It is all almost making richer even more richer, instead of properly hiring people for HR, AI bots.
Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more.
Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off monitor's back.
Instead of paying translators, do video ads with automatic translations and nerve irritating voice tones.
Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
Pre COVID, IKEA had a lot of decent value stuff (prices were low, relatively better built items too, relative to the other stock). There were also plenty of staff on the tills and on the shop floor to ask questions or get assistance.
You genuinely felt they passed on the savings
They also had decent online shopping.
These days though they're just like everyone else and have cut cut cut and prices have risen. The restaurant has gone to crap too
> These days though they're just like everyone else and have cut cut cut and prices have risen. The restaurant has gone to crap too
Aren't restaurants a totally local thing? They have vastly different offers eg in slovenia compared to italy (i visit both quite often), except for maybe hotdogs and cinnabuns... somehow the main ikea prices are different too.
Kind of. I just compared US to PL. We have much more choices here in PL, and breakfast is completely different. Meals are mostly different, but have a lot of common ingredients ( like iconic beans and meat balls). Us has no soups at all, while we have 5 kinds. Cakes are similar, but again we have much more choices.
The reason why companies cut jobs while increasing prices for the same or worse products...... is.... wait for it..... money printing. NOT some new found level of corporate greed, companies have ALWAYS been greedy. It's not a change in greed. It's the result of the covid shutdowns where money printing was increased at the same time as the production of goods and services declined. That economic imbalance is still being felt, and of course money printing has re-accelerated after the big inflation scare caused them to temporarily cool it down.
> except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
Do they? Money is simply the accounting of debt. You do something for me, and when I can't immediately do something in return for you, you extend a loan to me so that I can make good on my side of the bargain later. If we record that I owe you something at some point in the future, we just created money!
But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you. Money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.
Your landlord demands money every month. So do your local utilities - power, gas, water, sewage, garbage collection, phone, internet, etc.
Is magical AI going to materialize food out of nowhere for you, with no need for any raw materials to be consumed in the process? Will it make clothes out of nothing?
As if the "AI champion" will have a landlord. Methinks you've not thought this through.
> So do your local utilities - power, gas, water, sewage, garbage collection, phone, internet, etc.
Unless he owns all that too. Even if that doesn't play out, safe to say that in said hypothetical future it will be owned by a very small group of people. And while they may still have some trade amongst themselves, there will still be no need to sell things to the average Joe.
> Is magical AI going to materialize food out of nowhere for you, with no need for any raw materials to be consumed in the process? Will it make clothes out of nothing?
The magical AI will, yes. But as it is magical, you are right that this future branch is unlikely. Much more likely is the future where people remain relevant.
Hence why the previously stated remembrance doesn't hold.
As before, money only matters in a world where: You want/need people to do things for you, they won't do something for you without a favour returned in kind, and you cannot immediately return the favour.
If people still want other people to do things for them, accounting isn't going anywhere. It has already been invented. We don't have to un-invent it. But, if this our future, then humans remain relevant, so there is no concern about job loss or anything of that nature.
If, however, some future plays out where people aren't needed to work anymore, there will simply be no need for trade. The magical AIs, or whatever it is that someone has dreamt up that they think will eliminate the need to hire people, will provide instead. You only need people to buy things from you if you need to buy things from them as well.
whatever [...] they think will eliminate the need to hire people, will provide instead
the problem is that whose who do that thinking want to enrich themselves and not provide for others. if that doesn't work, then they won't do it. so the question is, how do we get from the current situation to this life of abundance without letting the majority of people suffer in the transition. because that is hat will happen if we keep going as we are. less and less labor is needed, and the focus is on getting the money from those who still have an income while the rest are pushed into poverty.
i do not believe we will be able to make this kind of transition without a serious push in moral education. this can only work if we change our attitude towards those who can't find work.
personally though i do not believe we will ever need to eliminate work. there are so many worthwhile things we could do. i rather envision a future where the majority of jobs are in education, healthcare and research, almost everything else can mostly be automated. i believe humanity would benefit immensely if we took advantage of all of human potential instead of letting people stay at home.
> the problem is that whose who do that thinking want to enrich themselves and not provide for others.
That might be your problem, but isn't the problem being discussed.
> so the question is, how do we get from the current situation to this life of abundance without letting the majority of people suffer in the transition.
The question is, from the perspective of what is being discussed, who cares? "I got mine" applies.
> less and less labor is needed
If those with the magical AI no longer need labor, it is more likely, as counterintuitive as it may seem, to lead to more and more labor! How? Well, if those with the magical AI no longer need people to work for them, they'll simply disappear from the economy. Which means everyone else without the magical AI will be the economy, and labor is what they most have to offer, so that is what they will trade.
> ... accounting isn't going anywhere. It has already been invented
> But, if this our future, then humans remain relevant, so there is no concern about job loss or anything of that nature.
Relevant as what? Serfs and accountants? Even short of that scenario, there is a big concern if the primary technology of redistribution (jobs) becomes far more scarce.
> If, however, some future plays out where people aren't needed to work anymore, there will simply be no need for trade.
People will still need raw materials and resources, and those are not evenly geographically distributed.
Never mind history. There is no evidence of "money" replacing "direct trading" today, so there would be no need to go back in time. But obviously it wasn't meant to be taken so literally. The "between the lines" intent is understood.
That's how a society that needs (delayed) trade between people works, but the setting was a hypothetical future where a magical AI exists, that can provide for someone without needing to rely on other people.
Well, as of right now, the only way to pay for a good is to pay for it with another good or service. As before, money is merely the accounting of debt. It only signifies a promise to provide a good or service in the future. You aren't really paying for something with money, you are delaying payment with a promise to actually pay later.
Given that, why do you think debt is necessary in the hypothetical future situation that was presented?
> But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you.
I really don't want to believe that people leading these huge corporations are dumb enough to actually think this, but at the same time I know better.
Sure if AI could make small communities autonomous and provide everyone with everything they would ever need, there would be no need for money.
But we are far away from this utopia, this utopia will require a ton of energy to be produced just to run the AI supervision layer, so hopefully by then we'd have fusion energy or something else figures out, and to achieve this utopia there will be a transition period.
I am actually worried about the transition period in your fictional world. Some people will be replaced long before the deprecation of money. It's a lot of people that is going to suffer from extreme poverty if we don't think this right, which I believe is what the OP comment was about.
> and provide everyone with everything they would ever need
It doesn't need to provide for everyone. Imagine a single Jeff Bezos type who conquers the world with the magical AI with no need for anyone else to do anything for him. With no need for someone else to do something for him, there is no need for him to sell to anyone else. This is where the "they forget people also need money to buy their goods" falls apart. There is no such need.
You just forget that the transaction part of consuming is just a portion of it. AI could provide bezos with everything material he'd need, just not the power and status. That's where your argument falls apart. We are social beings, and for those in power they won't be satisfied with the illusion of power. Consumption is the driving force that maintains power in capitalism. You could replace the system, but never the need for power humans have.
Because "But if I don't need anything from you — because, say, magical AIs are already giving me everything I could ever hope and dream of — I have no reason to become indebted to you" and "With no need for someone else to do something for him, there is no need for him to sell to anyone else" implies that consumption is purely transactional which I argued against.
In other words, AI can't ever give you everything you need and hope for.
Seriously though, I don't know what you are thinking when you say "Are you aimlessly reading comments in strict isolation?". I don't know what's unclear and what I should expand. If you treat everyone this way there is no way people will talk to you or take you seriously.
It, like every other followup response I have written, was a question. Do you mean that you would ask the same thing?
> If you treat everyone this way there is no way people will talk to you or take you seriously.
If asking questions means people will not talk to me or take me seriously, that's fine. What purpose would continually asserting random statements serve?
Not all questions are born the same. All questions you posed so far had this arrogant air to them like I'm missing something so obvious it doesn't have to be stated. If you can't bother to express yourself better why should I make this effort of guessing what you mean? You'd be surprised how far a bit of benefit of the doubt can take you.
> All questions you posed so far had this arrogant air to them
Arrogance has nothing to do with anything, so this seems logically flawed, no? However, in the interest of trying to better understand your take, how would you have alternatively phrased them to not have that "air to them"?
> If you can't bother to express yourself better why should I make this effort of guessing what you mean?
Why make a foolish guess when you can simply ask more about what was intended to be meant? Now that I have introduced you to the concept of asking a question, you've sensibly started doing exactly that, but if we look back at earlier comments...
I'm sorry. I lack the patience and the interest in continuing this conversation, but I deemed impolite to just ghost you. I won't be responding anymore.
At least one of my local, out of town, supermarkets doesn't have a warehouse any more.
It's all Just in Time, with a residual amount above the main shelves. If you can't find what you want, they don't have it 'out back', because apart from an unloading area, there's no 'out back'.
Amazing until covid hits and everything is out of stock at t+ 5 minutes. Every major city is like 24 hours away from MAJOR riots if anything serious happens to the supply chain.
COVID happened though, and shortages of commodities were extremely temporary, with no dire consequences overall.
What was actually unavailable with dire consequences, like masks/etc... was not unavailable due to lean manufacturing, but simply because it was a new demand that did not exist at this scale before.
covid was nothing. Try a few bombs on the major highways and airport runways, now you have to deal with a war AND your entire capital starving. Millions of people will go from somewhat civilised to starvation mode real quick. All in all covid was a blip on the radar. There is a huge different between just in time and even a month of stock
> What was actually unavailable with dire consequences, like masks/etc... was not unavailable due to lean manufacturing, but simply because it was a new demand that did not exist at this scale before.
Well yeah that's what stocks are for. France had hundred millions of masks in stock in the early 2009 because they were expecting H1N1, we scraped the project because the pandemic didn't hit as bad as we thought, fast forward 10 years later and we spent twice as much to get half as many masks
Wait until ww3, Europe will discover that having one week of ammunition stock is not enough... all of that is expensive so let's not plan anything and pray for the best case scenario
JIT shipping doesn't necessarily mean less carbon footprint from transportation. A single large shipment is far more efficient than many small shipments.
The self-checkout is the one that gets me. I'm paying you money for products, and you both continuously raise prices, and make it less convenient for me to shop there. That is, unless I want to order it for delivery online, and pay an extra fee. Every retailer doesn't need to be Amazon. I don't even want Amazon to be like Amazon anymore. Maybe this is me getting older, or me having worked in technology too long - but I'm growing tired of the hyper-fixation we have with optimizing every possible thing, at the loss of human interaction.
I like self-checkout on balance. The stores have a lot more self-checkout stations than they had cashiers. Most of the time I'm buying less than a dozen or so items. The work of having to scan and bag them myself is hardly more than taking them out of the cart. It's way faster than waiting in a queue behind someone who's apparently buying groceries for two weeks for a family of 8 and then has several dozen coupons and finally is writing a check. Or waiting behind several such people.
I guess if I were buying two weeks of groceries for a family of 8 I might prefer the cashier to scan them and the bag boy to bag them for me.
Self-checkout feels analogous to certain digital goods platforms - at certain times, it makes stealing/piracy the easier and more rational choice than paying for the product. They're both giving consumers great training in how and why to evade shitty corporate security tech!
>Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
And then we get the great turn of it all. Where governments opt to just sign contracts with these companies. Just hook the money printer up directly to the investor class and skip all these middle class middle people and the requirement to build a business that can stand on its own two feet.
What gets scary with this is people like Peter Thiel and friends are building a world for fewer people pretty overtly. There's the famous clip of him where Thiel hesitates to predict if humans will survive in the technological future. Probably because in the back of his mind he hopes the population of the U.S. diminishes to a couple hundred thousand people if that living a life of technologically supported luxury, while the descendants of the wageslaves have died out by then and don't threaten the power structure.
> AI in its current form is democratizing and allowing exactly the not rich to be relatively more dangerous.
Which part exactly ? The part where everyone pays 20+ a month to a few megacorps or the part where we willingly upload all our thoughts to a central server ?
To call GPT-4o high intelligence, is aspirational (to put it more plainly: GPT-4o is such a bad model it's not worth paying for compared to what's out there). And yes, it is undemocratic - when was the last time you got a say over what the AI is allowed to do for you, let alone a say over any of the ideas for how to improve it?
Last time I had access to o3 on a $20 subscription, the usage limit was laughably low. Accessing it through an API is much better value - I get over 1000 interactions with a much more controllable system message, which is a lot better than ChatGPT Plus.
Was that a pretty long time ago? Because I use o3 daily and have never hit a limit.
The only "limit" I have really with o3 is my patience -- it's a slow model for regular use. If I don't need its intelligence I'll use o4-mini or even 4o for speed, saving o3 for the prompts that really need it.
These days the only model I find I get rate-limited on frustratingly quickly is 4.5. It's clear OpenAI does not really want you using that one, despite the fact that's very good (and probably very expensive for them)! Pretty underrated imo.
Checking recently, it looks like o3 is limited to 100 messages a week on ChatGPT Plus. That's not really a "relaxed conversation" type of allowance when you really want to get into the weeds on a subject that interests you.
I have stopped using cloud models half a year ago. The meager intelligence local models, ones I can run on my machine, is already giving me a great deal of productivity boost.
Do you think it’s a monopoly? Is it not a competitive market? I see many strong Western competitors along with an expanding array of high quality open source options out of China.
But the open source options out of china are forbidden because being spied by china is evil while being spied by USA is good… usual free market lovers dropping it whenever.
Err so the American DoD — generally always concerned about supply chain considerations — prefers American models? And that’s surprising or problematic to you?
This is a weird conversation. At first you were concerned about prices and now you’re railing about the US Navy not using Chinese models. What’s your problem here?
Yeah, exactly. Lots of people use AI, if they can afford the subscriptions, but it’s only the tech oligarchs who can control AI, including controlling access to it.
Until you can run high quality models on affordable devices on your desk or in your hand the extent of the democratisation is much more limited than you might like.
Perhaps OSS will come to the rescue here.
(Aside: obviously free tiers are available but these are all hobbled in various ways: usage limits, data sharing/leakage, etc.)
If the AI industry achieves its short-term goals, instead of paying a human $100,000/year to do some desk job, companies will pay Microsoft/Google/OpenAI/whoever $20,000/year in API tokens and keep the extra money for themselves. To me, this doesn't seem like a way to reduce wealth inequality, it seems like a way to accelerate it. Sure, there's nothing inherent to AI that makes it cause wealth inequality. However, literally every innovation in human history that allows a single worker to generate more value has caused most of that extra value to get captured by the ownership class. I don't see how AI will be any different.
Even if it costs $100k/yr in GPU and RAM, the robot's preferable. It doesn't get sick, it doesn't have a family, it doesn't show up hungover, it doesn't sleep. It can be copy and pasted and duplicated and turned off as necessary.
The point is that instead of having to complain about the ownership class, you can now be an owner more easily than before. AI enables people to do more on their own. You can build stuff that simply was not feasible before. You still have to do it though.
If you prefer to be subject to the ownership class, I recommend being honest about why that is.
In that case you're still subject to the companies who have billions of dollars to spend on training frontier models and server farms full of GPUs. They're free to change their pricing or the quality of the services offered at will (see the recent Claude Code limit changes). Long-term, what you're describing would be a ton of underpaid "entrepreneurs" with no benefits all working away on whatever B2B SaaS web app while all the real money gets made by the AI services they subscribe to. It would be similar to how Uber has "democratized" taxis.
I, for one, just don't really believe that there's enough market for every person to have their own software business. There's only so many ideas that are interesting enough to be sold.
Big companies may save money on salaries, which would have first-order effects on the job market — but you could say the same about cloud computing, or computers, or mechanical reapers. Now what about all the companies that previously couldn't afford to exist because someone with a good idea didn't have six+ figures of discretionary income to throw at it?
If AI proves useful enough to effect sustained savings for Big Tech to the degree that you're suggesting, then the flip side of that coin is that it's effectively ZIRP on steroids for startups. The successful businesses which come out of that will ultimately have human labor needs of their own. Job market continues to trend upwards, only with lower concentration and greater overall resulting economic value in the form of more products and services.
Or AI/robotics/etc. gets so good that eventually no one needs human labor, and every company trends toward just being a CEO + board + AI. In that world, unless we expect everyone and their grandma to become an entrepreneur, something to the effect of a UBI would be necessary to keep the world turning without major societal upheaval.
On the other hand, AI skeptics can plan to sit back and eat popcorn while they watch the bigcos suffer the consequences of their mistakes and yield ground to startups. Either way, AI will have been a democratizing force.
>So yeah, the rich might use it to get richer. But so can everyone else.
N'ah as long as the AIs the everyone else has access to are heavily censored and lobotomized to prevent wrong think, while governments and corporations will have access to the raw unbiased data.
The raw data will still be incredibly biased, and the AI will have its own biases on top of what's in the training. Grok will be racist no matter what.
Im half expecting the appearance of virtual people any day. Basically cooperate sponsored UBI - but for bots, so they can buy virtual goods and services, finally decoupling the economy from the desert of the real.
> they forget people also need money to buy their goods.
the goods ought to have become cheaper if the ai/mechanization/industrialization is cheaper than labour.
And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
Number of employees down (despite number of stores going up)
Profits up.
I'd make an argument here about the desperate need for critical thinking in economics, the typically upside down nature of discourse (topics in economics are often approached with "i must defend what i know" rather than "i must learn what i don't know")... but there's no point. You tellingly said "ought", David Hume warned us about the futility of trying to argue from logic against an ought.
I like the phrase "you can't get an ought from an is", but the word "ought" doesn't always carry moral meaning. If an annoying alarm is beeping and I cut off its power, I might say "it ought to have stopped beeping". That's not a moral opinion, it's invoking a model of how the alarm works and the law of conservation of energy. Here the law of supply and demand is being invoked. Hume needn't get involved.
Conservation of energy is universally true given that you or i cannot travel at the speed of light.
Whereas supply and demand is obviously not universal and i'm not just talking about Giffen goods, Veblen goods or the Chivas Regal effect. No i'm talking specifically about ceteris paribus. Application of ceteris paribus is to step away from reality, the more you do it, the further away from reality you've gotten.
The model of supply and demand is useful and its utility is only reduced by ceteris paribus.
The law of supply and demand is blocked from existing, thanks specifically to ceteris paribus.
I was going to write that supply and demand is like a 'linearization' or some other regression around a point, but looking up "ceteris paribus" I'll have to thank you for forcing a good phrase upon me. :)
> And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
Absurd, they spend a fraction of their wealth on luxury goods (an industry which employs very few people anyway), the rest is on assets, keeping them locked into the financial market.
> Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
> Of course, it is up to the individual to search and find their niche, and to produce value to sustain their own existence. The advent of AI is not going to be different.
As in any upheaval of the labour market, there will be people who cannot or won't retrain, becoming detached from society. Those usually end up angry, left to their own devices, and lash out politically by voting on demagogues. In the end the whole of society bears the cost, is that really the best way we found to achieve progress? Leave people behind and blame the individual instead of seeking systemic approaches to solve systemic issues?
> And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things, which spawns new luxury good industries.
That will be a rounding error. Economic growth comes from a large population that spends and innovates.
Wealth concentration buys policy and media, and after that all of sudden the following things happen: tax gap widens, public services deteriorates, innovation halting, etc.
Wealth concentration means the pie will shrink, and eventually the rich will have to fear the super rich. And how do you reach growth after a country is sucked dry?
> Economic growth comes from a large population that spends and innovates.
No it doesn't. Economic growth comes from "doing more with more". WHO does that doesn't matter. It matters for inequality and jobs and a lot of things, but not for economic growth. If skynet kills all Americans and builds 5 million nukes, that will be economic growth.
Exactly, doing more with more requires a large population that spends and innovates.
It is about allocation. It might sound like a heresy, but the "invisible hand" is for a good part a myth. Resource allocation in the hand of just a few is
a) a hand that indeed tries to hide itself
b) a hand that cuts of energy to the rest of its body
c) a dying hand
Economics tries to model certain aspects of human behavior as driven by human's psychology, both on the individual and group level. A trading system of other "beings with a different wiring" might be a curiosity, but isn't strictly part of economics.
I would rather have economists in general (not directed at you) think a bit deeper about the unspoken assumptions of their behavioral models, to stop confusing models with laws, and to study humans and groups in a broader sense.
Yes it is. What you're conveniently forgetting is that governments and banks (which are kind-of government, except profits go to private hands) think this is a very, very, very, VERY good thing indeed.
Why? Well, what is wealth inequality? It is people and companies (indirectly also people) not spending money. Just keeping it. "For the future". In bank accounts. On the stock market. In government bonds. Under their pillow. This also explains that a very large chunk of "the rich" is in practice people's pensions.
This means that governments can create almost unlimited new money, without taxing anything, and know it'll be hoovered up by the wealthy. What happens in practice? Wealthy people and companies will provide goods and services to hoover up that money, but they won't want (any new) goods and services in return. In other words: it is a way for governments to acquire almost unlimited goods and services in return for ... nothing at all. A few updates to a database "to be paid in the future".
And if you look at what governments spend money on, it's "everyone", the "public good", in other words: on the poor. In other words: this is a way for the poor to get more stuff now.
You want to kill this effect? Expect every government employee, every pensioner, every unemployment benefit receiver, every sick or disabled person and so on to scream bloody murder, because you'll have to seriously cut a LOT of benefits. Or, frankly, if recent history is any indication, to actually just kill you with a 3d printed gun.
Of course, because the government is still overspending, and debt servicing is becoming bigger and bigger. New debt is adding less and less spending power to government budgets. In some countries debt servicing is already bigger than the growth in debt (and not just Argentina and Pakistan). You can calculate: if Trump continues like this, the US will cross this critical threshold halfway through his term (assuming 5% interest rate). At that point the US government will lose the ability to trade government debt for goods and services. And last Trump term spending went up and up and up as his term progressed, and so far the same is happening this term. Had we elected a deceased possum instead of Trump, our country would have been fiscally better of than we are now.
So you'll see the maga republicans join the democrats in shouting and screaming how evil banks and "the rich" are, in 3 years or less. What's scary is that due to Trump this moment is coming towards us a LOT faster than it was under Biden, despite, of course, Trump getting elected on the promise that he would make the opposite happen. But, as said before, a dead possum would have far outperformed Trump on the fiscal front.
Government balance sheet deficit is private sector surplus. Thus, government spending benefits primarily companies doing business with the government; there’s a lot of incentive to own a business doing that and this leads to lobbying, corruption, outright fraud and in the limit kleptocracy.
No, I don't (well, somewhere between 5% and 20%, it's not magical). But how it works, fundamentally, the rich exchange goods and services for new debt, in various forms.
That also shows why you can't touch the rich with the government: first, where would it get goods and services? And when the government gets goods and services it's for "the public good", which effectively means largely for the poor (especially if you reason the way governments do: the palace for the prime minister is the infrastructure that provides for the poor. So that room is really for the poor too, just like the many side-hustles the prime minister and many government figures have. But even disregarding government excess ... mostly these goods and services acquired really are for the poor). Second, the wealth of the rich is really something like 1%-5% of those new goods and services produced. That's what it fundamentally is, that wealth. If you take that away, the incentive for production falls away. And even that ignores the added difficulty that the richest "rich" in the US, by an extreme amount, are the pension funds, especially in aggregate. Attacking the rich will mean taking pensions from old people.
Which leads immediately to the consequence of going after big companies and "the rich": no more (much less) new goods and services. Because nobody's going to replace them, or, if someone does replace them, they become the new rich and you've achieved nothing.
AND there's a major, major, MAJOR catch in replacing the rich. The current rich see the social contract roughly like this "if we provide society roughly as-is, we get to be rich". If you replace the current rich with new MAGA rich, for example, they will demand a new social contract which you may VERY much dislike. For example, Microsoft, Google (even Apple, when it comes to computers) see the freedom to develop and run your own programs, as well as free communication over the internet, as an essential part of their "deal" with society. Chinese and Indian computer producers very much do not see things this way (but are largely, not 100%, 99%, forced into allowing it, at least in the US and Europe, by the current US rich). It seems to me unlikely in the extreme that if the US gets a new rich class, replacing these companies, that this will remain so.
>And also when "the rich" have more profit, they now want to spend that profit on things
In general those things that "the rich" buy are scarce assets - stocks, housing, land, etc. all of which keep getting bidded up in price. This does not generate jobs.
>spawns new luxury good industries.
Trickle down never worked.
>Of course, the news cycle and the sob stories always revolve around people losing their existing jobs, but there is new jobs around that previously didnt exist. Jobs that people previously never thought was even "a job".
The number of jobs available is politically not technologically determined. AI doesn't automatically destroy jobs in aggregate but this is what the economy is currently programmed to do (via the mechanism of higher interest rates), so this is what companies are chasing with AI.
For those who don’t get the reference: Grocery stores have low margins. It’s the textbook example of a business that many assume is high margin and rolling in profits, but when you look at the numbers they have very poor profit margins.
I don't know if you'll be able to answer this but;
I've been wondering about that conventional wisdom lately. In my area, and in most of the developed world, the prices of frankly most food I buy has doubled in the last 7 years. Meat is almost quadruple. This is despite ~3% inflation yearly over that time (higher in covid years, lower elsewhere), for an aggregate inflation over that same period of 44%. So the costs are rising way faster than inflation. indeed, my pay has not doubled.
Lets assume that its true that supermarkets etc where I am report very low profit margins (I haven't personally checked, but I suspect they indeed do). Where does the increased cost go? The general excuses given are covid, ukraine, etc. But those are market explanations - i.e. oh, there is less supply of this stuff, so the price goes up. But that means that SOMEONE is making a lot more money than they used to -- or the amount of effort to make the same amount of product has gone up. So which is it?
Other explanations i've considered:
- Hollywood accounting i.e. the profit margin is much higher but funneled into weird supplier companies also owned by investors/higher ups of the supermarkets.
- Middleman bloat. A bunch of extra steps where people take their "small margin" repeatedly have been inserted into the supply chain, the same product now passing through more hands (combine if you like with the above if you like)
On some definitely are.
At least in Canada grocery stores can get better margins by not selling prunes which go from green to dry (or rotten) hile on shelf.
Various fruits are sold at loos and I see why.
At the same time I don't think kind-of AAA beef sold for $55-$110CAD has bad margins.
Small grocery stores are going bankrupt, larger chains now all are becoming food conglomerates who also own the point of sale - so called "private label" is noted as a huge threat in the shareholder reports of traditionally large food companies - go to a whole foods, aside from a few high profile products like CocaCola its all in-house brand products
on one hand people complain about sweatshops but on the other hand when the repetitive, soul crushing, low paid job is replaced by technology people complain as well. you can't have it both ways.
People would rather have a low pay repetitive job and be able to barely afford living rather than no job at all and being homeless
Also the "people" of the beginning of your sentence aren't the same people as the "people" in the end of your sentence. People complain about min wage repetitive jobs but it still beats being homeless
Instead of having more people at the supermarket, have the customers work as if they were employees, the only thing missing is fetching stuff from warehouse when missing on the shelves, but still pay the same or more.
Instead of paying to artists, do job ads using generated AI images with code magically showing off monitor's back.
Instead of paying translators, do video ads with automatic translations and nerve irritating voice tones.
Gotta watch out for those profits, except they forget people also need money to buy their goods.