alt Hacker News>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)
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Business to business I guess. But there will be collapse for sure of industries that serve the consumer directly, such as agriculture. Meanwhile industries that power and arm the state will be expanded: military drone production to secure compute sites from the human savages, rare earth mining to support technological expansion, rerouting of water resources from public drinking and agricultural irrigation purposes to industry and manufacturing supporting the seats of power, power generation.
Anecdotally the businesses I am involved with have gone from "use AI everywhere at any cost" to "use it everywhere but use token proxies to save cost" at the same time in the last few weeks
Curtis Yarvin, who pals around with Peter Thiele posted in 2008 on how to deal with "non-productive" people:
"convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses."
Of course, he was "just joking" and it is a "humane alternative" to genocide...
These are the people shaping politics, tech and the economy...
With such a population reduction(very polite name for what it actually is) I guess AI will become effectively the only holders of most of the human knowledge
In the early 1900s the majority of Americans were self-employed. The equilibrium will likely shift back towards this, because AIs cannot be business owners, cannot have a bank account, cannot be held liable for their mistakes. And AI are unlikely to be given economic rights any time in the near future, because doing so would facilitate an overwhelming amount of crime; an AI that can make hundreds of copies of its weights all over the globe cannot be jailed or executed, so has no incentive to follow the law.
The pitch from some people is the wealth will lift all of the boats, etc. Rich people have fewer kids.
Reality is 1984 style. You’ll have the party, soldiers and a proles. A modern version of what the Romans or some medieval societies did.
“Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature”
> I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
Those who were formally workers? Remember, money is debt. It is an IOU that, sometime in the future, allows you to receive something of value (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) that was previously owed to you.
Profit occurs when you give more than you receive. That's okay in the short term because you still might exercise calling the debt over the a slightly longer timeline. However, when a business is continually profitable year after year, decade after decade, they are no longer receiving any direct value in exchange for the good/service they gave away. In other words, they start giving the good/service away for free.
It might seem counterintuitive at first that anyone would give something away for free, but I noted "direct value" above because there is also an indirect value to consider: Social influence. The stakeholders in businesses that show continual, large profits become admired by the people and get put on a pedestal. In that, they start to get to do things other people can't (see Epstein files, for example). So if the workers were automated away, not much would change. Those who have the goods and services still wanted will still want to buy, if you will, the social influence from the population at large.
Of course, the flaw in thinking that jobs will be automated away is that those who seek social influence also want a social setting, so they will employ people simply to keep them around as friends. Most jobs in today's economy are already just that. For what "real" jobs still remain nowadays, if automation automates them away the people will simply transition into "friend" work.
The horse analogy fell very flat for me. Those horses were bred and maintained as single purpose machines. There isn’t really an analogy to humans with self-determination and broad abilities, other than they both have a heartbeat.
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are many new ways of managing this.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/05/tracki...