Posted by WillDaSilva 1 hour ago
Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?
In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.
US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?
If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts.
The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock, and AI models that will do anything a human office worker can do for less money. Now, they don't know how to build either yet. But they'll spend every last dollar on the planet trying.
Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand.
IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services.
If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.
If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you:
a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders?
Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.
The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more.
That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage the 10 agents as well as the SWE? Of course you could say the SWE can now manage 10 agents who each manage 10 agents so he's even more valuable, but that has to break down eventually. You don't need 1,000 SWEs each managing 10,000 agents - you hit a bottleneck in the ability to give them work fast enough (even if you need the SWE at the top at all).
I think it's easier to think of from the perspective of blue collar labor. It's further out there time-wise, but let's assume we get a humanoid robot that can do any labor a human can do. It costs $25,000 and maybe a couple grand a year to operate. Works 20 hours a day when it's not charging.
The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots - there's already a GC doing that, and you can't scale building nearly the way you can scale writing code because of physical constraints. When the robot I've described exists, a huge swathe of the population is going to be unemployed. There's no competitor to hire them because the competitors just get robots too.
Some of them will. You've slashed construction labor cost to 5% of what it was before. With that and a similar reduction throughout the supply chain means we're going to start building a lot more stuff.
>Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...
Then again, as long as there is more demand and there's a limited supply of compute you can still continue to hire people as well. If we assume that the market has infinite demand for whatever AI + humans can produce together both will have jobs.
If demand is limited and compute is plentiful it should make sense for a company to try to have AI do as much of the work as possible.
If only someone wrote an entire article about this, huh.
Oh well. I guess we'll never know.
/s
If that stays true for the long term, then it seems to me there is a good chance the wealth built with AI will transfer to those nations that still have hard military power, who can fight and win wars.
For example, China will just copy the AI, not have to pay all the R&D costs, undercut all these American AI companies on price, and take most of the global AI market and long term wealth. And there is nothing American AI companies can do to stop them because America cannot fight and win a war against China.
not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem
most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
we can do better than this
No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.
The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed. 2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
"they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.
Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?
Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.
Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.
Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.
Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.
That's the one we live in though, so I guess that seems fair
I do.
People usually need to have a purpose, but it doesn't need to be a job.
But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.
In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't.
40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.
The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop.
Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value.
It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.
I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed.
This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.
Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined).
We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.
From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.
Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.
What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic path I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income.
And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.
Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.
Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
I'd say no. The rich won't buy millions of food items or works of fiction or go to every service available in real life.
So, many of those companies won't remain viable unless there's some alternative way for people to spend money. Lots of people who see themselves at the top will end up out of a job, or watch their businesses crash down.
I will say that the fact these societies are (at least for now) still democracies makes the future these tech moguls want less certain for them though. Feels like if there's enough pain from unemployment and declining living standards, someone will run on that and win, whether those in power like it or not. The US may have some issues there, but a lot of the world has seen parties outside the mainstream grow in popularity, including some on the more leftward side of the political spectrum.
I have a solution for that. Let's use AI to replace all these corporations who just lost their big moats. Conveniently, they just laid off a bunch of people with all the critical know-how and I bet they are very willing to just give it up out of spite.
Sure, if you assume that they've used their immense wealth to entrench themselves by paying for quality labor. If you take note of the myriad less-competitive ways they've ensured dominance and guaranteed profits rather than re-investing in their products or services then you will see that you have a large moat to cross yet.
I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
I guess if global population drops by 80-90℅ you suddenly get a "sustainable" economy, as everything is repriced the economy of scale needs a much smaller scale.
(Not speculating this is a plan, just a thought that occurred to me when reading about horses example)
Errr pretty sure that was Google?
If you want to learn, go trace how deep learning was funded. It started off with USPS.
Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.
Lastly, OpenAI and Anthropic or any other frontier labs needs to be nationalized because they become a public utility and the profits of automation goes to fund infrastructure or grand projects via government.
We do not need to do menial work anymore and AI is helping us with it, what we can do exploratory work, and we need a visionary to get this rolling.
There was a certain other undertaking in those years that went a little beyond infrastructure.
People quite often lose the plot that "government" is "collective will". Governments will only do this if their constituents want them to. If the constituents would rather spend those recourses on free VR for every household and gatorade from drinking fountains, then that's all we're getting.
For some companies yeah, but this is why companies are switching to consumption based pricing - so they can charge AI. So many companies will be fine - both their labor and customers could become AI.
In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?
That scenario is not really any different from having a technology advanced country (like the US) alongside some underdeveloped nation. The US could, in theory, close its borders and produce everything it needs itself, and leave said underdeveloped nation without the benefits of, for example, Netflix, Nike & Nvidia.
But it won’t, it’s not economically efficient. Economic theory (of comparative advantage) tells us that there’s always something that the less developed world can produce relatively cheaply, in exchange for sneakers, streaming services, and G-force Now subscriptions.
Well ya, if you don't need labor, why keep 8 billion laborers around polluting your planet?
I'd argue the only companies to survive will be the ones with either a human input or a human output. Everything else is effectively worthless now.
Even for AI, it's probably better off paying another AI that is specializing in something and done all the work rather then reimplementing everything from the ground up.
The whole economy would be whatever AI/robots need: compute, energy, raw materials, software, data, etc.
All those Greed is Good people are going to look kind of silly when a hand full of greedy people fight over everything and leave the rest of us for dead.