Pre COVID, IKEA had a lot of decent value stuff (prices were low, relatively better built items too, relative to the other stock). There were also plenty of staff on the tills and on the shop floor to ask questions or get assistance.

You genuinely felt they passed on the savings

They also had decent online shopping.

These days though they're just like everyone else and have cut cut cut and prices have risen. The restaurant has gone to crap too

*because ikea is cheap.

Crucial element in GPs complaint was lack of passing on savings to consumers.

Nope, is just as bad.

> Your landlord demands money every month.

As if the "AI champion" will have a landlord. Methinks you've not thought this through.

> So do your local utilities - power, gas, water, sewage, garbage collection, phone, internet, etc.

Unless he owns all that too. Even if that doesn't play out, safe to say that in said hypothetical future it will be owned by a very small group of people. And while they may still have some trade amongst themselves, there will still be no need to sell things to the average Joe.

> Is magical AI going to materialize food out of nowhere for you, with no need for any raw materials to be consumed in the process? Will it make clothes out of nothing?

The magical AI will, yes. But as it is magical, you are right that this future branch is unlikely. Much more likely is the future where people remain relevant.

No, why?

If people still want other people to do things for them, accounting isn't going anywhere. It has already been invented. We don't have to un-invent it. But, if this our future, then humans remain relevant, so there is no concern about job loss or anything of that nature.

If, however, some future plays out where people aren't needed to work anymore, there will simply be no need for trade. The magical AIs, or whatever it is that someone has dreamt up that they think will eliminate the need to hire people, will provide instead. You only need people to buy things from you if you need to buy things from them as well.

wait-- do you have historical evidence that "money" replaced "direct trading" at any point in time? Why do you pick "end of middle age"

suggest reading Debt: the first 5000 years.

> You need a roof over your head and some food to eat

The magical AI will (hypothetically) provide this for you.

> But whoops, no one is willing to pay you enough to do that.

You seem confused. The question wasn't posed from the perspective of those who don't have the magical AI.

They’re not too bothered with a part of humanity starving. Why do you think they’d care about you more?

What for?

> and provide everyone with everything they would ever need

It doesn't need to provide for everyone. Imagine a single Jeff Bezos type who conquers the world with the magical AI with no need for anyone else to do anything for him. With no need for someone else to do something for him, there is no need for him to sell to anyone else. This is where the "they forget people also need money to buy their goods" falls apart. There is no such need.

We live in ahistorical times, it seems, especially since Covid.

“Sure, it will probably happen again, but what if we made some money along the way?!”

Amazing until covid hits and everything is out of stock at t+ 5 minutes. Every major city is like 24 hours away from MAJOR riots if anything serious happens to the supply chain.

JIT shipping doesn't necessarily mean less carbon footprint from transportation. A single large shipment is far more efficient than many small shipments.

Self checkout is just fine, except for UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA.

More often than not, I’m finding the stores don’t even have a register with a cashier anymore.

$20 a month for a nearly unlimited stream of high intelligence isn’t really undemocratic imo

Yeah, exactly. Lots of people use AI, if they can afford the subscriptions, but it’s only the tech oligarchs who can control AI, including controlling access to it.

Until you can run high quality models on affordable devices on your desk or in your hand the extent of the democratisation is much more limited than you might like.

Perhaps OSS will come to the rescue here.

(Aside: obviously free tiers are available but these are all hobbled in various ways: usage limits, data sharing/leakage, etc.)

Even if it costs $100k/yr in GPU and RAM, the robot's preferable. It doesn't get sick, it doesn't have a family, it doesn't show up hungover, it doesn't sleep. It can be copy and pasted and duplicated and turned off as necessary.

The point is that instead of having to complain about the ownership class, you can now be an owner more easily than before. AI enables people to do more on their own. You can build stuff that simply was not feasible before. You still have to do it though.

If you prefer to be subject to the ownership class, I recommend being honest about why that is.

Big companies may save money on salaries, which would have first-order effects on the job market — but you could say the same about cloud computing, or computers, or mechanical reapers. Now what about all the companies that previously couldn't afford to exist because someone with a good idea didn't have six+ figures of discretionary income to throw at it?

If AI proves useful enough to effect sustained savings for Big Tech to the degree that you're suggesting, then the flip side of that coin is that it's effectively ZIRP on steroids for startups. The successful businesses which come out of that will ultimately have human labor needs of their own. Job market continues to trend upwards, only with lower concentration and greater overall resulting economic value in the form of more products and services.

Or AI/robotics/etc. gets so good that eventually no one needs human labor, and every company trends toward just being a CEO + board + AI. In that world, unless we expect everyone and their grandma to become an entrepreneur, something to the effect of a UBI would be necessary to keep the world turning without major societal upheaval.

On the other hand, AI skeptics can plan to sit back and eat popcorn while they watch the bigcos suffer the consequences of their mistakes and yield ground to startups. Either way, AI will have been a democratizing force.

The raw data will still be incredibly biased, and the AI will have its own biases on top of what's in the training. Grok will be racist no matter what.

Does that mean that Company Towns are coming back?

I like the phrase "you can't get an ought from an is", but the word "ought" doesn't always carry moral meaning. If an annoying alarm is beeping and I cut off its power, I might say "it ought to have stopped beeping". That's not a moral opinion, it's invoking a model of how the alarm works and the law of conservation of energy. Here the law of supply and demand is being invoked. Hume needn't get involved.

> Economic growth comes from a large population that spends and innovates.

No it doesn't. Economic growth comes from "doing more with more". WHO does that doesn't matter. It matters for inequality and jobs and a lot of things, but not for economic growth. If skynet kills all Americans and builds 5 million nukes, that will be economic growth.

As the OP mentioned, growth is different from fair distribution of resources.

Yes it is. What you're conveniently forgetting is that governments and banks (which are kind-of government, except profits go to private hands) think this is a very, very, very, VERY good thing indeed.

Why? Well, what is wealth inequality? It is people and companies (indirectly also people) not spending money. Just keeping it. "For the future". In bank accounts. On the stock market. In government bonds. Under their pillow. This also explains that a very large chunk of "the rich" is in practice people's pensions.

This means that governments can create almost unlimited new money, without taxing anything, and know it'll be hoovered up by the wealthy. What happens in practice? Wealthy people and companies will provide goods and services to hoover up that money, but they won't want (any new) goods and services in return. In other words: it is a way for governments to acquire almost unlimited goods and services in return for ... nothing at all. A few updates to a database "to be paid in the future".

And if you look at what governments spend money on, it's "everyone", the "public good", in other words: on the poor. In other words: this is a way for the poor to get more stuff now.

You want to kill this effect? Expect every government employee, every pensioner, every unemployment benefit receiver, every sick or disabled person and so on to scream bloody murder, because you'll have to seriously cut a LOT of benefits. Or, frankly, if recent history is any indication, to actually just kill you with a 3d printed gun.

Of course, because the government is still overspending, and debt servicing is becoming bigger and bigger. New debt is adding less and less spending power to government budgets. In some countries debt servicing is already bigger than the growth in debt (and not just Argentina and Pakistan). You can calculate: if Trump continues like this, the US will cross this critical threshold halfway through his term (assuming 5% interest rate). At that point the US government will lose the ability to trade government debt for goods and services. And last Trump term spending went up and up and up as his term progressed, and so far the same is happening this term. Had we elected a deceased possum instead of Trump, our country would have been fiscally better of than we are now.

So you'll see the maga republicans join the democrats in shouting and screaming how evil banks and "the rich" are, in 3 years or less. What's scary is that due to Trump this moment is coming towards us a LOT faster than it was under Biden, despite, of course, Trump getting elected on the promise that he would make the opposite happen. But, as said before, a dead possum would have far outperformed Trump on the fiscal front.

You mean having 10.000 servants for a few rich people, their families and government institutions? Yeah, real fun jobs, those.

Not all countries are at 2.24 -- USA is at 1.62, so whether correlation or causation, many developed countries are nowhere near the replacement rate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_f...

In places which don't have this structure.

I don't know if you'll be able to answer this but;

I've been wondering about that conventional wisdom lately. In my area, and in most of the developed world, the prices of frankly most food I buy has doubled in the last 7 years. Meat is almost quadruple. This is despite ~3% inflation yearly over that time (higher in covid years, lower elsewhere), for an aggregate inflation over that same period of 44%. So the costs are rising way faster than inflation. indeed, my pay has not doubled.

Lets assume that its true that supermarkets etc where I am report very low profit margins (I haven't personally checked, but I suspect they indeed do). Where does the increased cost go? The general excuses given are covid, ukraine, etc. But those are market explanations - i.e. oh, there is less supply of this stuff, so the price goes up. But that means that SOMEONE is making a lot more money than they used to -- or the amount of effort to make the same amount of product has gone up. So which is it?

Other explanations i've considered:

- Hollywood accounting i.e. the profit margin is much higher but funneled into weird supplier companies also owned by investors/higher ups of the supermarkets.

- Middleman bloat. A bunch of extra steps where people take their "small margin" repeatedly have been inserted into the supply chain, the same product now passing through more hands (combine if you like with the above if you like)

Everything in groceries has bad margins. Grocery shops are not making the money, food conglomerates are making the money if you look at earnings.

I'm working on it, give me time.