PALO ALTO, CA - With Silicon Valley boasting that artificial intelligence could replace millions of jobs around the world, currently laid-off workers have reported having more free time to form angry mobs dedicated to storming and torching the homes of the tech billionaires responsible.
All of that requires you have money. Which you don’t have anymore, because you don’t have a job that pays you. Unless the system changes radically, at some point enough people can’t even buy food and have only time in their hands. So what are they going to do?
Steal what they need?
And if millions of people start stealing? The point is, if the scenario of AI taking away jobs and making people useless keeps happening at the rate it is happening now, our societies will collapse in some way. Unless it’s solved by other changes, fast
I get the impression we’re in the final stages of “money” as we’ve known it and heading to some sort of digital feudalism where most people don’t own much of anything and rent, lease, or pay a subscription to access everything else. You don’t need to buy a smart fridge that analyzes your behavior because it was supplied by your landlord. Can’t tamper with it, can’t replace it, and older models are no longer supported. Can’t repair the 40yo car you own because it’s no longer considered “safe”, plus they quit making replacement parts so you have to get a new one. I would not at all be surprised to watch them shift to an all digital money market where your rent, bills, and subscriptions are withheld and distributed as a convenience and when you go shopping the retailer adjusts the price based on your ability and willingness to pay more. You might make 10% more than your coworker but WalMart knows that and gouges you for every last cent of discretionary income they can pull. Can’t shop anywhere else, it’s all the same because the same people own everything. Jobs will exist, the illusion of “work hard/climb the ladder” will be abandoned and the tasks it’s cheaper/more efficient to use human labor in will be your career options. If you cannot find a mate one will be assigned to you and the expenses of your children (obligated to provide) will be deducted from your wages, after taxes of course.
Dystopian and dark, probably a bit of a stretch, but I do think there’s an effort to make private property and capitalism as we’ve known it a thing of the past. Not in a socialist, collectivist way, but to get to some perpetual indentured servitude.
What to do about it? Sink the ship. Yeah, we’re on it; so are they. Some of us won’t survive, there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but we’re constantly patching up a 250yo vessel that has some parts worth saving but is mostly rotten. We sleep in the bilge while they enjoy the cabin. Scuttle it and start again. I get why people still aren’t ready to do that, but I guess we’ll see what they think of our prospects when elections start getting cancelled, suppressed, or ignored.
That’s the key thing I was kinda talking about. Work will always exist - but there won’t be enough for everyone. At this rate there’s quickly going to be millions of “useless” people with no market value, no jobs, no nothing - this has already started to happen in China for example. What will they do then, when the mass of people gets big enough? The systems aren’t capable of getting rid of all of us quickly enough either, since this problem is already rising way faster than even fascists can build death camps, as the real cause is companies trying to maximize their short-term profits without caring about anything else, and not some carefully orchestrated plan aiming for this scenario.
And yeah, the ships are on the way to sink themselves right now. Societies with safety nets will likely fare a bit longer than ones with no social security, since the options are either taxing the AI etc. companies enough to pay sort of general income to everyone, or the total collapse with the figurative (or literal) guillotines being build
Pure speculation- they’ll let it happen. Boomers are on their way out and the price being paid by the next generation for their greed is that insurance companies, funeral homes, creditors, and their own hubris won’t pass along the wealth they inherited from their parents. Many have held positions of power (public and private) at the expense of allowing other members of society to progress into (except in cases of nepotism and cronyism). With them phasing out and the decline in birth rates among Mils and Zs, it might not be as much of a crunch. Toss in a few endless wars and you can clear out some more to the meat grinder, build new private prisons to house “illegal immigrants” and once you’ve made a dent in that you can keep them stocked with the folks you can’t deport as easily. Maybe they’ll get lucky and mass resistance will break out at home and they can gun down some more. At best you’ll get the one or two who snap and are eliminated even if the fire doesn’t spread. The rest will either submit, accept poverty, eke out a living, die young because they’re malnourished and have no access to healthcare, they’ll starve, or suicide. Even under the current system where many live paycheck to paycheck, impoverished Americans don’t live in the kind of poverty that many in other places do. There’s places where people live and die in garbage dumps. I don’t think there’s much concern for the people of this country, how they live, how they die, so long as there’s enough infrastructure to keep the standard of living the elite enjoy up to par and they don’t have to see the poverty from their penthouse.