The AI tool providers need companies and customers to pay for the tools and automation. If all the white collar jobs in the Western world are replaced by AI or AI generated SAAS products, some 60% percent the workforce suddenly won't have jobs. If such a large percentage of the workforce has no income through employment, who will be able to pay for the services from SAAS providers and thus ultimately the AI providers?

The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.

The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.

So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.

Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.

There will always be jobs for private security, firefighters, and utility repairmen to protect / restore the data centers when people inevitably attack them.

There will be a period of rapid change. If we are lucky, the political class will see and adjust policy quickly. Otherwise we will see US urban areas gutted like the Rust Belt was after NAFTA / WTO. They are making the same mistakes but in a different industry.

Google will definitely lose. Llms supplants search. But not the old document search which they stopped doing long ago.

Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype.

AI companies are in trouble.

I guess if they are wrong the world economy crashes and burn again, because they wasted all these shiny dollars on infra build out. It's lose lose.

A few percent of your net worth, when you're sitting on top of a pile of gold like a dragon on a yacht is one thing, but when you're a retiree, and you're on a fixed income, living off the proceeds from an annuity and a reverse mortgage, and inflation in all its forms is eating into the plan you had, and you don't have any backup, yes there will be consequences!

> Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.

the entire US economy rides on this now so it’ll be more than few people and a lot more than few percent.

Initially I assumed that when the bubble burst, some VCs would go bust, Oracle would go bust, a few hyperscalers would take a significant haircut but carry on, and life would pretty much go on. However there's now sufficient dodgy AI-related debt making its way onto the debt markets that the bubble burst could be a lot messier, and it may be more than a few percent.

LOL.

Robotics isn't even 1% of the way to replacing anything.

Consider why every neat demo is a backflip and not washing the dishes or laying bricks or something.

One things for sure I won't be buying any SaaS, streaming, or ordering from Amazon if I have no future prospects for work. I already stopped most of my subscriptions because of a layoff unrelated to AI.

We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.

This feels like the same mechanism for climate change. The actors dont care since they're not completely responsible for that outcome and benefit from ignoring it

Automation tax solves all the problems? Seriously? The tax would go to retraining programs, according to the linked paper, so that workers can be reabsorbed into the workforce. Undiscussed conditio sine qua non: the economy has room for additional workforce, the government - as the distributor of said tax - has implemented sufficient legislation into social networks to ensure the tax goes to these programs and not another pointless war or subsidies for agriculture or tax relief for the rich.

This paper proposes a solution for which the framework/base is missing.

No country would want them.

If you have worked in Silicon Valley you know that Bangalore and Shenzhen came here ;)

In all seriousness, the silicon is still designed in Silicon Valley but maybe you don't hear about that as much? Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, AMD, Nvidia, etc. all have a huge presence there still.

There's a lot of flaws with their fantasy world, that's not even the most prominent one.