> Who is the customer when the customer is the thing you’ve eliminated?

Seeing how US economy is K-shaped, the answer is the rich. Assuming of course the service is right.

agree with many points in here.

one thing it missses, birth rates. soon there will be no humans left to participate on either side of the economy.

This article reminds me of the issues raised in Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis

We need to consider that by automating and replacing the work of people who have an income, those people stop consuming and no longer generate profit for capitalism.

How is this sustainable?

If human labor becomes 'uneconomical', what will happen? Obviously a great deal of social upheaval.

But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises: abundance.

Imagine if AI suddenly was in more demand than human labor, simply due to the price. Excellent quality output for cheaper than somebody with a degree. What would be the second order effects?

Human labor, being in less demand, would have to lower its price to compete. This is the death of the middle (and lower) class future we fear. But ironically the price of goods and services would lower as everything, even complex engineering, medicine, construction becomes affordable. With the right policy, human labor becomes cheap again. Maybe even competitive to machine labor in some niches. Improvements in machine labor could have a compounding effect on how affordable it can be for humans to survive.

So where's the gap here? Well, most wager earner's income worldwide goes towards housing. Food and water and medicine can be bottlenecked causing price gouging. Monopolies and lack of competition in the market can raise the prices of things until everybody is spending all of their disposable income on necessities. I think the price of human labor is currently very high (in the developed world) due rentier capitalism.

The transition will upend much of our economic investments and probably involve a great deal of human suffering until nations figure out the right mix of solutions.

The former head of sales at Google once told me “we only focus on growth because you can only cut down 100% but you can grow 10,000%.”

This always stuck with me and baffles me why we aren’t listening to that now.

There is this bizarre math now where it’s for every person we cut the remaining with 5-10x with AI but I’m not seeing anything like that yet at all.

You can have all the GPUs in the world, and all the AI datacenters in the world, but when we are barreling towards a global energy crisis (first Russia/Ukraine, then the Strait of Hormuz shutdown, and in a few decades we will run out of fossil fuels altogether), what are all of those GPUs and AI datacenters going to do without energy? Nothing. I say this because I think this will have a far larger effect on the economy than anything else this article is talking about (AI replacing labor, a possible AI bubble crash, etc.)

>article complaining about AI destroying the economy >includes 2 dozen AI generated images in the article

What's the endgame here? Like the group of psychopath capitalists own everything, automate everything, and devise ways to separate themselves from or un-alives the remainder of the population and live, trade, and war amongst themselves with their armies of robots?

Edit: Also this article has so many AI-generated images. I hate that I can't tell if the words themselves are AI-generated or not as well.

Fully automated luxury communism etc etc.

It's not diseconomic, but it obviates a lot of constraints that required a person to manage a coordination problem, and those were a lot of jobs. Keynesian ideas about employment and GDP are just having an apocalypse. Like someone replaced the hole diggers and fillers with a conveyor belt and I would guess Keynes critics would have some predictive power here.

A couple developers can collaborate, but several need someone to specialize in coordination to yield additional value from more workers. Whether you call it management or orchestration, the need emerges at each threshold of additional complexity.

When AI collapses the productivity of 10 people into one, that's the disruption. The best AI user is going to suck all the opportunity out of the room for the others, and that's when layoffs happen. However, this assumes a fixed pie of opportunity. That's the real problem. As though there were only so much dirt to shovel.

FAANGs are old/mature and don't have exponential growth in front of them anymore, where opportunity within them is mainly about optimizing themselves but not growing in radical new directions. AI will indeed eat those optimization workforces alive. They resemble professions because law firms and doctors offices aren't growing either. They're mostly solving internal optimization problems, not finding net new growth opportunities.

The real effect is AI radically polarizing the difference between growing and dying in an org, where any firm that isn't growing fast enough will have its fixed opportunity pie collapse as AI disrupts this regulated oxygen supply. Whereas, growing firms without ceilings on the opportunity to deliver value will use AI to grow to the opportunity available.

Professionals can do fine if they re-orient themselves to new growth with different unit pricing, but yes, anything large and slow moving is probably going to get eaten.