As stated, the companies that push AI aren’t concerned with the long-term consequences. But if you want to know how the individuals who run those companies personally feel, do a search for billionaire doomsday preppers.
TL;DR: They’ve got a vision for the future. We’re not in it.
All kinds of people fatasize about the end of times. From the losely asociated groups of rednecks, to the religious cults. The rich just has a better budget for their hobbies, and their toys are more visible. Which, paradoxicaly, disqualifies them from the prepping game.
Number one rule about the secret bunker is not telling anyone about the secret bunker.
Everyone will be working multiple shitty service jobs that robots are not cost effective to automate. Our miserable wages will be just sufficient to keep the wheels on the cart from falling off.
Other companies? Companies also need things, so they would also need things to buy and sell. Buying and selling to each other doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, particularly if the goods are non-physical. A company selling editing services for articles to a company that writes those articles for a news company who might be selling stocks to an investment company, and ad space to an ad company, etc.
Realistically, though, that doesn’t tend to be that high a priority, or much of a long-term worry. Most of the concern these days seems to be focused more on the short-term profit more so than anything else, even if it will ultimately harm the company.
Not that it would really matter for most, since a lot of the people who might otherwise be affected would likely be out and away by the time that that rolls around. It would barely affect them.
This doesn’t sound sustainable at all. A billionaire only needs so much gasoline, food, medicine, TVs…
Collapse of entire industries will happen way before we even get a chance to see industries reinvent themselves to cater to billionaires. Don’t believe me? Just look at what happened to the economy during the pandemic.
Yeah of course industries will collapse. 100 car factories will close, 5 superyacht factories will open, tying up the same amount of productivity. Owned by the same guy.
There will be tons of spacecraft launchpads, private jet hangars, etc.
The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we’ll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.
Except it's not. That wealth isn't cash in some bank account, in most cases it's a stock in companies these people built from scratch - Bezos made Amazon, Gates Microsoft, Buffet Berkshire Hathaway and so on
The wealth of super rich is allocated in places that produce goods and services
How is everyone going to be fired by AI? First define AI, because what we have now is a bunch of LLMs.
In the end, it’s more practical to have both working in tandem. You have a person who has common sense guiding and an AI tool who assists the person in doing the work.
At worst, people would have to up skill/re skill to have working experience with AI tools.
But people are not gonna stop working. New jobs will be created and some old jobs will disappear, as it has been the case
They don’t need anyone to buy products if they already have all of the resources, and an army of drone soldiers and slaves. For an example, watch Elysium. It’ll be like that, but without the opportunity to revolt.
Hell yeah! People in 50s and even 20s worked 40 hours per week to feed a family of 4! Now we can do that by working much less than… wait, not even 2 working parents safely feed a family of 4? Even with all the gains in productivity?
When there is a scarcity of resources a population will shrink to sustainable levels. Right now there are too many people to share the scraps left from the billionaires hoovering up all the capital. People will stop having kids, others will die homeless, and population will decrease just as happens in any population of animals experiencing scarcity.
I agree it’s going to be problem. It’s already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn’t pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that’s why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is relatively more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that used to be expensive but are now cheap) and don’t understand how life is more expensive.