Absolutely 💯 this!!🤦♀️
How are the rich going to continue to make money if we can't afford to buy anything else but rent & food . Your income is based on us consuming your products. Idiots.😒
They will use the robots for two purposes, to make the things they need, and to fight of the starving hoards and their guillotines. At that point, who needs money?
I take your point, but there are robots (e.g. welding cobots) that improve ergonomics for workers rather than replace human labor - same bots are endorsed by Unions.
AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed Ford. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”
I think the main problem with many business leaders is a lack of empathy and ethics, not a lack of intelligence. Although, I have to admit that MBA types tend to be a bit thick.
You see it. First they use robots, replacing more and more people. Replace others with ai. Income goes down and down and down. But then the corps have to give up because there's nobody to buy their stuff. We're left to fend for ourselves or else build up a new kind of economy.
Those planning the dystopian future, like Peter Thiel and his lackeys, e.g. Musk, are not really doing long term thinking other than doom prepping, which clears up the whole thing.They plan to ride out the apocalypse in air-conditioned comfort, surrounded by private armies while the rest of us die.
They've been doing long term thinking for about a century now, and really kicked it into high gear with citizens united. This didn't just start by accident in 2016. Dems are the ones acting like an election every four years is the only goal.
Until those 'private armies' turn on them and steal all of their amassed supplies because those rich dudes wouldn't be able to defend themselves and nobody would be there to save them.
They won’t need us at that point. They’ll have their slave labor that won’t fight back and they’ll just let us all die by doing what they are doing right now with healthcare and industrial regulations.
Yes, that is essentially what happened in the industrial revolution. Machines produced much more. Ordinary people benefited a lot (not as much as the rich). An average person today is incomparably better off than 200 years ago. AI has the potential for a giant leap forward (or back).
Please take a moment and think this through. You are right that if people cannot buy things the economy will collapse. So there will have to be a universal basic income. Even Elon Musk recognises UBI will be needed and has been saying so for years.
They might really do that, just to attempt to simulate a functioning economic system, I don’t doubt it at all
Meanwhile me and many others are in huts in the woods growing potatoes, foraging for berries, gathering wood for winter, hoping a billionaire doesn’t want a hotel right there
Here’s the thing tho: they *can’t* make robots that replace workers. You know how we know? Because they would replace everyone immediately. A robot that does what a worker does is SO irresistibly valuable, they’d collapse the economy to do it
The mistake people make when thinking about this is treating the corporations as a monolith. None of them even fully control their own market. If McDonalds automates, it doesn’t guarantee all fast food gets automated. THATS how they think about this:
What their competitors do isn’t their problem; what other sectors do isnt their problem. And even in a worst case where every corp gains access to automation solutions, some sectors will change faster than others. Fallout will be uneven. It could be decades before the consequences catch up with us.
It's the same tragedy-of-the-commons that causes restaurants to fight tooth-and-nail against minimum wage increases, despite the fact that the #1 thing people do with more disposable income is eat out more.
Comments
#UniversalBasicIncome
lest the culling commence
But now I think automation needs to be a public good to subsidize universal income.
They dream of a world where they're free from the tyranny of labor, but they've got no plan for what to do when they've starved all their consumers.
How are the rich going to continue to make money if we can't afford to buy anything else but rent & food . Your income is based on us consuming your products. Idiots.😒
They aren't called robots though.
They are called stupid humans.
great SF story from 1954
Eat
Work
Buy
Shit
Repeat.
That they could destroy the economy is "just an externality"
They simply don't think about anything beyond profiting today.
They need to factor that into their post-employee post-consumer worldview
Humans are being robotised.
Instead they'll make the ex-worker humans just do a lot of not-breeding and dying.
Meanwhile me and many others are in huts in the woods growing potatoes, foraging for berries, gathering wood for winter, hoping a billionaire doesn’t want a hotel right there
And yeah, they'll never be consumers.
they think that after they get all the money they'll do a little jig on the pile and shout "he he I've won!"