i think the points you are countering and your own points are both right, just operating in different timescales.
automation is increasing, jobs are being replaced, and its going to get extremely bad as the unimaginative top 1% will try to maintain a death grip on business as usual and not be willing to cede a dollar of profits for the sake of human wellbeing and social wellbeing.
the real question is just how bad will it get before real change happens? what is the actual tipping point where trying to uphold "business as usual" is actually more expensive to the bottom line and to society than it is to rewrite the rules of the game and move to UBI and a post-labor future?
If the behavior and choices of the 1% throughout history are any indication, i think things are going to get catastrophically bad before they eventually get better. we will eventually find out what new jobs look like in the new AI world, we may eventually pass UBI and have a whole fundamentally different understanding of our relationship to work. but i suspect it will be too little too late as we are stuck in the entrenched ways of wage slavery and we are in for the roughest next 20 years ever
You’re not taking into account the true nature of the change. This isn’t just some chatbot who is going to automate the dumbass jobs. The nature of consumption will change. It’ll lead to automated socialism, enough to survive and then those who want “more” will find creative ways to contribute using the AI.
So you think AIs can't consume? Perhaps you're right, but there's still the race to the bottom, to capture all the profits while someone else is still paying the salaries of inefficient meatbags that will buy your product.
> This creates a paradox: while it might be profitable for any individual company to automate their workforce, if every company does it simultaneously, they collectively destroy their customer base by leaving them without jobs or/and with less monies to spend. This doesn't mean automation won't happen – individual companies will still pursue it for competitive advantage.
This is literally the orthodox Marxist argument (the so-called "tendency of the rate of profit to fall") for why capitalism will inevitably destroy itself. Didn't work as modus ponens, won't work as modus tollens. The rate of profit can do all sorts of stuff depending on the details of the situation; so too can any supposed "built-in brakes".
fun and interesting take my guy, love the candidness. while capitalism won't let AI take everybody's job, it won't stop the big corp from redundancying office jobs and you know what fair enough i'd be concerned about that.
time to pick up a trade or live on a fishing island or both.
technocapital emerge from human minds, and it won't and can't kill its substrate... though nick land seems to believe that it will eventually replace biology with electronics... but anyhow, the danger is more from other humans using technocapital to enslave other humans... this emergent creature is amoral and there is no law of nature that prevents horrific outcomes with more advanced technology... it looks like humans are the only conscious and moral agents in this universe, and so we will be the ones to choose the future
Don't let some basic understanding of 19th century macroeconomics block your fantasy.
Let there be AI. Let it be more efficient than you are, at a lower cost. You're not afraid, because capitalism needs you as a consumer, who else will buy the flying cars produced by the autonomous machines?
Jokes on you, the machines are more versatile than ever, and their masters are not stupid. Your wage will plummet, and thus they won't account for your need for a flying car. There's plenty of stuff to produce instead - even better machines, or maybe spaceships for the 1%? Perhaps a few pretty monuments? Wealth inequality just took a leap, creating a bullish market for crazy luxury goods.
"The system still needs me", you think, full of hope for better times, while you work more for less. At least it still hungers for your work. But the cost of machine-powered surveillance and oppression is sinking with the ongoing victory march of technology, drastically lowering the demand for your happiness. Your worth as consumer is only as great as your power as a worker, and now that the system can produce without you, now that you've become replacable along with all your other fellow humans at the bottom, now you're lucky if you get the opportunity to slave away yourself for amenities (like food).
The system does not really need you so much anymore, and you yearn for the near future when technology might transcend you completely, finally making you completely useless. Capitalism does not need apes after all, and maybe then you can be free.
The problem you’re overlooking is that there’s no central CEO of “capitalism”.
If AI can save money by making the company fire all of their employees, the CEO and board have a fiduciary duty to do that. Consequences to the larger market or society in general be damned.
You're completely misunderstanding it, compadre. The thing about capitalism is that it's not just an invisible hand - it's a egregore or more than that. A hyperstitional entity emerged from centuries of market behaviors, profit-seeking algorithms, and accumulated human greed. No CEO needed when you've got a self-perpetuating thoughtform running the show through distributed cognition. This egregore doesn't even need explicit control. It propagates through mimetic desire and memetic evolution, embedding itself in corporate decision matrices and quarterly earnings calls. We're all just processing nodes in its distributed will-to-profit. When every CEO simultaneously optimizes for shareholder value, they're not making independent choices. They're executing subroutines in capitalism's noospheric manifestation. The fiduciary duty is just one of its behavioral enforcement mechanisms. As any "being" the egregore only really cares about survival but it operates on a different layer of reality and we can't resist because we're already part of its cognitive substrate. Capitalism isn't a system we created and maintain but an entity that emerged and captured us. Now it uses human institutions as its organs and market dynamics as its nervous system. The memetic infection is complete. It won't let itself die, compadre. Be humbled.
This is the exact reason I don’t believe in AI hype, just as I didn’t believe in crypto hype. You need consumers to build it at scale, but if consumers don’t have a job, automation and AI “magic” makes no sense.
I just can’t take it. There’s UBI and you’re argument starts with the premise that the system is futile towards exploiting and without generating any real value.
Wishful thinking. All that means is the overlords keep people juuuust fed enough that we don't start a revolution. Or, more likely, superhuman genius robot police and soldiers make it so it's literally impossible for those without power and their own robot armies to do a single thing the overlords don't want us to.
If all production and consumption is by robots and computers, the market still works. It just doesn't provide anything for people anymore.
i think the points you are countering and your own points are both right, just operating in different timescales.
automation is increasing, jobs are being replaced, and its going to get extremely bad as the unimaginative top 1% will try to maintain a death grip on business as usual and not be willing to cede a dollar of profits for the sake of human wellbeing and social wellbeing.
the real question is just how bad will it get before real change happens? what is the actual tipping point where trying to uphold "business as usual" is actually more expensive to the bottom line and to society than it is to rewrite the rules of the game and move to UBI and a post-labor future?
If the behavior and choices of the 1% throughout history are any indication, i think things are going to get catastrophically bad before they eventually get better. we will eventually find out what new jobs look like in the new AI world, we may eventually pass UBI and have a whole fundamentally different understanding of our relationship to work. but i suspect it will be too little too late as we are stuck in the entrenched ways of wage slavery and we are in for the roughest next 20 years ever
You’re not taking into account the true nature of the change. This isn’t just some chatbot who is going to automate the dumbass jobs. The nature of consumption will change. It’ll lead to automated socialism, enough to survive and then those who want “more” will find creative ways to contribute using the AI.
I mean…is this why the U.S. is simultaneously embracing AI and fascism?
This meta-organism might pivot from b2c to b2-rulers-who-order-custom-made-technological-marvels-of-incomprehencible-scale.
So you think AIs can't consume? Perhaps you're right, but there's still the race to the bottom, to capture all the profits while someone else is still paying the salaries of inefficient meatbags that will buy your product.
> This creates a paradox: while it might be profitable for any individual company to automate their workforce, if every company does it simultaneously, they collectively destroy their customer base by leaving them without jobs or/and with less monies to spend. This doesn't mean automation won't happen – individual companies will still pursue it for competitive advantage.
This is literally the orthodox Marxist argument (the so-called "tendency of the rate of profit to fall") for why capitalism will inevitably destroy itself. Didn't work as modus ponens, won't work as modus tollens. The rate of profit can do all sorts of stuff depending on the details of the situation; so too can any supposed "built-in brakes".
fun and interesting take my guy, love the candidness. while capitalism won't let AI take everybody's job, it won't stop the big corp from redundancying office jobs and you know what fair enough i'd be concerned about that.
time to pick up a trade or live on a fishing island or both.
cybernetics has been a useful frame: https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/psychofauna-studies-a-manifesto
technocapital emerge from human minds, and it won't and can't kill its substrate... though nick land seems to believe that it will eventually replace biology with electronics... but anyhow, the danger is more from other humans using technocapital to enslave other humans... this emergent creature is amoral and there is no law of nature that prevents horrific outcomes with more advanced technology... it looks like humans are the only conscious and moral agents in this universe, and so we will be the ones to choose the future
Don't let some basic understanding of 19th century macroeconomics block your fantasy.
Let there be AI. Let it be more efficient than you are, at a lower cost. You're not afraid, because capitalism needs you as a consumer, who else will buy the flying cars produced by the autonomous machines?
Jokes on you, the machines are more versatile than ever, and their masters are not stupid. Your wage will plummet, and thus they won't account for your need for a flying car. There's plenty of stuff to produce instead - even better machines, or maybe spaceships for the 1%? Perhaps a few pretty monuments? Wealth inequality just took a leap, creating a bullish market for crazy luxury goods.
"The system still needs me", you think, full of hope for better times, while you work more for less. At least it still hungers for your work. But the cost of machine-powered surveillance and oppression is sinking with the ongoing victory march of technology, drastically lowering the demand for your happiness. Your worth as consumer is only as great as your power as a worker, and now that the system can produce without you, now that you've become replacable along with all your other fellow humans at the bottom, now you're lucky if you get the opportunity to slave away yourself for amenities (like food).
The system does not really need you so much anymore, and you yearn for the near future when technology might transcend you completely, finally making you completely useless. Capitalism does not need apes after all, and maybe then you can be free.
Capitalism transitioning to “techno feudalism”
You’re wrong.
The problem you’re overlooking is that there’s no central CEO of “capitalism”.
If AI can save money by making the company fire all of their employees, the CEO and board have a fiduciary duty to do that. Consequences to the larger market or society in general be damned.
You're completely misunderstanding it, compadre. The thing about capitalism is that it's not just an invisible hand - it's a egregore or more than that. A hyperstitional entity emerged from centuries of market behaviors, profit-seeking algorithms, and accumulated human greed. No CEO needed when you've got a self-perpetuating thoughtform running the show through distributed cognition. This egregore doesn't even need explicit control. It propagates through mimetic desire and memetic evolution, embedding itself in corporate decision matrices and quarterly earnings calls. We're all just processing nodes in its distributed will-to-profit. When every CEO simultaneously optimizes for shareholder value, they're not making independent choices. They're executing subroutines in capitalism's noospheric manifestation. The fiduciary duty is just one of its behavioral enforcement mechanisms. As any "being" the egregore only really cares about survival but it operates on a different layer of reality and we can't resist because we're already part of its cognitive substrate. Capitalism isn't a system we created and maintain but an entity that emerged and captured us. Now it uses human institutions as its organs and market dynamics as its nervous system. The memetic infection is complete. It won't let itself die, compadre. Be humbled.
Happened this week at my place of work. 15% workforce laid off - AI will be used by the remaining staff to keep productivity at the same level.
why can't they automate consumers?
This is the exact reason I don’t believe in AI hype, just as I didn’t believe in crypto hype. You need consumers to build it at scale, but if consumers don’t have a job, automation and AI “magic” makes no sense.
I just can’t take it. There’s UBI and you’re argument starts with the premise that the system is futile towards exploiting and without generating any real value.
but compadre, motst jobs are just glorified UBI already
Wishful thinking. All that means is the overlords keep people juuuust fed enough that we don't start a revolution. Or, more likely, superhuman genius robot police and soldiers make it so it's literally impossible for those without power and their own robot armies to do a single thing the overlords don't want us to.
If all production and consumption is by robots and computers, the market still works. It just doesn't provide anything for people anymore.
The jobs Ai will take are not jobs you would have wanted to do anyways, like making donuts.