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.
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.