Who will buy your services if you fire us all?

datadrivenangel

This is one of the biggest questions as the singularity compresses the deployment of capital and material resource allocation: if the majority of people aren't competitive with machines, who provides for them and how is that structured?

Apreche

The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.

loyukfai

They can get rid of non billionaires next?

luizfzs

That's the greatest contradiction in our current system. Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.

carlosjobim

That's when you whip up a war to kill off as many young men of your own people as possible. Why do you think war has always been with us?

zaik

> who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. Very optional consumption.

didip

I think the billionaire class will expand BNPL type products so everyone will stay in-debt forever. And expand gig economy so everyone can stay "employed" forever.

a_e_k

Analogous to that, this is something that I'd been wondering about with respect to hardware prices as silicon is reallocated from consumers to data centers: how am I to make heavy use of frontier (edit: i.e., cloud/data center-provided) AI models if I can't easily buy a machine worth using it on?

joe_the_user

One of the theses of JM Keynes (of "Keynesianism" fame) in his General theory was that the rich save and the poor spend. That's been an ongoing assumption of state policy for a while now. One factor to consider is that today we seem to have a mid-level consumer sector - a group of people with high ($100K+) incomes who still spend nearly all that income. This group may provide the demand to support the investments of the super rich while still allowing a large percentage of people to sink to the underclass.

fancyfredbot

Who will vote against seizing your assets if you fire us all?

schnitzelstoat

We’ve seen this before when the mines and factories closed. Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.

mistic92

We need global UBI but it's not going to happen.

vanuatu

I'm not sure I follow Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth? In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those

stavros

Wait, if I had a company, why would I want to pay my workers more so they'd buy more? That just sounds like I'm keeping my money with extra steps?

Aurornis

> The government hands cash to displaced people, who immediately send that money right back to the tech companies to pay for subscriptions, automated food delivery, or digital entertainment. No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions. Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services. UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries. It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?

desireco42

I think this is legitimate concern that a lot of well paying jobs will essentially ruin prospects of more upscale services.

bensyverson

Real question: who honestly believes that labor is going away? Throughout history, technologists have promised that increased efficiency will mean that people can work fewer hours—or not at all. But it has never materialized. Not during the Industrial Revolution, not in the 1950s, not during the dawn of the Information Age. What makes us so confident that "this time it's different?"

kittikitti

The comparison to slavery is apt. With increased surveillance and austerity measures, workers are being turned into underpaid labor with the constant threat of losing their livelihoods. Coupled with anti-union departments like Human Resources, there is no better way to describe the job market in 2026. Simply put, it's techno feudalism and we are the new slaves. The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.

Havoc

Society has managed a transition from gold to fiat and also towards a world where the majority live paycheque to paycheque and still diligently work ever harder. ...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion

rvz

"Agents" Humans will be cut off from work and will be on a forever UBI system that you will have to be spending tokens as currency for basic services /s.