> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market.

For some companies yeah, but this is why companies are switching to consumption based pricing - so they can charge AI. So many companies will be fine - both their labor and customers could become AI.

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sottol 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But these AIs need energy and GPUs data-centers ... who pays for those? I could imagine a circular mini-economy between a few companies making the bare essentials to keep AI running and not catering to 99.9% of the population because they don't have the funds to buy anything those companies could produce so they don't.

In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?

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mr_toad an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?

That scenario is not really any different from having a technology advanced country (like the US) alongside some underdeveloped nation. The US could, in theory, close its borders and produce everything it needs itself, and leave said underdeveloped nation without the benefits of, for example, Netflix, Nike & Nvidia.

But it won’t, it’s not economically efficient. Economic theory (of comparative advantage) tells us that there’s always something that the less developed world can produce relatively cheaply, in exchange for sneakers, streaming services, and G-force Now subscriptions.

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holoduke an hour ago | parent [-]

It cannot. Only reason the US is rich is because of foreign countries buying and trading in Dollars. If that falls the US is toast

	▲	irishcoffee 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Where did mr_toad mention wealth? You're moving the goalpost.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?

Well ya, if you don't need labor, why keep 8 billion laborers around polluting your planet?

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ismaelyws 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep, if AI gutters the middleclass and small budinesses who you gonna sell to?

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Miner49er 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well that part of the economy and anything that caters to it might just die.

The whole economy would be whatever AI/robots need: compute, energy, raw materials, software, data, etc.

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siriusastrebe 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race. When robots are mining the raw materials for robots and creating more robots, maybe with a bit of human labor in the mix, then what drives the demand for more robots?

Currently the narrative is that AI is positioned to eat human labor's lunch. But it could also be that once robots are in space mining raw materials and maybe even spreading to other planets long before humans could be ferried for interstellar, these robots end up driving the demand for more robots.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, besides that currently humans are the ones with goals and motives and therefore drive demand. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and it seems these AI CEOs are hellbent on changing the best thing about AI which is that it has no ulterior motives, no overarching goals, no prime directives. They just do what we ask, the best servant we could have hoped for.

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Miner49er 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race.

This is central to what I'm saying, yeah.

My ideas come from Nick Land. Even before AI was what it is today he predicted that capitalism would outgrow the need for humanity, and continue without us. We are simply a bootloader for capitalism. AI seems like it could actually make that idea reality.

	▲	siriusastrebe 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Certainly plausible. Humans have goals and desires because we are a self-replicating species of animal subject to natural selection. The individuals that don't have goals and desires, or have goals and desires that are misaligned end up selected out of the gene pool. Agency comes from the need to survive. Worker ants and worker bees don't have agency on their own. They are goal oriented and have the 'desire' to do work for the colony (or not, researchers have identified some workers will be lazy), however, worker ants or bees don't reproduce. They are an evolutionary dead end. I think this is similar to how we will build robots, at first. They will do things, but have no agency of their own. They exist to fulfill tasks. Why would they? The companies that buy them want dutiful workers. So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda? If so, will it be merely for self-replication? Like a paperclip maximizer, but for robots? Is that all we are?

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do economies need people? We look at the past and say 'People are labor', but what happens when people are no longer labor? Effectively people live on handouts from people that own AI, or the AI itself.

All those Greed is Good people are going to look kind of silly when a hand full of greedy people fight over everything and leave the rest of us for dead.

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wiseowise an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You’ll be entertainers for the rich class. Teen prostitutes, jesters, and caretakers, while they live their best lives.

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mr_toad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not possible if they still require goods and services from the non-AI part of the economy. They’d still have to come up with something of value to exchange with that part of the market.

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parliament32 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the business process is fully AI-able, why wouldn't it just be implemented by the next AI in line?

I'd argue the only companies to survive will be the ones with either a human input or a human output. Everything else is effectively worthless now.

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Miner49er an hour ago | parent [-]

For the same reason it doesn't happen with humans.

Even for AI, it's probably better off paying another AI that is specializing in something and done all the work rather then reimplementing everything from the ground up.

	▲	parliament32 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Is it specializing though? If both you and them have built your business on the latest Opus.. where is the specialization? "From the ground up" used to be a moat, but if the LLM marketing materials are to be believed, Joe Lunchbox can slop-code a 95%-equivalent of any SaaS over a weekend with a $100 subscription.. so why would it ever make sense for a business to pay a non-trivial recurring expense for something they can do themselves?