Comment by PieTime
24 days ago
Market for who? Who is left working? If we can’t answer that question then we’re not prepared for what’s next.
24 days ago
Market for who? Who is left working? If we can’t answer that question then we’re not prepared for what’s next.
THIS is the question!
Henry Ford II: "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?" Walter Reuther: "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"
Ah, the elephant in the room. Nobody seems able to answer this point, or even talk about it. Occam’s razor sure doesn’t imply a good outcome.
For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.
And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.
I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.
So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.
11 replies →
Ah, well, nobody needs to buy them if the robots just provision everything for the people who would have otherwise had their businesses make cars.
Driving a car is a chore, not a job (usually), much like washing dishes is. Dishwashers did not produce an economic collapse.
OTOH replacing people with AI would indeed bring about a huge economic downturn. What would be good is augmenting humans so that they can do 10x more. That would enable things that are hard to imagine exactly now, much like computers enabled interesting transformations in the society from 1980s to 2010s.
The current crop of AI is by construction unable to reach the human level of cognition, but it is quite good at doing some symbolic manipulation tasks. We will get used to that, and will integrate that in our workflows. Humans are still going to be needed.
Tractor-trailer trucking alone is the 13th largest profession in the US. It’s not unusual for driving to be a whole profession in and of itself.
Fair, but I spoke about cars, the commute / chore kind of work, not trucks, a commercial job.
And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?
If an employee brings in more profit than before, you want more such employees, not less.
You have to cut costs when the costs do not bring you enough profits.
1 reply →
Huh?
Hundreds of billions are changing hands globally, every week, at the retail level alone.
And that happens literally every week, week after week.
That constitutes a massive market in any sense I can think of.
That won't happen any more if nobody has jobs. It's also completely irrelevant because how did you just connect the self driving car market to the entirety of retail sales?
So you think a trend that is growing year after year, yes global retail sales grew from 2025 to 2026 week over week, indicates a future collapse?
That needs a way more complex explanation than simple gut feeling.