Once there are like 150,000 humans resources will be functionally unlimited

> That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources

Two astronauts meme: "Wait, it's all been over resources?" "Always has been"

I mean, you are describing the vast majority of history.

Starcraft for Billionaires

In the voice of worker-bot: "That's your plan?!?!"

"Forcing redistribution" doesn't always happen. Typically, redistribution happens when negotiating leverage has increased such that the beneficiaries of any redistribution can make it more painful to not redistribute than to redistribute. I.e. they have labor power, which can be converted to force if necessary.

In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.

Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.

How low do we go before that happens? Look at how poor people are in other countries and still aren't threatening their ruling oligarchy at all.

And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?

No they won't, not if they have just enough bread and circuses and someone below them to hate. Boil the frog slowly enough and it'll work out just fine for the capital class.

hasn't happened in the US yet, and probably won't.

and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom

if the yanks won't, why would the public elsewhere?

At that point, why bother to employ? If we have no recourse, no power to resist them (as must be the case in that scenario), then they might as well just keep us as pets.

Or slaves.

they're already replacing actors with AI, mate. Once the slop machine gets better you won't know the difference

Well, it's the same problem with all sorts of free-market capitalism and derivatives. They all believe there's infinite "somewhere else" that resources can come from, or the customers, or the funding etc. But reality is very much finite. And so instead of the theoretical equilibrium we get monopolies and collusion to manipulate markets.

The article, actually, addresses your claims:

> The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

So, the author believes that the problem with your reasoning that it will take a long time for the niches you are talking about to be filled (lifetime, maybe more), meanwhile things will look quite bad for most those involved.

I am even less optimistic than the author. The new aspect of this workforce displacement is the centralization. Of course, previous advances in automation also caused a degree of centralization, but AI is posed to become super-centralized if you will. There will be just a handful of suppliers and nobody will be able to challenge them, similar to situation we have with microprocessors today. Needless to say this is absolutely not a healthy situation for the world's economy.

the number of functioning machine shop in the US in large urban areas has been plummeting for decades. where there were 50 there are now 3. the customers for machine shops are large production facilities with a need for custom parts. they're all gone. now its little bits of rnd work and some custom architectural design kind of stuff. and the margins are punishing.

ok, so machine shops aren't really central to the argument, but the collapse of demand is.

Actually you can for entry level jobs. You also shouldn't just look at unemployment but underemployment.

>Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...

You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.

Labor costs are not the limiting factor on production.

Whether it "needs to" is its own debate.

I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?

But your last sentence is talking about something completely different: the current reality, which most of the tech CEOs and AI boosters refuse to engage with.

For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty).

But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it, and not just airily dismissing the concern as something that will obviously work itself out without any real problem.

Even if 99% of the current programmers go the way of 99% of people who were farming in 1750, you have to remember that a huge percentage of the farmers who were made redundant by industrialization and modern farming methods fell into destitution; many died penniless. That's not something that seems either wise or compassionate to just handwave away!