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.
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.