That's not the scary part. The scary part is the intelligence at scale that could be available to the average employer. Lots of us like to LARP that we're capitalists, but very few of us are. There's zero ideological or cultural framework in place to prioritize the well being of the general population over the profits of some capitalists.
AI, especially accelerating AI, is bad news for anyone who needs to work for a living. It's not going to lead to a Star Trek fantasy. It means an eventual phase change for the economy that consigns us (and most consumer product companies) to wither and fade away.
How would that work? If there are no consumers then why even bother producing? If the cost of labor and capital trends towards zero then the natural consequence is incredible deflation. If the producers refuse to lower their prices then they either don’t participate in the market (which also means their production is pointless) or ensure some other way that the consumers can buy their products.
Our society isn’t really geared for handling double digit deflation so something does need to change if we really are accelerating exponentially.
Whim and ego. I think the advanced economy will shift to supporting trillionaires doing things like "DIY home improvement" for themselves. They'll own a bunch of automated resources (power generation, mining, manufacturing, AI engineers), and use it to do whatever they want. Build pyramids on the moon, while the now economically-useless former middle-class laborers shiver in the cold? Sure, why not?
> If the producers refuse to lower their prices then they either don’t participate in the market (which also means their production is pointless) or ensure some other way that the consumers can buy their products.
Imagine you're a billionaire with a data centre and golden horde of androids.
You're the consumer, the robots make stuff for you; they don't make stuff for anyone else, just you, in the same way and for the same reason that your power tools and kitchen appliances don't commute to work — you could, if you wanted, lend them to people, just like those other appliances, but you'd have to actually choose to, it wouldn't be a natural consequence of the free market.
Their production is, indeed, pointless. This doesn't help anyone else eat. The moment anyone can afford to move from "have not" to "have", they drop out of the demand market for everyone else's economic output.
I don't know how big the impact of dropping out would be: the right says "trickle down economics" is good and this would be the exact opposite of that; while the left criticism's of trickle-down economics is that in practice the super-rich already have so much stuff that making them richer doesn't enrich anyone else who might service them, so if the right is correct then this is bad but if the left is correct then this makes very little difference.
Unfortunately, "nobody knows" is a great way to get a market panic all by itself.
I get a lot of "IA will allow us to create SaaS in a weekend" and "IA will take engineers jobs", which I think they both may be true. But a lot of SaaS surive because engineers pay for them -- if engineer don't exist anymore, a lot of SaaS won't either. If you eat your potential customers, creating quick SaaS doesn't make sense anymore (yeah, there are exceptions, etc., I know).
A lot of those will probably go under, too. I think a lot of people are in for a rude awakening.
The only people our society and economy really values are the elite with ownership and control, and the people who get to eat and have comfort are those who provide things that are directly or indirectly valuable to that elite. AI will enable a game of musical chairs, with economic participants iteratively eliminated as the technology advances, until there are only a few left controlling vast resources and capabilities, to be harnessed for personal whims. The rest of us will be like rats in a city, scraping by on the margins, unwanted, out of sight, subsisting on scraps, perhaps subject to "pest control" regimes.
This isn’t true. The biggest companies are all rich because they cater to the massive US middle class. That’s where the big money is at.
It is true, but I can see why you'd be confused. Let me ask you this: if members of the "the massive US middle class" can be replaced with automation, are those companies going 1) to keep paying those workers to support the middle-class demand which made them rich, or are they going to 2) fire them so more money can be shoveled up to the shareholders?
The answer is obviously #2, which has been proven time and again (e.g. how we came to have "the Rust Belt").
> That’s where the big money is at
Now, but not necessarily in the future. I think AI (if it doesn't hit a wall) will change that, maybe not instantaneously, but over time.
Plenty of profit was made off feudalism, and technofeudalism has all the tools of modern technology at its disposal. If things go in that direction, they will have an unlimited supply of serfs desperate for whatever human work/livelihood is left.
If AI lives up to the hype, that will become possible.
> If all that remains of the economy consists of a few datacenters talking to each other, how can the ruling class profit off that?
I don't think it would be that. There'd also be power generation, manufacturing, mining, and construction, etc.; but all extremely automated. If you get to truly extreme levels of wealth concentration, things would shift out of our capitalist market system model, and concepts like "profit" would become anachronisms.
It actually might kinda look like the "economy" of Starcraft: you gather resources, decide what to build with them, and order it all around according to your whim. There will be a handful of guys playing, and everyone else will be a NPC.
We're racing up a hill at an ever-increasing speed, and we don't know what's on the other side. Maybe 80% chance that it's either nothing or "simply" a technological revolution.
