Were already seeing a drop in product quality and reliability. Just try a search engine for practically anything. Chances are you already type “wiki” or “reddit” or “Lemmy” or whatever along with your search terms. AI(LLM) is just advanced cargo cult development. It won’t translate to physical design even though that’s being pushed by management level and marketing. Products will stop being useful altogether.
That’s on top of the tailoring to business and wealthy class as others have argued here. But even that will have to endure enshitification. Ultimately the wealthy will pay for labor on their toys(they already do, we just can’t afford those).
That, my friend, is the problem for whichever schmuck is in charge after me, a C Suite executive. By then I will be long gone on my private island, having pulled the rip cord on my golden parachute.
The real answer is no one. They will quickly realize that at the root of the economy are the regular people, and since the economy is a cycle, when you cut off a part, the cycle doesn’t work anymore.
People (doomers) here are saying businesses and rich people will, but this can only, work for a limited time, because either the products will shoot up in price since only the rich can afford them, or the businesses won’t be able to sell their products, so they can’t buy new things, which means no more revenue to the shareholders.
Think of all the companies that live from b2b models, when you look closer, they are all at some the suppliers of b2c businesses, except, maybe military companies. That company that makes the lithography machines (asml) only sells to other businesses such as tsmc. Tsmc also only sells to other businesses, but they sell to businesses that sell to consumers.
i don’t think prices will shoot up, it’s just the wealthiest will have accumulated the absolute most amount of wealth they possibly could. Everything would crash but they would own everything. That’s of course if AI can fully replace us and produce everything that humanity needs practically forever but behind a paywall.
That’s why private property is so cool. You can even enslave sentient AI to work for you because you inherited things. Capital rules all as long as it has more firepower. Though I bet the AI would be better at organizing a strike than we are.
The rich people don’t care, they’ll have already retired to their private fortress islands and gotten eaten by their own security staff long before the survivors can track them down.
Software has already been doing a lot of stock market buying and selling for many years, even before AI came along, I imagine that sort of concept but on a more expansive scale, for a start!
It sounds like the beginning of a cast system, I can’t imagine it not being abused in our current economic system. It’s also essentially welfare + a bit extra so you can actually live on it.
How will this deal with home ownership and paying for your kids education? And then your kids end up being stuck in the same situation they were born into with absolutely no way forward. It’s already like this in a sense but UBI is very likely to amplify it imo.
My main fear is how this will affect renting and house ownership. Rents will probably go up as UBI comes into play and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit. I doubt UBI will be enough for monthly mortgage payments in any case.
It’s already very hard to move past the renting stage, I imagine it will be impossible once on UBI.
The cast would be comprised of land and business owners. Again, it’s already almost the case, I just think UBI without careful considerations would amplify it.
Rents will probably go up […] and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit.
It’s the same capitalism we have now.
Whatever it does to home and rent prices, as well as inflation generally, would be temporary until the markets adjusts. That can be softened by slowly phasing it in, maybe $100/m each year. The standard supply, demand, price balancing act at play. This time with the income floor not being at $0.
I completely agree with you. UBI is overall a good idea, I just think UBI alone won’t be enough to properly deal with massive job loss and certain aspects of our economic systems are going to greatly reduce its impact. It’s a very complicated problem and we have some serious decisions to make, it’s further complicated by the fact that the best solutions will probably end up dealing a blow to the billionaire class and big corporations and they will most likely fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Depending on the details of the system… Who cares?
Sure, we can have a couple investigators working on gross abuse of the system, but we spend more money fighting social security and disability claims than it would cost to just pay every request.
Whoever still has money. Either importing wealthy immigrants to replace the American market or they’ll move their products to the markets that still have money.