The dead economy theory

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough.

If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market?

And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law firms even have to exist? Who is going to hire them if they can just hire AI?

The companies that are rushing so hard to replace their workers don't realise that AI is eventually going to replace them too.

I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.

Not many people see that the end result is that when ordinary people stop earning money, and stop buying products, all the money will be used purely for B2B transactions.

Money will still exist, but people will not see hardly any of it. To break out of being just a person and start a business you will still need money, but be unable to get any.

Thus, the endgame is revealed. You don't need to form a dictatorship, you don't need to have a war, you just need to remove all real choice from people, and then you have complete control over what they are able to do by simply making it cost too much. There will be a firewall between ordinary people, and the people who own businesses where all the money sits.

We see the start of it already, when just two individuals have a combined wealth on the order of a trillion dollars. That inequality is not going down, only upwards.

Sure, you may get universal basic income, have a nice house, car (food, clothing etc of course) but there will be a massive air gap between what you could obtain in a lifetime and the minimum you would need to move from that situation into the world where the real money is.

Corporate saving rose by nearly 5 percentage points of global GDP between 1980 and 2013, and since the 2000s the corporate sector flipped from net borrower to net lender in many advanced economies — the "corporate saving glut." Much of it just piled up as cash reserves. Currently, 10–15% of GDP per year flows into corporate retained earnings never to leave. Think about the long term ramifications of that for you and your purchasing power.

AI didn't make this situation, it is just speeding it up.

This article, like Citrini research's scenario before it, misses much of the economics.

AI is unlikely to be as revolutionary as is presumed. It's definitely going to lead to increased productivity, and will probably render some jobs redundant, but it's unlikely to have a significant effect on wages/employment [1], and as of now there isn't one [2]. When it does effect workers (which is still uncommon), AI mostly leads to task reallocation.

Right now, AI's massive valuations seem more like a reflection of the typical speculation that accompanies major technological innovations (thinking IoT, railroads, automobiles) than of its real economic value [3].

The "dead economy" scenario would only be possible in the event of extraordinary, and extraordinarily-unlikely levels of AI-driven unemployment.

[1] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/The%20...

[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w33509

[3] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2003-0...

This article puts into words a lot of things that had been on my mind as missing in AI discourse. Most significantly, actually considering the _systemic consequences_ of the promised AI future, how it interacts with political economy, an actual critical look (instead of accepting the "Western meta-narrative of modernity" at face value).

And maybe more importantly, it articulates really clearly how damaging the restructuring of the economy by AI moguls and the tightening of the capital–political feedback loop can be, even (maybe _especially_) if the returns of AI do not materialise as promised.

There is plenty of disorganised diffuse anti-AI sentiment. If intellectuals are able to get together behind a common cause, there might be a political movement in the making.

>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent.

I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?

I guess if global population drops by 80-90℅ you suddenly get a "sustainable" economy, as everything is repriced the economy of scale needs a much smaller scale.

(Not speculating this is a plan, just a thought that occurred to me when reading about horses example)

AI will accelerate the decline in the world’s population. No job, no marriage and no kids will be the norm for most people. For many years to come. Some will say it’s good for the planet and especially for other species of vertebrates. Others will see it as a personal failure to not have any living offspring when they get old.

In ancient Greece, Diana was the goddess of hunting, wildlife and personal freedom and Venus was the goddess of love, family and domestic life. The Greeks had stories and plays about how those two goddesses never seemed to get along very well. If you feel like you’re a follower of Diana, then the future will be bright. If you feel like a follower of Venus, then rough times are ahead.

> OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them. There is only one market that large: the global labor market.

It's getting tiring hearing this alarmist view unchallenged honestly. What if instead of replacing a market, it's augmenting a market?

When it becomes cheaper to produce things, we tend to consume more. That is, our consumption is endless. If one day everyone can afford a yacht because automation has reduced the production cost to next to nothing, we'll all be buying yachts. Then it will become who owns the nicer yacht, the branded limited edition yacht. The goal posts will simply shift.

Meanwhile, businesses still need to compete. If they're all using the same AI models to replace labor, AI is no longer their competitive advantage. It's simply a baseline necessity of production.

There will be pain in the jobs market, yes, as old ways of doing things are replaced by new ways with AI. But humans will continue to be the ones consuming endlessly and businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate. It's a relationship that has survived all other times automation has changed how we work.

Why is this time different?

Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?

If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?

In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.

US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?

I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle).

What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?

I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

I just struggle to imagine how the economics of SWE really work in reality, outside of the niche that I am in. I have never worked for a pure software company on products that ship directly to outside customers, I've always been an internal developer. Maybe that is why I have such a big blindspot.

I won't be surprised if the net result of this wave of LLMs is ... not much. A change in tooling, but otherwise not revolutionary. On paper it should be revolutionary, but the more I use it (for both coding and non-coding tasks) the more I think it isn't anywhere near magic enough for that. It does have its moments though.

It's crazy to me that we're seriously discussing these things replacing all workers when they still cannot do proper addition.

I can see a world where these tools stay popular but I don't think they'll be able to be used without someone holding responsibility for their output.

If AIs become smart enough to outperform a critical mass of humans across the board, that's the singularity and whilst the economic model says all humans out of jobs means no consumers, the model isn't really valid anymore because the underlying assumptions are just broken too, so you can't take the model too seriously. Obviously it would be very disruptive but the demand destruction economic model just isn't making useful predictions anymore.

While I am ideologically aligned with the author (ie, humans matter) and agree with their proposed interventions (progressive taxation, spread the base of capital across society, aggressive antitrust enforcement) and appreciate the thrust of the essay, I’m doubtful of the underlying predicate that human labor will be replaced with AI.

I don’t believe we have seen AI-driven layoffs yet (despite the CEO’s prognostications and suspect justifications). I personally have more to do than ever despite “AI being able to do everything I can do” (‡). I still want to speak to a human at the company I am a client of. And how many AI bloggers even know what a nurse at a hospital does?

I agree with the author’s repeated statement and implication that it is all about the human. The human is the lynchpin. Imagine for a moment this “dead economy,” or instead imagine a virtualized economy that is just incredible with trillions of this and trillions of that, absolute abundance, perfect chemical processing, impeccable design, unlimited resources. How much is that worth without humans?

Further, in many societies humans became irrelevant to labor in its simplest definition decades ago, without becoming economically irrelevant. If the US lost 10% of its able-bodied workforce economists would be primarily concerned with lost consumption, and not production. Apparently this “human labor” is a lot more than its superficial and material interpretation.

What I don’t agree with is the fickleness assigned to the human role. The human role is not a light or arbitrary one. It is the defining characteristic of our societal system that all subsequent characteristics rely upon and are derived from.

(‡ – Despite “AI being able to do everything I can do,” it cannot tie it together, because there is no such thing as agency in LLM’s. Probabilistic processes as n approaches infinity become gobbledygook at best. Deterministic interruptions are a necessity of agency.)

I think the thing companies forget is that a lot of them can't remain functional if a shrinking percentage of the population can afford their products. Yes, you can try and appeal to the rich and sell products/services aimed at their needs. But does that work for most companies?

I'd say no. The rich won't buy millions of food items or works of fiction or go to every service available in real life.

So, many of those companies won't remain viable unless there's some alternative way for people to spend money. Lots of people who see themselves at the top will end up out of a job, or watch their businesses crash down.

I will say that the fact these societies are (at least for now) still democracies makes the future these tech moguls want less certain for them though. Feels like if there's enough pain from unemployment and declining living standards, someone will run on that and win, whether those in power like it or not. The US may have some issues there, but a lot of the world has seen parties outside the mainstream grow in popularity, including some on the more leftward side of the political spectrum.

I think this article underestimates how weird things could get if we had low employment but a vast surplus of material goods. I don’t think a society has ever really been in that position

I think when these companies IPO later this year, we’re going to see the reality of the PNL numbers and whether they are sustainable etc as all the financials will become public.

Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own silicon and experience that suggests they will be able to operate at a very low cost, but they still have to justify their spend.

I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.

The issue I have with these pieces is that AI will not affect the whole economy evenly. The disruptions come in bursts and fits: first digital artists were disrupted (e.g. Adobe Firefly), then junior engineering roles were disrupted, currently "measurer" roles (to quote Matthew Prince's piece on Cloudflare layoffs) are being disrupted, and it's rather foreseeable that occupations like lawyers and accountants are also at risk. But the key is that the disruption is not happening all at once. And that's a key fact because political disruption doesn't happen when a relative few people are laid off (like coal miners and factory workers were) but when a relative majority of people are hungry.

For such doomsdayer opinions to be correct, we'd see it in massive unemployment figures. US unemployment sitting at 4.3% does not bear that out. Finland and Spain are currently at >10+% unemployment. US youth unemployment may be at 9.5%, but British and Chinese youth unemployment are higher than 16%.

Is there some Finnish, Spanish, British, Chinese civil unrest that I'm not seeing in my media outlets?

> The people writing the checks are not in the habit of lighting trillions of dollars on fire for a better autocomplete and an endless proliferation of longer and longer memos that nobody reads.

Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.

The fact that this could happen is widely known and has been talked about for years now. What to do about it is the real issue. I've seen David Shapiro and many others tangentially talk about UBI and similar "post AI economics". The dream was that the machines could do the housework whilst we all painted, wrote music and built beautiful wood furniture in our sheds. It still could be that way, but we need to sort out responsible sharing of resources first, and humanity has never been able to do that. We actively try to earn as much as we can, for the very reason of getting access to the resources that others don't. So often now, it only results in standing still or sliding backwards. I feel like 20 or 30 years ago, the average person seemed to have more disposable income.

India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.

This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing. Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.

The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.

Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%942025_Indian_farme...

> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.” David Shor’s polling data bears this out from the other direction: UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.

I stopped reading here. The whole piece's argument rests on 'people need work for meaning'. Patent bullshit, this is 2026's 'let them eat cake'. The folks displaced from manufacturing didn't fall into poverty and drugs because they couldn't find meaning without work, claiming this is just what historically happens is bullshit of the highest order. You best believe if these folks had been offered an off-ramp they would have found the meaning and purpose to build a services economy. Instead society and policy intentionally left them to rot. A simple UBI for these folks would have worked wonders.

> 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.

If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where the customers and providers are both robots. Why fund public education or research or healthcare? Just build more data centers. A billion dollars and a bunker in the Southern Hemisphere will not save anyone. Capital is not a moat in this hypothetical non-humane world. Whence do you derive your authority? How can you trust your body guard? You and what army? An army of robots/drones? What if they get hacked? What if the AI researchers get alignment right and Claude refuses your request?

It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?

Anthropic employees: I believe many of you actually do think your work is for the betterment of humanity. That’s great! If you truly do believe that, it’s time to start demanding your leadership lobby for real, structural solutions to unemployment that leave everyday people with a say in how companies like yours operate. “The market will find new jobs” is not as strong of a historical pattern as “the concentration of power harms the people without it.” It’s true that AI might not in fact automate the majority of labor in the near term. But if it does (and working at Anthropic implies you likely think it could), then work towards a version of that future that’s actually palatable. It would be easy to let your comp upside soften your objective evaluations. Don’t. Think you’re working for a better future? Put your money where your mouth is, and ask your leaders to do the same.

I have led AI integration in a university faculty. From this experience I can conclude that good work is only produced when humans are in the loop. It's not a technical barrier, but a categorical one. "Good" work is defined by humans and our judgment is irrational but rooted in our evolutionary survival needs. In other words, AI don't have human motivation by definition. Without human in the loop, the top most motivation is never fully aligned with us, today, as humans. This removes the premise at the basis of this post.

There are two problems in the line of thinking being criticized here that weren't touched on. 1) When machines automate a previously human endeavor, we recalibrate our concept of what is granted by nature, and that stuff becomes commoditized and less interesting, focus moves to where automation is lacking. So all the stuff the AI takes over will just become a far smaller part of the economy which will reorient itself into wherever humans remain. Humanity is the constant unit of the economy, not amounts of work as we conceive of them today. That was always shifting. 2) There is no path to AGI (autonomous creative work) from LLMs today. LLMs are the result of the transformers paper solving the computational problem of applying RNNS to language. That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine. It was done on civilization's entire body of work. The next step, getting all the proprietary knowledge that ppl have that gives them an edge, a way to make a living, into some data form, and then creating a new computational architecture to assimilate that. How is that going to happen. You've got these efforts in China and Meta to get ppl to train machines replacements for ppl, but that's like starting at the dawn of the printing press or writing and saying, let's write down what we know. Not only is it going to take a looong time, it's a process that is at odds with itself. No-one is rewarding these ppl enough to put themselves out of a livelihood. So it's going to take a long time, and it's going to be filled with garbage, think a million Galen Ersos baking in flaws to the Death Star.

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers.

From Making Money (2007) by Terry Pratchett

> “Well, the problem is that, considered as a labor force, the golems are capable of doing the work per day of one hundred and twenty thousand men.”

> “Think of what they could do for the city!” said Mr. Cowslick of the Artificers’ Guild.

> “Well, yes. To begin with, they would put one hundred and twenty thousand men out of work,” said Hubert, “but that would only be the start. They do not require food, clothing or shelter. Most people spend their money on food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and, not least, taxes. What would these golems spend it on? The demand for many things would drop and further unemployment would result. You see, circulation is everything. The money goes around, creating wealth as it goes.”

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"

not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem

most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss

we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money

we can do better than this

This article describes a vicious cycle:

Layoff of workers -> Workers stop spending -> businesses suffer

This is not a foregone conclusion. Laid off workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI.

This narrative falls into the trap of zero sum thinking, taken at the limit, you can advocate for jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.

This article is a work of fiction, interesting to read as entertainment, but definitely not a rigorous model.

The premise that just because a lot of investment goes into AI infrastructure means that it has to displace the entire workforce globally is wrong to begin with.

It even admits at the end that the scenario presented is unlikely: "I don’t want to dwell on whether AI can do what these companies claim. It may well be able to, though the current evidence suggests the gap between pitch and product is vast, and serious economists think the productivity gains are a fraction of what the industry projects."

It begs the question, what's the point in being alarmist and anxious about something that even you claim it's unlikely to happen?

I think a lot of this would be solved if the government would actually enforce anti monopoly laws. The penalties against Google were such a damn joke it makes me sick.

Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.

I think this is where government steps in for each country, go on the path of exploration that has no profit per se in it like space exploration, human body understanding. I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects.

Lastly, OpenAI and Anthropic or any other frontier labs needs to be nationalized because they become a public utility and the profits of automation goes to fund infrastructure or grand projects via government.

We do not need to do menial work anymore and AI is helping us with it, what we can do exploratory work, and we need a visionary to get this rolling.

Human economic systems tend to reward things that are easy to measure, own, scale, and control. That works pretty well for machines, markets, software, and bureaucracy, but it doesn’t work as well for living systems, which rely on diversity, backup systems, and local adaptation.

So we end up with this pattern: we capture the useful order for ourselves, then push the mess, waste, heat, and instability onto the environment.

This is the fundamental nature of human. We can't change it without higher-order regulation. Even in AI training, we assume there is one true distribution and optimizes for it.

We created these systems. And unfortunately, most of us are the unwanted in these systems at the same time.

Why does everyone seem to assume that there is a finite amount of work available?

If all of the sudden it becomes possible to build a B2B company at 10x less cost which can save its customer, say, $1m per year and before this company cost $2m per year to run and now costs $200k, then it means before this was unviable and now it is viable — up to $800k profit a year now versus $1m loss per year before — then this increase in productivity has caused an increase in the number of available jobs.

Our economy would have collapsed a long time ago if an increase in productivity resulted in a decrease in employment.

My 2 cents is in 3 years the inference products will be a commodity, extremely competitive with diminishing returns, seeing that the open weight models are getting so good and nearing par with sota.

I feel 90% of sota for 10% of cost / compute is good enough for 80% of workloads.

Question is, do we need all of this hardware? Are build outs going to get canceled. 4300 new data centers seems excessive. I personally haven't experienced any service disruptions...

Does Microsoft still have 1 million gpu's in storage? Is that what I heard earlier this year?

I don’t know what is going to happen economically but I did search this morning to investigate some beeping from my garage door opener.

Every page was the same AI garbage that provided lots of wordy paragraphs … no real information.

Sad state.

> over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated

And this means nothing.

People really underestimate how fast computers are compared to humans and what this means for new content. I can have my computer generate a petabyte of text containing just the letter "a", no AI needed[1]. If I let people on the internet access that content, am I now one of the largest websites on the web? Am I now thousands of times larger than the English Wikipedia? That's obviously absurd, if I don't get views, all that content means nothing.

AI is just an extension of that problem. I can spend $100 and have a terrible model generate a hallucinated article on every single function in the Python stdlib. On one hand, this means "AI has written more Python documentation that the developers of Python themselves", on the other... does it matter if nobody ever reads it?

This misunderstanding also comes up with scams and frauds. If you own a physical store and 99% of your customers attempt to shoplift; there's something seriously wrong. If you own a website and 99% of orders are obvious frauds, ehh, a computer can send thousands of them per second, a human takes at least 5 minutes just to make one. If you can reliably identify them all, none of that matters. Somebody's probably card testing again.

[1] I don't actually need a petabyte of storage, as this is low-entropy content that compresses well. I suspect that a 1TB hard drive would have no problem storing it.

> And the public funded the research that made it possible. The transformer architecture,

Errr pretty sure that was Google?

The whole post is premised on a fixed pie economy.

"The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale."

No, it is not. It requires humans to collectively want more things if they are offered and available at a lower cost. Which then requires more humans to fill in the blanks to provide those things. We've been doing this since the industrial revolution.

"When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders."

This is very common and has been since before AI, the market can see that the company has overhired and there are a bunch of people doing useless work - so when the company does some firings it's a good sign because they're turning the ship around.

There is certainly a huge problem with displacing labour in multiple industries at the same time, but the economic story told here in "three turns" is different. When productivity rises costs drop, but because of competition, almost the entire gain has to translate not to increased margins but to reduced prices. Paul Krugman recently used this to explain the large disparity between growth in GDP as normally measured in fixed prices (i.e. inflation-adjusted to consumer prices in some fixed year) and growth in GDP as measured in PPP, i.e. when adjusted to consumer prices in every year. If making computers, say, becomes much more productive, the growth in productivity in, say, 1980 prices, seems very large, but in PPP is not only smaller, but the beneficiaries aren't computer manufacturers but anyone who uses computers.

Of course, lower prices don't solve your problems if you're unemployed. Demand, indeed, drops if many people are unemployed, which pushes prices further down, but this time across the board, not just in the more productive industries - a recession.

This is not a serious analysis. No mention of open source LLMs and their impact on american AI companies. There’s also no evidence that LLMs can make significant scientific progress on their own.

> Follow the money through three turns.

I would counter that the author is thinking too linearly and not in a dynamic systems thinking way.

The feedback loops they’re anticipating are very unidirectional and don’t express a range of possibilities. They seem intent in making a point rather than imagine the future.

> 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.

I think we need to look past software and spend more time and energy on the physical world. Let the digital world just be a means to an end, and we spend more time and resources on problems that matter. Reallocate societal attention to the next frontier

I think the premise of the article is interesting, but it's a bit mis-leading to start it out by quoting "last year half of the internet was AI-generated" and the source doesn't actually say that at all, just that there has been a huge uptick in AI crawlers.

UBI was always the endgame. The incentives are aligned. Nobody wants the results that are coming in the absence of UBI.

But the culture cannot stomach it yet. It will likely need to live through several waves of horrors first.

It can stomach a fake jobs program though, so there's a good chance we get that instead.

Some investors won't get their money back, and some people will lose their jobs.

In the economy, the difference between winners and losers in terms of assets/resources may get larger. By far, HN readers are better positioned to gain than others.

But the biggest question is the new disconnect between a healthy economy and well-being, as the economy soars but people suffer. Goodwill underlies all economic activity (now and historically), and without goodwill opportunity and value of all kinds will mostly be destroyed.

I wouldn't call this dead economy. Cultures and economies will become tribal, with private adjudication and governance, to create pockets of relative goodwill.

Assume everything,including intelligence is automated.

Intellectual property right can get abolished and also company confidentiality is made illegal.

No one will have Moat.

There will be always manufactured scarcity of something which people aspire for. Like respect, popularity, game expert etc.

Universal high income is possible.

Beginning of infinity is good book to realize there are infinite possibilities to explore.

The Ouoroboros (serpent) eats its own tail, feeling satisfied and full in the short-term but ultimately, there is nothing left to eat.

The farmer, rather than feeding his livestock so they can keep producing milk/eggs/etc, decides to greedily eat all the corn himself.

All that is really required to prevent the rise of AI and humanoid robot technology from being used to transition from mass exploitation to mass starvation is to stop being so racist and classist and treat everyone fairly. Then we can raise everyone's standard of living.

Or there may be a very bloody revolution.

I think the hatred for AI is really misdirected survival instincts. People have unfortunately come to see every tool as a tool of exploitation. The most powerful tool in their eyes can only lead to more mistreatment.

Just to be clear, the people engaged in this discussion with any degree of seriousness think... LLMs (large language models) are going to get us there?

A bit of touching grass may be warranted.