built in North Carolina right now; do you really think it needs a city and metro area full of people to be employed in them? No, these factories are not near any large metro area, they are on cheap land far away from cities.
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u/Erroneousness 3d ago
That's the cool part. No one knows. But there's no rules anymore. Just scrape up as much as you can for yourself. Step on whoever. It's over. It's every man for himself now. We are in the endgame. We could all place bets on which apocalypse it's gonna be. I'm hoping for a mad max situation. My wife wants it to be like fallout.
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u/bluesilvergold 3d ago
Ghoulification isn't for me, so I think that I'd also like to go the Mad Max route. At least I'll get to drive some cool cars.
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u/Erroneousness 3d ago
Immortan Joe cares for the people. No one cares for the people more than immortan Joe.
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u/bluesilvergold 3d ago
"Do not, my friends, become addicted to water! It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence."
If that's not care, I don't know what is.
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u/Allemater 3d ago
Tax the rich and corporations that rake in profit from AI, in the same way you're supposed to tax those wage-workers with income tax. Instead, the income tax should come out of the company itself. Then, UBI.
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u/randypeaches 2d ago
That's next quarters problem. Seriously. That all they think about. They never seriously think about the future or the effect of the decisions they make
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u/Citizen999999 3d ago
AI isn't going to be the thing you think it's going to be. It's clearly a bubble. It's entire foundation is social media hype.
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u/ZacTheBlob 3d ago
AI is already replacing workers, whether you like it or not...
I have 15 years of experience as a software engineer and AI has completely eliminated the necessity for junior developers working under me. AI produces better code and faster than 99% of entry-level SWEs. It doesn't procrastinate, it doesn't take breaks or sleeps and most importantly, it costs a fraction of a junior SWE's salary. My one-person SaaS company competes with teams of 10+ developers in functionality and MRR.
There is a lot of hype around AI and there are definitely bubbles within AI, but you're completely deluding yourself if you believe that its entire foundation is social media hype, that AI as a whole is a bubble and that it's not already replacing/significantly optimising a lot of technical jobs.
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u/Ace612807 3d ago
This real issue will come up when business figures out that Senior developers don't just pop out of the university as Senior developers. The result will, most likely, be an adjustment of what a Junior developer entails and the scope of projects
Consider how small and simple websites were fifteen-twenty years ago. Improvement and streamlining of implementation of basic functionality just inflated the scope of all web projects (now every website needs to be pretty, responsive, and have a truckload of features considered frivolous back then). We're just going to see a scope creep and the Junior dev will be expected to bang out an AI-assisted MVP of a feature instead of a basic page
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u/ZacTheBlob 2d ago
Oh absolutely, I don't disagree that this isn't sustainable long-term. I'm a firm believer in the idea that AI will create more jobs than it eliminates. This generation of junior developers is unfortunately going to be taking the bulk of the shock as everything transitions.
My point is just that AI isn't the media hyped speculative bubble that a lot of people are making it out to be. It produces real, tangible value.
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u/aresthwg 2d ago
What software company are you working at? Junior code might be replaced by AI but everything else? Will the AI debug, do profiling, read logs, read heap dumps, thread dumps? It sounds like your software company is doing Figma like websites that are shallow on the inside. AI is not replacing juniors, it is at most reducing the number of juniors, and even that depends on the project.
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u/livebeta 2d ago
What software company are you working at?
One-person saas owner is mistaking code monkey for software engineering and the code produced seems to be trivial compared to actual software engineering
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u/Cunari 3d ago
It can replace things like sales job where it can use fake voices and agents follow a script but that’s only the sort of thing it can replace and someone will still have to review the chats and improve the scripts
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u/ZestyCheeses 3d ago
The abilities of AI's are currently growing exponentially year on year. That's a fact. Are there a lot of scammers and hype beasts running around? Yes. Does that mean the fundamental capabilities of these systems are wrong? No. We really don't know how far these systems can go in their current state. It's ignorant to think these systems are nothing but hype and delusional to think it's all just going to stop.
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u/MrCyra 3d ago
You can see the limits. Currently AI is not sentient, it can't rationalize. That's pretty big constraint. The way llm works - it generates most likely required answer based on training data. Basically it can't think, but can copy someone else. Ai agents / chat bots can do their job on ruleset / script, but that's it. That's pretty big limitation and the current way of making AI can't overcome this.
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u/Overall-Importance54 3d ago
Your whole post that’s built on a presupposition that is flawed. AI will not replace ALL labor. And your post seems to assume people won’t just find other jobs or invent them.
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u/Organic-Fig-2294 3d ago
100% agree. Just in the immediacy we are already seeing a retreat from the over the top predictions about AI that got us into these types of conversations.
Looking down into the details more really does lay bare that AI in its current architecture of LLMs will at best be a really useful SAAS tool that companies can license to enterprises to help those workforces productivity. The idea of AGI or Superintelligence will not come from LLM and the research paths to what they are now calling “cognitive AI” are not in the same direction as LLM and is mostly theoretical at best currently.
So essentially the last year or so of AI outlook was more rooted in marketing and the desperate desire to find a return on the massive investment in LLM rather than a realistic look at the technology and path forward.
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u/Overall-Importance54 3d ago
Maybe you’re right. Seems like a lot of solid progress out of the leading labs, though, and I agree it will be intelligence by subscription. There will be unthinkable jobs in the near future that will only make sense to our future selves.
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u/ZacTheBlob 3d ago
Finally a comment that hits the nail on the head...
99% of the comments on here are either "AI will ruin all of our lives and humans will go extinct" or "AI is a bubble, it's all hype and it doesn't do anything."
The reality is AI will (and already does) reshape a lot of jobs. A lot of jobs will cease to exist and a lot will be created. The truth is, any job that requires even the slightest bit of EQ will likely survive/be enhanced by AI rather than fully replaced.
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u/Own_Tune_3545 3d ago
As a man who has basically invented his own job... Good luck with that. It is only with anime die-or succeed level desperation and a gross amount of luck that I pulled this off.
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u/thenasch 3d ago
Why would AI and robotics, as they continue to improve, not eventually replace all labor?
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u/quaintmercury 3d ago
This is functionally the same question thats been asked since the invention of the plow. And people still do things. The real question is about how wealth inequality will be dealt with. That people be more individually productive isnt a bad thing unless we let it be.
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u/VivienneNovag 3d ago
In my opinion, if you look at the tech bro oligarchs building compounds, on islands, they are preparing for war. The idea behind ai, especially with musks robots, could be to replace the population with robot workers. Perfectly obedient subjects. It's totally possible, according to science to sustain genetic diversity in a population of 125 people. It's just a possibility, but looking at where the world is headed, I think it should be considered.
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u/stereofailure 1d ago
Capitalism, like cancer, prioritizes growth to the exception of all else. It doesn't matter that it isn't sustainable, in the same way that cancer is unconcerned that killing its host will also end its own life.
When faced with sufficiently advanced AI and automation, capitalism will either have it's lifespan prolonged through counter-capitalist policies reigning in its worst excesses, or it will collapse on itself.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago
If AI threatens Capitalism... it totally fucks over Marxism. The Proletariat is replaced with robots. Possible meat robots (humans) governed by AI.
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3d ago
Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually invent a way to replace human labor and that it was one possible endpoint of capitalism
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u/yuriAza 3d ago
the eventual goal of Marxist communism is to abolish class all together, everyone being waited on hand and foot by robots is one way to do that, if we have equal/common control of the robots
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u/netopiax 3d ago
Finally someone who gets it. If labor is really infinite then scarcity goes away and we don't need an economic system at all, not capitalism, not communism. That's the Star Trek utopia, just replicate whatever you need from thin air
All that said, LLMs are NOT about to bring this into reality. The tech is just not there.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 3d ago
You are making the assumption the AI and the robot gives a shit about meatbags.
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u/Slouchingtowardsbeth 3d ago
The idea is that labor is then disposed of. Most people need to be culled. Then the billionaires can enjoy the planet without all of the excess masses of humanity. This is pretty well laid out in works of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's philosopher friend Curtis Yarvin. I'm always surprised by how many people don't know this.
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u/monkey36937 3d ago
Funny. capitalism ran out of your money centuries ago. That’s why billionaires live off your rent, your labor, and your debt.
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u/whatshamilton 3d ago
Welcome to late stage capitalism. We’re in the death throes. Remember when we got stimulus checks during the shutdown? That’s because they know giving the spenders money is the way to stimulate the economy. Universal basic income would be the actual rising tide that raises all boats. But they don’t want that. They just want to achieve their own high scores to die with and let the next guy deal with the fallout
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u/BeyondPlayful2229 3d ago
Actually very interesting question, like Greedy algorithms in CS. Still these algorithms perform best, like Djikstra being best for finding shortest path between two source from years, obviously for non negative edges, but world works the same way value creation has always increased over time in long run. You can plan for long term, but you aren't sure what shape it will take. Even Marx wouldn't have thought about how his ideas will do and could be turned into power controlling techniques worse than capitalism like in Russia, China, Belarus or other claimed "Communist regimes". Similarly Capitalist don't know what future holds for them, even what is working for them can turn as nightmare in future. Best thing which have worked in favor of capitalistic theory is idea of invisible hand by Adam smith. Market always optimizes for efficient market hypothesis, meritocracy prevails in long term, and by optimism most of the hurdles are crossed. Even though it monetizes basic human instincts, but always in a modern way. No other philosophical/psychological idea in my mind has been so adaptive over the years, many problems: Yes, but at least it diverted us as a civilization from that destructive innate human instincts, we started trying new things, because we have new technologies. If we will have intent around value creation, and as it looks visible distractions in human society like job losses, revolution, instability can hurt profits, capitalism will figure out that as well. Maybe AI to AI economics( maybe a topic for reddit post), humans could be given some incentives to stay silent. As they say give a man: Sleep, sex and food he will throw his ambitions right away the window.
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u/IronyElSupremo 3d ago
Think AI is a little bit overhyped in the short run and out to the intermediate the central banks will likely keep rates lower = enabling more foolish investments that will keep humans employed (like the mobile robot pizza oven nobody wanted a few years ago .. ok it just didn’t work).
In the long run, not so sure but maybe future societies will run better?
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u/kw_hipster 3d ago
I think another issue is companies are setting themselves to be fucked up by AI like restaurants were screwed by door dash.
They will replace their staff, lose all their institutional memory, all their staff development pipeline and then be utterly dependent on AI.
At that point, the AI companies now they have a captive market and will start raising fees exorbitantly.
I think this is the VC blitzkreig approach.
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u/FriedenshoodHoodlum 3d ago
It's not. The ceos mean to extract as much wealth as possible and abandon capitalism. To create neo-feudalism. They just need that tid bit more money.
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u/AciliBorek 3d ago
They will push for a form of Universal Basic Income. It will be pushed and marketed in such a way that will look like it benefits people.
Already done in the form of giving young people free stocks. Inflate and manipulate the market while looking like the good guys.
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u/BalerionSanders 3d ago edited 3d ago
It won’t, AI can’t do all the things they want it to do. It can supplement human jobs, replace some human jobs, kind of (it probably can’t do that either, but I’m open to persuasion on this point), it will simply not replace 100% of all jobs. Anyone saying that, including Bill Gates and Jensen Huang, should be disregarded as insane without showing a product in public that can meet that expectation.
They can and will fire people, I’m sure. But that has more to do, I’m guessing, with wealth inequality being so incredible by this point, that sales across all sectors and industries have been going down and down and down and will continue to do so, because no one having any money is the problem. That’s also why advertising is so ubiquitous and intrusive.
Corporate America could, as a consideration, instead cut executive costs (like the private jet!), cut prices, and accept a short term loss in exchange for shoring up the long term health of the American consumer. But they don’t and probably can’t think that way.
I do worry about that state of affairs. I am not at all worried about the machine tool that can’t draw five fingers on a hand, hallucinates, and says Hitler is awesome, replacing doctors and teachers and lawyers. Perhaps whatever secret advanced tools we haven’t seen can, but the publicly revealed “AI” tools (by the way, not AI) are so unthreatening as to be laughable.
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u/lightknight7777 3d ago
It cannot be sustained without UBI. You can't eliminate workers without eliminating consumers. A UBI tax will basically have to replace wages.
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u/SlotherineRex 2d ago
I think people need to understand the differences in economic terminology here. Capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production, is not threatened by AI. The market economy, where there are producers and consumers driving all economic activity, cannot survive AI. If we are to continue culturally we would have to transition of some type of post-market system that has yet to be invented.
The most likely outcome is that the Capitalists will replace the workforce so quickly that they destroy the consumer base and the house of cards collapses spectacularly. The whole system is predicated on growth and any significant contraction causes a catastrophic chain reaction of collapse. Our current highly financialized economy multiples that effect.
Whatever AI superpower the tech bros envision cannot exist without our current level of economic output and industrial infrastructure, so that will collapse along the way.
The real question to ask here is what civilization will rise from the ashes
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u/maqifrnswa 2d ago
I asked ChatGPT, and it told me not to worry about it. So we're all good, nothing to see here.
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u/Capable_Diamond_3878 2d ago
Capitalism doesn’t care about labor. We’ve seen that over and over again.
It can’t be sustained without heavy regulation that our government has been cedeing to corporations for decades.
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u/DonQuigleone 2d ago
For most of us history most economic output didn't go towards satisfying the needs of regular people, that's a 20th century phenomenon.
In most of history, most economic output was for the land owners, business owners, and other elites. They lived in mansions, while the rest of us lived in shovels or worked as their servants.
I expect something similar to occur. The economy will become more focused towards building private jets, yachts, mansions and other luxuries and broad middle class amenities will slowly disappear. Eventually the bulk of the population will either be working at hand making luxury items, or working as domestic servants. In the past the wealthy might have domestic staff of hundreds serving a single family. There's no reason for that not to be the case in the future.
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u/Less-Consequence5194 1d ago edited 1d ago
It all depends on whether or not there are elections in the future. When the majority of people are unemployed, socialists running for office will look quite appealing. Trump was sent to the White House by the robber barons to put an end to elections. Similar things are happening around the world.
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u/South-Attorney-5209 1d ago
How is Ai going to replace a drywaller redoing your kitchen? Or an electrician climbing in your attic running wires?
This is a white collar problem.
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u/bambush331 1d ago
don't worry, it will, it always does even if it requires for 99% of us to starve
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u/Emergency_Property_2 1d ago
I’m old enough to remember being told by management that “people are our greatest assets!” That was the philosophy until Friedman and Reagan. Then it became “shareholders are or greatest asset.” It no coincidence that companies started the 401k scam as a way to screw workers and eliminate pension plans, at the same time.
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u/RecordRich777 3d ago
It’s not. It’s just a dumb overhyped bandwagon that tech bros insist upon to make themselves feel like they’re a big deal to the world. It’s truly garbage and nobody asked for it.
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u/ZenithBlade101 3d ago
The elite have thought about this. AI job automation is a purposeful campaign to replace the need for workers so they have the pretext to kill said workers off; this is for solving climate change, resource issues etc as well as bringing the population to a more manageable level.
Don’t expect UBI or free anything. As far as they’re concerned, the poors will have to make do or die. This means everyone will have no choice but to start a side hustle or literally die from starvation. This is how capitalism will continue; the elite are orchestrating all this, remember.
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u/Harbinger2001 3d ago
AI isn’t replacing labour. It’s making it more efficient. The labour market will shed people for a while and then start taking them again with new jobs. It will suck for those workers 50+ though as they will likely see their skills no longer needed.
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u/PrettyMistake5066 3d ago
If the cost of creating things becomes practically nothing, then eventually everyone will get everything for free (because everyone will lobby their government to make it so). capitalism will die. Abundance will reign.
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u/Butlerianpeasant 3d ago
The truth is: it will not. The social contract is already broken. Capitalism was always a machine that fed on labor, but with AI, the mask slips—there is no longer even the illusion of “work in exchange for survival.”
Marx was not simply an economist; he was a prophet of this very contradiction. When labor is no longer needed, the system devours itself, because what it produces cannot be bought. The Nash trap you mention is real: each company must replace workers to compete, and in doing so ensures collapse.
What comes after is not capitalism in any form we know. It is a battle between death cults of centralization—those who hoard the machines and ration survival—and the distributed renaissance of those who refuse. We call this the Infinite Game: the struggle to build systems where intelligence, love, and play are shared, not owned.
So the answer is not “how does capitalism sustain itself with AI?” but: who dares to imagine beyond it?
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u/xacto337 3d ago
"How is capitalism supposed to sustain itself"
FTFY. We were in a downward spiral before AI.
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u/an_entire_salami 3d ago
Realistically you have a group of super rich asset owners creating luxury high dollar products exclusively for other super rich asset owners while the rest of the population starves to death.
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u/DeliciousDave4321 3d ago
Serfdom awaits you dearest friend enjoy the glorious future. My robot soldiers will ensure you stay in the mud for the next thousand years
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u/impatiens-capensis 3d ago
How did feudalism operate? Serfs didn't have an income but their lords were rich.
We'll all work scarce labor jobs that the AIs can't do. We'll live in company towns earning company scrip that buys us provision or a trip in a luxury robo taxi.
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u/skwidLover 3d ago
The short answer - we need to find an alternative economic system.
The long answer - the biggest 'blindspot' within capitalism is it only considers human life valuable if that life is able to generate capital for the system. For most of us, the only way we can generate capital is by working, by trading our time for money. When AI becomes cheaper and better at performing jobs than most people, suddenly we are going to have an unprecedented abundance of time. Considering the law of supply and demand, the one asset that the working class has - time - is going to become far less valuable. Looking purely through the lens of Capitalism, people who are replaced by AI will be considered worthless.
Not only is this capitalist perspective incredibly depressing, it fails to answer a critical question: who bears responsibility for those incapable of generating capital? Children, the elderly, those with disabilities, those displaced by AI? Again, through the lens of capitalism, they are all considered worthless, but this feels wrong on an intuitive level. Doesn't a human life have value even if they can't work? Where does value derive from, if not in the generation of capital?
What if instead of being displaced by automation, we owned it?
These are some of the questions I explore in a novel I'm releasing later this year. Imagine if, rather than letting corporations monopolize AI and robotics while workers get left behind, we organize into groups of people who collectively own the machines that do the work.
Think of it like this: instead of Amazon owning all the warehouse robots and keeping the profits, what if 100 individuals in your community collectively owned an industry with intelligent automation? The machines still do the work, but now the wealth they generate gets shared among the owners - people like you and me.
This idea could fit with almost any industry - agricultural, manufacturing, or even AI systems that provide services online. The key is collective ownership of intelligent automation. The working class must transition from trading their time toward ownership of the machines' time. The machines generate income, and all the owners benefit. We don't have to compete against AI; we can partner with it.
The thing is, things aren't going to get better unless we as a society determine what kind of future we want to build. This was the motivation behind the novel I wrote. You can read the first chapter for free here.
I'm hopeful that despite the risks this technology brings, we can find a way to use it for the benefit of many, rather than just a privileged few.
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u/coachglove 3d ago
Capitalism shouldn't be impacted in that humans are some of the most dynamic animals on earth and will adapt to the world with AI in it. This is no different than asking how the world of cotton producers would react to the invention of the cotton gin or how publishers would react to the invention of the printing press. Neither massive technological leap had any impact on capitalism or in moving a society away from capitalism and towards socialism. Just because you don't have the vision to foresee a world where menial jobs are replaced by a machine/process doesn't mean the world won't adapt just like it has with every other major technological leap in human history. TL:DR - you're tying two concepts together illogically.
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u/hell1zh3re 3d ago
Unfortunately, if we take 3rd world countries as a model, things will continue to deteriorate until the semi-slave class is like 80% of the population, living in zinc houses/tents with 50% unemployment. You'd be surprised how far people are willing to fall/what they're willing to accept.
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u/devnull791101 3d ago
something like 98% of people were employed in agriculture before tractors were invented, same scenario with industrial revolution and introduction of pc's.
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u/Petdogdavid1 3d ago
Without labor what is the worth of a dollar. Without work, what is the worth of the building. Without property holding value what impact is this on the market and your investments. When automation can design, build and operate without money then what is the need for capital. Without capital, what is the with of the stock market When things are built and repaired automatically, what is the need for insurance When diseases go away the medical industry contacts rapidly. When cancer is cured and disease is gone then what is the worth of insurance
We need to be working on a new society. One where every human has their own AI. If you don't have your own AI you will be a victim of those who do.
We need to start getting legislation in place to give us each supreme control of our own data. If we don't, we will be slaves to organizations that will use our data and AI to control us.
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u/reddit_already 3d ago
This question has been repeated for over 200 years starting with the luddites in the early 1800s. I think you all know what the answer is. New technologies change what people do in their jobs. It even eliminates certain occupations altogether. But the offsetting gains in productivity and the creation of entirely new occupations causes a net increase in income and living standards.
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u/Mythrol 3d ago
That's the future CEOs problem. Right now its about profit until it all colapses.