Comment by zombot
3 hours ago
> If A.I. starts to replace jobs en masse
But then nobody will have money to buy anything anymore, then nobody will have money to pay the AI companies, and then they won't have any money. The jobless will starve to death and then those who have their food made by robots will reign over an empty world where money has become meaningless. LLMs and robots don't eat money, they eat electricity.
If you really simplify how this works:
Owners of capital use the capital in combination with workers to produces goods and services. They give half of the production to the workers and keep the other half.
If AI replaces workers, the owners of capital will simply keep all of the production to themselves. So they would be better off. If I have a construction company, I could just lay off the workers and distribute the surplus houses to myself and other owners.
There are nuances to this of course, but this is a point that most people miss.
With that many people out of work, you may struggle to hold on to that capital.
I had the same thought, but this is more or less how things stood at the end of the 19th century: most of the wealth was accumulated by the ruling class whilst the majority of workers were at the poverty line.
If we don't tax these A.I. Moguls these times will return.
Paperclippers but in slow motion with the economy in the loop.