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.
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.
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.
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?
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point. Domestic manufacturing production in developed nations has actually been increasing. They just don’t use humans much. You’re not losing your job to poor people overseas. You’re losing it to robots, and you have been since before the current AI craze.
What, do want a shitty graveyard shift call center job? Trust me, you aren’t losing out by not having access to that.
Unemployment isn’t even high right now. Why are you whining about a non-issue to begin with? What good would it do you to have more low paying jobs when the problem is that all the jobs are already low paying as it is? We just saw that if there are more jobs then people they’ll happily crash the economy until there aren’t just to make sure wages don’t go up. What do you hope to accomplish by spreading 30 year old conservative propaganda?
But more seriously: There is a lot of stuff that AI can't do. And is far off of. It can barely do anything at all for me. Like translate stuff or re-write an E-Mail. The rest is hype. It can't do my laundry, clean up the kitchen. It can't drive the train that gets me to work, not fix a toilet. And it's years if not decades away from being able to do it. I'd be worried if I had some callcenter job or first level support. Or was a useless manager who just pushes paper around all day. These jobs are going to be replaced fast, yes. But it'll take some time for lots of other jobs.
And if we (at some point) advance to a future, where we live in abundance, and technology can do all the hard work, so humans don't have to... Wouldn't that be great? We could do whatever we want. Of course culture and society has to change. We can't have concepts like salaries if we don't work. But by definition we'd have our basic needs met. Food will be enough, or we wouldn't not work anymore. So I guess we just do away with money. Or everyone gets a fixed amount. You could make up your own job. Do arts and crafts, or travel, or spend the day with your kids.
There is one big caveat, however: We won't automatically arrive in a Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. Currently all the AI is owned and designed by big corporations. They also own the computers to run it and they are in control of it. And there is a lot of corporate greed, lobbyism and generally unhealthy divide. I'd say it's very likely that rich people and big, greedy corporations will want to keep everything to themselves. The rich will get richer and assert their dominance with this powerful tool. The poor will get poorer. And can't compete with that at all. And despite theoretically living in a sci-fi world, it'll be a dystopia and end in a big mess / class war / oppression.
But yeah, you're right. Our current form of economy with supply and demand, and money, won't work under those conditions. And I don't think there is a fix to it sou we could keep it.
In the 2000s, there was a strong angle about how programmers would no longer exist thanks to drag and drop programming tools and website builders. The average office worker would write little programs as easy as a excel formula, and a “programmer” would cease to exist.
I remember CS professors fearing for the future as they talked about the doomsday scenario of programmer jobs ceasing to exist, going the way of human calculators and the people who put letters together for a printing press.
Of course, business is still normal. It ebbs and flows.
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