That seems like a Q3 issue for 2026 let’s put the conversation off till then.

/s

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.

Back in the 1980’s they told me it’d trickle down.

…eventually.

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.

The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.

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.

This is a common question in economics.

It’s called technological unemploymemt and it’s a type of structural unemployment.

Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.

An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there’s like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.

There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.

Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.

There’s been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there’s not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.

Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.

One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn’t as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.

In theory, UBI.

In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.

If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it’s not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.

In a better world machines would do the work and humans just would share the wealth and live life in peace.

They won’t, they’ll simply die and the market will slowly adjust to those with capital.

This is all happening because we shot a gorilla in 2016 btw.

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.

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).

I’m an optimist, so I’ll believe one day we’ll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don’t criticize me too harshly

Why would we need anyone to buy things? Remember that money is an abstraction for resources. If you can do everything with AI, then you already have all the resources you need. Whether or not someone else needs what you produce is irrelevant when you already have access to everything you could want.

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.