• BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    Capitalism doesn’t look that far ahead.

    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.

  • deadlyduplicate@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Which is why you place hards limits on capitalism with a lotmof oversight like in the north European countries. It can be done right ifnits done right. That is, of you wa to do it right. If you simply want to say “fuck it, I want to get rich” then you go for the no limits no safe wors style that the US is practicing.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        My base rule is that if it’s needed or used by a majority of people, then the government should have it (probably exclusively too). Like hospitals, schools, infrastructure like roads and trains, electric grid, eventually the internet.

        Now, shops and food isn’t in there, probably because we shop wildly differentt I guess, but some base could be handled by rhe government (which is usually the case, like minimum rights to food etc).

  • marcos@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    AI owners will.

    And if you then go around wandering “oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want”, “that’s way too few people to fill a market”, or “and what about all the rest?”… Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).

  • Shardikprime@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Bad news: it is going to be an artificial scarcity economy. It basically already is, we have plenty of money for everyone to live well but it is all going into hoards.

      • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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        4 months ago

        This is what the mega rich don’t seem to realize. They already have 99.9% of the wealth, but if they had 99.1% of it no one would give a shit how much money a few trust fund babies had.

        We would all be able to take care of ourselves and our families. Instead they want all the wealth and are willing to kill most of the global population along with the earth to get it.

    • Jikiya@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I would if I didn’t fear that the scarcity will then be artificial to keep groups in power. The idea is beautiful, our current direction is terrifying.

    • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • sunzu@kbin.run
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        4 months ago

        That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point.

        Ohh wow really? i guess they can really only off shore manufacturing 🤡

        • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          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?

          • sunzu@kbin.run
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            4 months ago

            You don’t know what you are talking about if you think that call center jobs are being offshored.

            Also, unemployment is low due to demographic shift.

  • NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    That’s the neat part. No one.

    If the rich can hire a handful of the middle class to build and maintain their robots, then they can just cut the poor and working poor out of the economy entirely, and they will be willing to accept any conditions for food and shelter.

    We can arrange the economy anyway we choose. Taking all of the decision making for themselves is part of the plan.

    • Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com
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      4 months ago

      They won’t need maintenance if they’re a general purpose intelligence. A technology that has the possibility to free all of humanity from scarcity, has the possibility to finally collapse dominance of aristocracy for good. Sure, they’ll try and put themselves on top somehow. But once the knowledge exists, anyone can create a version for the greater good.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

  • Hello_there@fedia.io
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    4 months ago

    If all the money is hoarded by the rich, who is going to spend money to make the economy run?

  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I see three possibilities if AI is able to eliminate a significant portion of jobs:

    1. Universal basic income, that pays out based on how productive the provider side was per person. Some portion of wealth is continually transferred to the owners.
    2. Neofeudalism, where the owners at the time of transition end up owning everything and allow people to live or not live on their land at their whim. Then they can use them for labour where needed or entertainment otherwise. Some benevolent feudal lords might generally let people live how they want, though there will always be a fear of a revolution so other more authoritarian lords might sabotage or directly war with them.
    3. Large portions of the population are left SOL to die or do whatever while the economy doesn’t care for them. Would probably get pretty violent since people don’t generally just go off to die of starvation quietly. The main question for me is if the violence would start when the starving masses have had enough of it or earlier by those who see that coming.

    I’m guessing reality will have some combination of each of those.

    • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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      4 months ago

      In the USA, it would be option 3 all the way. We would see three classes: Mega Rich, the warfighters of the mega rich, and then the rest of us left to starve.

      They wouldn’t just pull the plug and leave us to our own devices, they would actively destroy farming equipment and industry to make sure life is awful

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I’m not even sure it will be 3 classes because having a soldier class risks them deciding to just take over. This is one of the real dangers of AI, they won’t have any issue going into an area and killing everything that moves there until they are given an encrypted kill command. Or maybe the rich will even come in with an EMP (further destroying what infrastructure is left) and act like they are the heroes while secretly being the ones who give the orders to reduce the numbers in the first place.

        Worst part is the tech for that already exists. The complicated kill bot AI is getting it to discriminate and selectively kill. I remember seeing a video of an automated paintball turret that could hit a moving basketball with full precision 20 years ago. Not only that, it was made by a teenager (or team of teenagers).

    • Grimy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • Steve@communick.news
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        4 months ago

        It’s the same capitalism we have now; Accept the bottom income level, isn’t zero anymore.

        Who would be in what Cast?
        Where do you draw the lines?

        • Grimy@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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.

          • Steve@communick.news
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            4 months ago

            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.

            • Grimy@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              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.

    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • Steve@communick.news
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      4 months ago

      I’ve heard people say a UBI is easy to exploit before.
      But I don’t see how.

      If everyone gets the same payment, with the only qualifiers being citizenship and age; How can it be exploited?

  • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.

    Further proof of this: Climate change.

    • BlackLaZoR@kbin.run
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      4 months ago

      Funny thing is that capitalism accidentaly solves global warming same way as it created it - turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources

      • JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it’s more expensive than renewables.

        The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There’s a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.

        Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a “bridge fuel” that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what’s been built doesn’t seem like much of a bridge because there’s no plan for ramping down natural gas.

        Colour me shocked.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources

        Cool, when is that going to start happening? Because I only see a handful of electric cars and I see a whole ton of coal power plants.

      • Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz
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        4 months ago

        The problem is that the previous accumulation of capital has centralized a lot of power in actors who have a financial incentive to stop renewables. If we could hit a big reset on everything then yes, I think renewables would win, but we’re dealing with a lot of very rich, very powerful people who really want us to keep being dependent on them.

          • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            Everywhere except countries that have subsidized non-renewables which means they’ll become dumber and polluted and regress. And these countries (the US, specifically) have nuclear weapons and a lot of authoritative policy power.

        • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          They are only slowing us down though. They really cannot stop the change, because solar power is simply cheaper than oil. Once governments stop subsidizing oil, the big oil companies will be done for if they haven’t innovated by than. That is also one of the reasons why they are slowing us down, so they can buy more time to innovate and remain on top with a new, green business model.

          I hope all the big oil bosses get locked up for crimes against humanity, but I think they’ll just change their business model into something green and exploit us in some different way.

          This is why they say “they’re too big to fail”.

      • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        This is not “capitalism accidentally solves climate change”. This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way. From there, capitalism took over, as intended. For green energy to be be feasible, we needed it to get picked up by the capitalist machine, because the capitalist machine has all the power and infrastructure in place to make it into a succes.

        I predict that the same thing will happen with large capacity, small size home batteries once they become economically feasible. They are on the brink of becoming profitable and once they do, they will become a huge success and help reduce energy waste.

        Same thing goes for fusion, but we’re a long way off making that economically viable.

        • BlackLaZoR@kbin.run
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          4 months ago

          This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way

          I think this oversimplifies it a lot. There were a lot of different actors involved - I’m sure a lot of development was coming both from the semiconductor industry, and from state funded research, but in the end, the greed machine (aka capitalism) takes care of further researching and scaling it to the global level.

          Also it’s not like there wasn’t any money in that business years ago - even back then solar was commonly used as a remote power source in mobile applications (calculators, camping and so on). Also NASA, but this was purely state funded

    • Blubber28@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yup, economics are all about “LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!” It’s infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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      4 months ago

      Did you mean to say shareholder and corporate management? Investment itself (especially diversified) is completely about long-term performance.

    • Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.

      Well that’s not true at all. The vast majority of investors are in it for the long run.

  • morphballganon@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Don’t think of people having money as an on-off switch. It’s a gradual shift, and it’s already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.

  • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, can’t think past their quarterly reports. The ones that are private are competing with the public ones and think following trends by companies that are “too big to fail” will work out for them.