When the bubble pops - How AI will destroy the economy
How exactly will AI steal your job? And what will it look like when unemployment skyrockets?
AI is hyped. It is hyped to be able to do all of our tasks much more efficiently than most humans could, very rapidly erasing the need for human labor. The collateral damage? The entirety of the working class. The mass layoffs across the tech sector serve to prove this point. The labor cuts are no longer counted in numbers, but in percentages.
If this is truly a systemic trend, then the mass increase in unemployment is irreversible. AI will wipe out the working class as a whole. If that happens, tens of millions of people will be left without income. Income they’d need to buy goods, services and assets. The prices of assets will fall because the retail won’t have the money to spend on them. Profits will fall, leading to the stock market crash, pulverizing incomes and net worth of millions. The economy as we’ve known it for decades will be destroyed.
Well, if there is an automaton growing cheap food, working for free, it’s a new type of society. It won’t be an easy change but I think the outcome might be good actually?
Like we’ll always need humans, just less in this automated society, and isn’t that great?
I’m not saying all AI crap today is good but I do see a possible good future.
Edit: what a toxic community.
This bubble is not about that kind of AI. It is majorly driven by GPU guzzling LLM.
We’re not currently on a trajectory toward automata like that, at least not with the kind of AI that’s currently heavily being invested in, but even if we were, it would not lead to a positive outcome with the way society is set up right now. The problem is that someone would own the automata and therefore be in complete control over in whose benefit the automata would work. Unless the automata are easy to make (and the patents easily bypassed), making it difficult for someone to monopolise them, it would take a fundamental change to the way the economy works for this to benefit everyone, and that’s not an inevitability.
But this video isn’t really about that, it’s about the much more likely scenario that AI does not end up living up to its promises and the money eventually running out, and what the economic fallout of that will be.
Enjoy the 3 upvotes before the ghouls here wake up.
I think we’re on track to a New disruptive technology, which just like the splitting of the atom can be used for good or bad. The environment impact is really terrible. The fact that it is dominated by half a dozen guys stuck in a dick measuring contest is bad, and the tech may go somewhere, but that’s separate from the economic mechanics behind it (fuelled by a lawless us president they bought).
The bubble can burst even if the underlying tech one day may be seen on the same footing as the invention of the combustion engine.
Everyone is gambling on the current iteration of AI being disruptive, I’m just not seeing the path. Not afraid to be wrong! But no one has produced the killer app, they’re just betting they will at some point and no one wants to be left behind. LOL, remember Xerox PARC giving Gates and Jobs the keys to the kingdom? Kodak developing a digital camera and not seeing any future in it?
Even if something comes of this, there’s a serious issue coming up. Not fond of dotcom bust comparisons, but there are some valid points. As with the dotcom bubble, winners will arise from the ashes, but… But no one hated the internet because of the dotcom crash. I think this bubble’s going to crash the world economy so hard that AI will afterwards be viewed as poisonous. Talking Butlerian Jihad kinda hate.
The Buffett Index is in all new territory.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett-indicator/
Gosh! What happened in 1999 and 2007? The index is at 200%+ today. It was 130% in 1929. And all that non-existent money is wrapped up in AI.
One thing that’s different today is that lot of that money is mike surplus miney, or so I feel. Wages and productivity split in the seventies, almost like we earn “enough” to not overthrow our government, and the rest is for the rich people to gamble with. I’m no economist but it’s like money itself is now a bubble (people can have millions of years of work in their bank account), I wonder what will happen when that one crashes.
Ha ha I didn’t believe you but here we are with losers downvoting without being able to explain their point of view at all lol 😂
That’s how lemmy works. Downvotes with no rebuttals.