Maybe I’m over thinking it or have s poor understanding of economics—but I’m curious where companies think money will come from to buy their products when no one has a job because they’ve been replaced by AI?
I get the impression that many companies don't care about the product or consumer anymore. That seems bizarre, but in a world where money is made up, maybe it makes sense.
It’s because companies aren’t run by Joe Business anymore, who founded the company and has been in the Business business for three generations. It’s a hedge fund now and the 40 layers of middle management just need the line to go up. Then they get a bonus and a pat on the back for crushing their KPIs.
that means ai is just there to pump up stocks and valuations while saying they are valuable but really producing nothing of value and just stealing from tax payers as a strategy next admin will need to hammer on ai and just ban it from usa completely for using it for replacing jobs in general instead of making things cost less ai used to make things cost more
I’m not a business guy by any means, but it hit me a while ago that the majority of huge companies aren’t really driven by sales of their core products now, like how you’ll buy an appliance from an electrical store on finance offered by a company they own. They make more money from the banking and investment, to the point that the original point of the firm is a vestigial interest.
They don’t have to give a shit about the customer when the money they make is, to some extent, self-sustaining. As long as someone else is paying people, their income will keep on keeping on.
The trouble is, more and more companies are doing all they can to stop paying people.
Employees are thinking “I like my job/it pays the bills/my coworkers are fun/it’s an interesting problem/the nerd rapture is here”
Bosses are thinking “This gets me fat stacks”
Investors are thinking “This will get me stupidly fat stacks, and if it causes social problems I won’t bear the cost”
Also everyone is thinking “me not doing this just means it happens anyway but I don’t benefit”
Read Marx, like I’m not shitposting. If you want to understand why these traps happen and why capitalism keeps going here read Marx. You don’t need to 100% agree with him but the economic analysis is invaluable.
The middle class isn’t a natural state of things. You have to work at it to maintain a middle class.
Most of these people want to move back to a feudal self set up again. Where ‘the economy’ is just the nobles and rich merchants trading among each other. They don’t actually care if that economy is overall less prosperous, so long as they are one of the big fish in the tinier pond.
So right now we’re seeing rich people eat other rich people, fighting over who gets to control the dwindling remains of civilization that will remain after their decisions wreck the world.
I look at things like the car market, where the top end is basically being floated by oil princes, trustfund kids and early crypto investors. Even have mass production companies like Mercedes starting to focus more on “handcrafted limited release” cars they can make 30 of, and flip at a few million each.
The wealthy seem to seriously believe they’ve amassed enough money at the top that they can sustain the economy without anyone else participating. And unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like the data supports this belief.
yes but the key is to not need the wealthy. issue is they bought most of our politicians like 99% of them. remove their influence and they will need to flee. tax their wealth or they can leave and leave everything they cant move else they will forfeit it. i do not care at this point need a national wealth tax on the 0.01% remove income tax completely
A lot of folks just make their money because the line goes up, then instead of spending that money they borrow more using their old money (stocks) as collateral. So long as the line goes up those people have basically a continuing stream of income and credit.
Whenever it stops going up long enough for them to care they will start to introduce their version of UBI which will probably be something like Mr Lee’s KongBucks because every single one of these fuckers seems to have gotten the exact wrong message out of the novel Snow Crash.
They don’t. Companies think as far as the next quarter, that’s it. Negative externalities do not exist for these people.
It’s an entire system built on perverse incentives, and those perverse incentives are all about keeping the stock price going up. Companies operate for the benefit of shareholders. Not for profit or growth or stability; those are just means to an end. The end is line go up.
The mega wealthy are literally building bunkers to ride out the collapse of civilization. That’s their long term play; emerge as kings of the ashes.
Companies all think they’ll be the ones to do it first, do it best, so they’ll get all the profits from having no expenditures while all those other dumb companies will be the Rubes paying wages to workers who will buy their profit.
Yes, that’s the endgame of AI. Create a permanent underclass of quasi slaves doing anything just to stay alive and the upper class living in luxury bunkers celebrating while the world burns.
One billionaire once asked (this was before the AI boom): how can I make sure my servants don’t rebel in the luxury bunkers? AI might be their answer.
Yeah, some “doomsday prepper” consultant was asked, “how do I ensure my security doesn’t turn on my in a doomsday scenario,” the answer was “well, don’t have the doomsday scenario.”
well actually it would be universe 25 not elon musk infinite abundance it is instead infinite slavery.
the lower iq eat it up as good for them and pump the stonk.
And unfortunately for them, it doesn’t even work that way. The capitalists who better use labor to build on top of AI will beat those trying to make all labor obsolete. Meanwhile, they do little to automate jobs that they literally rely on. No food? No energy? No modern supply-chains? These fuckers don’t even realize how fragile it all is, as they’ve grown up in the same era of stability that we have. Just like the middle class was blindsided by the return to feudalism, they’ll be blindsided by world war, the collapse of free trade, and the fall of America as the center of the global economy.
It won’t be all that bad for them, but they’ll drop the luxury bunker fantasies as not enough people die and local powers begin to vie for regional control. They’ll lose to more grounded rivals if they try to pull some naive bullshit.
that’s half of it, yes they’d like to funnel all wages to five silicon valley dipshits, but the very same dipshits believe that computer god that they will build, just dump another 20B dollars bro pls this time it’ll work out, will grant them immortality (many flavours here, brain uploading or cryonics or others) or limitless space colonization or some other piece of scifi setting that they read 30 years ago and missed the point of
It’s not really the wages they are after. Paying a wage on one end and getting paid market rates on the other end is how they generate profit, no matter how much automation advances.
It’s those pesky labor rights they want to get rid of. AI helps in two ways: take away power from workers by threatening replacement, and automate data gathering and surveillance to physically control those who try to oppose capitalism.
It’s not really the wages they are after. Paying a wage on one end and getting paid market rates on the other end is how they generate profit, no matter how much automation advances.
It is wages they’re after. How much profit there is can be greatly increased by not having to pay any workers.
That’s not how (non-speculative) profit works under capitalism.
All profits that a capitalist accrues are eventually extracted from a laborer who puts in more work than what they are paid, where
the wage is determined by the costs of reproducing labor power (amortized cost of their education, food to keep going, shelter for rest, entertainment to not go insane, costs of bearing and raising children to produce more workers)
the amount of work is determined mostly by the length of their working day
The profit is the difference between the labor power expanded in a working day and the wage (the labor power necessary to maintain a “supply of labor”).
If you remove the wage, and therefore the laborer, you are left with no profit. Capitalists understand that intuitively. Some will speculate on the amount of labor power to manipulate the perceived value of their company (hence the hiring/layoffs cycle), but a sustainable business requires a steady supply of labor for which (at least under capitalism) they must pay a wage.
If, by some miracles, capitalists manage to produce & gain control of an AGI (I strongly doubt this will happen with LLMs), and manage to force us to bootstrap a fully automated supply chain without overthrowing capitalism, we will indeed enter into another economic system entirely, and it won’t be good for most of humanity.
If you remove the wage, and therefore the laborer, you are left with no profit
Not exactly. Because you’re not removing the labor, you’re just bringing it down to virtually nothing.
There’s still the labor of pressing the button to start the AGI.
But the larger problem capitalism has is one of the wage form - my wages are your income as a capitalist, since I buy things with them. You remove wages, and demand (desire plus ability to pay) collapses in the market. Super depression.
The rich that are in on it are conning the rich that are cultists. The end result is further centralization of wealth as they cannibalize each other until the real feudal action starts
Automation only really increases productivity. The principles of scarcity and capitalism will ensure that people always have work. Even if robots could fully take over all current jobs, new ones will emerge as capital seeks more busywork. The only way to actually make a fully automated world is through collective ownership of such automation production and a total abolition of private speculation.
Of course, we could realistically strive for a partially automated world where we need to put in less and less labor as more essential work gets automated, but that won’t happen. Global capitalism adds a competitive drive to maximize development so states and companies don’t get bullied by rival empires and businesses. It’s a prisoners dilemma and none of the states or capitalists have any motivation to deescalate. So instead all those with power race to the bottom; buring humans as fuel, pillaging the environment, and making sure we never reach a post scarcity world.
Maybe I’m over thinking it or have s poor understanding of economics—but I’m curious where companies think money will come from to buy their products when no one has a job because they’ve been replaced by AI?
I get the impression that many companies don't care about the product or consumer anymore. That seems bizarre, but in a world where money is made up, maybe it makes sense.
It’s because companies aren’t run by Joe Business anymore, who founded the company and has been in the Business business for three generations. It’s a hedge fund now and the 40 layers of middle management just need the line to go up. Then they get a bonus and a pat on the back for crushing their KPIs.
They need number to go up 30x from when they bought it so they can sell and do it again or just coast forever
that means ai is just there to pump up stocks and valuations while saying they are valuable but really producing nothing of value and just stealing from tax payers as a strategy next admin will need to hammer on ai and just ban it from usa completely for using it for replacing jobs in general instead of making things cost less ai used to make things cost more
I’m not a business guy by any means, but it hit me a while ago that the majority of huge companies aren’t really driven by sales of their core products now, like how you’ll buy an appliance from an electrical store on finance offered by a company they own. They make more money from the banking and investment, to the point that the original point of the firm is a vestigial interest.
They don’t have to give a shit about the customer when the money they make is, to some extent, self-sustaining. As long as someone else is paying people, their income will keep on keeping on.
The trouble is, more and more companies are doing all they can to stop paying people.
And here we are.
Companies don’t think.
Employees are thinking “I like my job/it pays the bills/my coworkers are fun/it’s an interesting problem/the nerd rapture is here”
Bosses are thinking “This gets me fat stacks”
Investors are thinking “This will get me stupidly fat stacks, and if it causes social problems I won’t bear the cost”
Also everyone is thinking “me not doing this just means it happens anyway but I don’t benefit”
Read Marx, like I’m not shitposting. If you want to understand why these traps happen and why capitalism keeps going here read Marx. You don’t need to 100% agree with him but the economic analysis is invaluable.
Other companies.
Once you and competition have been optimized out of the economy it’ll all be b2b.
The middle class isn’t a natural state of things. You have to work at it to maintain a middle class.
Most of these people want to move back to a feudal self set up again. Where ‘the economy’ is just the nobles and rich merchants trading among each other. They don’t actually care if that economy is overall less prosperous, so long as they are one of the big fish in the tinier pond.
So right now we’re seeing rich people eat other rich people, fighting over who gets to control the dwindling remains of civilization that will remain after their decisions wreck the world.
Top 10% ofc. Poor people don’t spend a lot anyways.
I look at things like the car market, where the top end is basically being floated by oil princes, trustfund kids and early crypto investors. Even have mass production companies like Mercedes starting to focus more on “handcrafted limited release” cars they can make 30 of, and flip at a few million each.
The wealthy seem to seriously believe they’ve amassed enough money at the top that they can sustain the economy without anyone else participating. And unfortunately, it’s looking more and more like the data supports this belief.
yes but the key is to not need the wealthy. issue is they bought most of our politicians like 99% of them. remove their influence and they will need to flee. tax their wealth or they can leave and leave everything they cant move else they will forfeit it. i do not care at this point need a national wealth tax on the 0.01% remove income tax completely
Think? (chuckles) No, no, we don’t do that here.
You’re thinking past the quarterly earnings report, that’s what cucks do. Line go up, mother fucker. Infinite growth, FTW, bitch!
/s
A lot of folks just make their money because the line goes up, then instead of spending that money they borrow more using their old money (stocks) as collateral. So long as the line goes up those people have basically a continuing stream of income and credit.
Whenever it stops going up long enough for them to care they will start to introduce their version of UBI which will probably be something like Mr Lee’s KongBucks because every single one of these fuckers seems to have gotten the exact wrong message out of the novel Snow Crash.
This is like asking ‘how did the slave owners make money if slaves couldn’t buy anything?’
The wealthy already control 50% of the market. They don’t need us. And they don’t want us. They want us to be slaves.
They don’t. Companies think as far as the next quarter, that’s it. Negative externalities do not exist for these people.
It’s an entire system built on perverse incentives, and those perverse incentives are all about keeping the stock price going up. Companies operate for the benefit of shareholders. Not for profit or growth or stability; those are just means to an end. The end is line go up.
The mega wealthy are literally building bunkers to ride out the collapse of civilization. That’s their long term play; emerge as kings of the ashes.
Companies all think they’ll be the ones to do it first, do it best, so they’ll get all the profits from having no expenditures while all those other dumb companies will be the Rubes paying wages to workers who will buy their profit.
Yes, that’s the endgame of AI. Create a permanent underclass of quasi slaves doing anything just to stay alive and the upper class living in luxury bunkers celebrating while the world burns.
One billionaire once asked (this was before the AI boom): how can I make sure my servants don’t rebel in the luxury bunkers? AI might be their answer.
Yeah, some “doomsday prepper” consultant was asked, “how do I ensure my security doesn’t turn on my in a doomsday scenario,” the answer was “well, don’t have the doomsday scenario.”
concrete truck doesn’t care how many explosive collars are inside bunker
well actually it would be universe 25 not elon musk infinite abundance it is instead infinite slavery. the lower iq eat it up as good for them and pump the stonk.
And unfortunately for them, it doesn’t even work that way. The capitalists who better use labor to build on top of AI will beat those trying to make all labor obsolete. Meanwhile, they do little to automate jobs that they literally rely on. No food? No energy? No modern supply-chains? These fuckers don’t even realize how fragile it all is, as they’ve grown up in the same era of stability that we have. Just like the middle class was blindsided by the return to feudalism, they’ll be blindsided by world war, the collapse of free trade, and the fall of America as the center of the global economy.
It won’t be all that bad for them, but they’ll drop the luxury bunker fantasies as not enough people die and local powers begin to vie for regional control. They’ll lose to more grounded rivals if they try to pull some naive bullshit.
I can solve wages too, we destroy the capitalist system.
Communism gets rid of wages in fact it gets rid of money all together.
As does Anarchism.
isn’t anarchism the same as communism?
I specifically mean the end goal. A classless, moneyless, stateless society.
I always thought that communists and anarchists only disagreed in how to get to that end goal
Yes
that’s half of it, yes they’d like to funnel all wages to five silicon valley dipshits, but the very same dipshits believe that computer god that they will build, just dump another 20B dollars bro pls this time it’ll work out, will grant them immortality (many flavours here, brain uploading or cryonics or others) or limitless space colonization or some other piece of scifi setting that they read 30 years ago and missed the point of
For some odd reason, this description makes me think of some of the bad guys (e.g. Todd Pharo) from the Horizon games.
It’s not really the wages they are after. Paying a wage on one end and getting paid market rates on the other end is how they generate profit, no matter how much automation advances.
It’s those pesky labor rights they want to get rid of. AI helps in two ways: take away power from workers by threatening replacement, and automate data gathering and surveillance to physically control those who try to oppose capitalism.
It is wages they’re after. How much profit there is can be greatly increased by not having to pay any workers.
That’s not how (non-speculative) profit works under capitalism.
All profits that a capitalist accrues are eventually extracted from a laborer who puts in more work than what they are paid, where
The profit is the difference between the labor power expanded in a working day and the wage (the labor power necessary to maintain a “supply of labor”).
If you remove the wage, and therefore the laborer, you are left with no profit. Capitalists understand that intuitively. Some will speculate on the amount of labor power to manipulate the perceived value of their company (hence the hiring/layoffs cycle), but a sustainable business requires a steady supply of labor for which (at least under capitalism) they must pay a wage.
If, by some miracles, capitalists manage to produce & gain control of an AGI (I strongly doubt this will happen with LLMs), and manage to force us to bootstrap a fully automated supply chain without overthrowing capitalism, we will indeed enter into another economic system entirely, and it won’t be good for most of humanity.
Not exactly. Because you’re not removing the labor, you’re just bringing it down to virtually nothing.
There’s still the labor of pressing the button to start the AGI.
But the larger problem capitalism has is one of the wage form - my wages are your income as a capitalist, since I buy things with them. You remove wages, and demand (desire plus ability to pay) collapses in the market. Super depression.
No, that is still part of the con. They are pretending to sell that, but they know they can’t. In reality they’re selling vaporware.
The rich that are in on it are conning the rich that are cultists. The end result is further centralization of wealth as they cannibalize each other until the real feudal action starts
what trillion dollar problem is automation trying to solve?
Automation only really increases productivity. The principles of scarcity and capitalism will ensure that people always have work. Even if robots could fully take over all current jobs, new ones will emerge as capital seeks more busywork. The only way to actually make a fully automated world is through collective ownership of such automation production and a total abolition of private speculation.
Of course, we could realistically strive for a partially automated world where we need to put in less and less labor as more essential work gets automated, but that won’t happen. Global capitalism adds a competitive drive to maximize development so states and companies don’t get bullied by rival empires and businesses. It’s a prisoners dilemma and none of the states or capitalists have any motivation to deescalate. So instead all those with power race to the bottom; buring humans as fuel, pillaging the environment, and making sure we never reach a post scarcity world.
And they are messing it up big time, and fixing that mess later down the road costs way more than just paying wages to actual brains.
❤️😘