A great deal of the current commentary about artificial intelligence “destroying jobs” & somehow threatening to break the circular flow of the economy rests on a remarkably Optimistic reading of what is actually taking place in the real, physical world, because the layoffs that people are pointing to in the technology sector & across white-collar industries aren’t primarily the result of some sudden technological singularity in which machines have abruptly rendered human labor obsolete, but rather the very predictable unwinding of a decade-long financial & organizational distortion that was created during an era of near-zero interest rates, cheap energy, & thus... effectively free capital, when companies (especially in the tech sector galore) were incentivized to expand their payrolls far beyond what underlying productivity or long-term economic fundamentals would justify. When money costs nothing & investors reward growth above all else, firms accumulate entire internal ecosystems of analysts, consultants, product managers, brand strategists, communications teams, culture officers, & other nonsensical layers of managerial & administrative complexity that can exist comfortably only in a world where capital is abundant, energy is relatively cheap, & demographic growth ensures a continuously expanding consumer base; but once those background conditions begin to shift, those layers of complexity become economically fragile & are quickly pared back, which is precisely the process we are witnessing now! 😉
At the same time, the deeper macroeconomic reality unfolding across the developed world points in almost the exact opposite direction from the fashionable AI-technophilia narrative, because the fundamental structural problem facing advanced industrial societies isn’t an excess of workers whose labor can no longer find productive use, but rather a steadily intensifying shortage of them driven by demographic collapse (Japan is a textbook case of this), as birth rates across Europe, North America, & East Asia have fallen far below replacement levels & working-age populations are beginning to contract even as the number of retirees continues to rise, producing the peculiar situation in which fewer & fewer workers must support larger & larger dependent populations. In that context, automation & advanced computational tools function less as destroyers of labour than as compensatory mechanisms designed to maintain economic output in the face of a shrinking labour pool, effectively substituting for workers who were never born rather than displacing masses of existing workers who suddenly have nothing to do... & these tools are just a Zombie & a Dead Man Civilization's way of delaying the inevitable... akin to how a dying man may yet live a few months longer with some chemo! 😘
More fundamentally still (& this is the level of analysis that much of the popular discussion simply ignores)... the economy doesn't ultimately run on abstractions like “labor” & “capital” in the way simplified textbook models suggest, but rather on the far more basic foundations of energy flows, material throughput, ecological capacity, & demographic structure, because every complex economic system is in the end a physical system embedded within the biosphere, dependent on the availability of usable energy, extractable resources, stable ecosystems, & a population structure capable of sustaining the institutional & productive complexity that modern industrial economies require... & when those underlying biophysical conditions begin to tighten (whether through declining energy quality, resource constraints, ecological degradation, or demographic contraction)... the system does what complex systems always do under pressure: Namely, it sheds layers of complexity, meaning that entire categories of bureaucratic, managerial, & low-productivity service work disappear not because a machine has replaced them but because the broader economic structure that once sustained them can no longer be maintained at the same scale:
Seen from that perspective, the attempt to interpret the current wave of layoffs as evidence that artificial intelligence is somehow undermining the fundamental mechanisms of the economy is less a profound insight than a category error, because it mistakes the most visible technological tool of the moment for the far deeper forces that actually govern the expansion & contraction of complex economic systems; for what we are witnessing isn’t the arrival of a machine economy that no longer needs human beings, but the gradual adjustment of an overextended economic structure to a world of tighter energy margins, more expensive capital, aging populations, & ecological limits that were always going to reassert themselves sooner or later regardless of whether large language models or generative algorithms had ever been invented! 😊 🤭
Nonsense, it takes approx one generation [30-40 years] for new technology to become integrated. This applied to steam, internal combustion, computers, TV,s, cell phones and pretty much anything else you can think of.
After that, the old jobs are done away with and new different skills are trained and acquired
The economic systems change, slowly, to accommodate the new products. I don't know of anyone claiming that AI is undermining the economic 'system' merely it does and will require a major sift in distribution and outlook.This happens regularly and causes enormous pain and suffering.
Sometimes it is the plebs that suffer [like 90% of the time] and occasionally it is the rich elite.
I think that China is somewhat successfully managing the transition but i cannot see any other society making it without riots and revolution.
Thank you for not doing your typical doomer shtick. And of course he’s an optimist; that’s why I and I suspect many others subscribe: he consistently identifies the woeful realities we face and tries to identify and share potential solutions. Sometimes you then comment that evil America will and should soon be destroyed and that western civilization will fall allowing your intellectually sophisticated Muslim spiritualist future to emerge… and for that reason I almost did not read your comment today, although I definitely would have eventually :-). Having said all that, I cannot disagree that America has evil powers, internal and external, influencing it and that western civilization does appear to be bent on self-destruction. So I guess I’m a bit of a doomer too.
I do think your comment is spot on, you said what I was gonna say and a heck of a lot more than occurred to me. Despite your doomerness, perhaps you might share some possible solution paths too? Maybe even some that don’t end with the deaths of all the people that would come from a true collapse of western civilization?
That's part of it. Tech companies that grow fast and pull in a lot of money to play with, especially woke ones (and few aren't), tend to hire a lot of extra people just because. I'd also like to compare Block's outsourcing numbers today with three years ago and three years from now. Some of the "Sorry, but AI is taking your jobs" stuff is cover for switching to (more) foreign labor.
Still, I assume at least some of this is real, at least at companies that do one high-tech thing and are really pushing to use AI for it. It *is* going to replace a lot of so-called knowledge workers, as fast as the inertia within industries can be overcome.
We're already seeing perfectly serviceable commercials being made with it, for instance. They're not high art, but commercials never were. So ad agencies will still exist, but they won't need casting agencies, actors, crews to build sets and light them, etc., which will mean far fewer people getting paid. That seems inevitable, and the only reason it hasn't already happened across the board is that people keep doing their jobs the way they've been doing them out of habit, and not many are sure exactly how to use it yet.
One roadblock might be that the AI companies still aren't profitable, and presumably will have to charge a lot more for their services to get profitable before the investment money stops pouring in, unless they achieve some breakthrough in compute/energy costs. So the ad agency owner who wants to fire everyone and make ads from his computer probably isn't going to be able to do it on a $200/month subscription. Maybe the AI company will want $20k or $200k per month for the amount of compute he needs, and then it won't be such an obvious move.
I derive much of my sense of purpose from self-employment - building things and remodeling; but also growing more food than I can eat, hunting and fishing, binding books, playing guitar, fermenting alcohol, reading and writing extensively.
Theoretically I would still thrive on UBI, as I could supplement my income in many ways. But for the vast majority of people who spend most of their life with their face in front of a screen, UBI would be devastating to a sense of purpose and agency, destabilizing society.
UBI will be delivered in digital currency (programmable, expirable). Its use will likely be mediated through the Digital ID, which will be subject to “positive” social credit and carbon credit scores.
Only if UBI provides more than mere subsistence. If you have any excess, then landlords and merchants will grab it [force it] from you.
How do you supplement income when 90% are in the same boat as you and the other 10% are looking to reduce any payment?
Talk to retirees who have spent decades in productive employment, now there only possible source of income is standing as 'security' in a society that is paying excessive amounts for police and justice,
Of course, like I said, if society is destabilized, opportunities for making money will be few. What the centralizing control freaks always forget though, alternative currencies will rise, the black market would expand exponentially.
You doing someone's nails and their washing of your underwear is not a market or economy.
You are still thinking that life will be like it was. It won't. When there is no profit to be made in maintaining the buildings, roads, transport, food distribution, they will stop.
It will be slow, but the end is not negotiable. Either there will be a revolution and a new economic system, or 90% will die. It has happened over and over and over.
Matt Taibbi summed up how the system is rigged rather succinctly in a recent article:
“And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air. The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.”
“Anyone who has seriously studied applied macroeconomics knows that crony capitalists hate free markets, with all the fairness and transparency that they imply. Competition is a serious drag on enormous profits and introduces significant uncertainty and risk. As soon as the game is underway, successful capitalists are constantly pushing the envelope of the rules, seeking to establish rents, monopolies, unfair advantages, and debt traps to snare the bulk of the players and stifle the profit-eroding tendency of real competition.
This is the basis of all aristocracies, which are merely the institutionalization of privilege. Once they make it they bloody well want to change the rules to hang on to it, and take the risk out of their equation. They foster a culture of two sets of books, two sets of rules, and two systems of justice.
The oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens across the globe to insure their wealth and power remains intact.
Overtaxed, sometimes homeless, unemployed, hungry, and deprived of any hope of justice, the vast majority of French citizens were not blind. They saw their own children starve while stolen riches bought velvet outfits for children of the elite. When their desperation erupted abruptly into unbridled rage, the French Revolution had arrived.
Nails and underware? Are you calling me a fag now?
Charles Eisenstein just called up the spectre of the French Revolution too. I’m not sure why these guys keep refering to the French, when we are Americans. It sounds like you think something similar should happen, about which I do not necessarily disagree. But its also true, the globalist, neo-marxist goal is the destruction of America. So be careful what you wish for.
All I’m saying is, the control freaks over extend their hands. People create markets even in the midst of total war. We are anarchic that way at our core, in the sense that it is spontaneous, it does not need to be directed.
Otherwise, Friday I was watching Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, and Sam Altman, CEO of Open-AI, interviewed by Aaron Ross Sorkin.
These are not strong men. They are weak men, parasitizing society, building nothing beautiful, leading society to collapse.
Globalist, neo-Marxist? There is nothing Marxist about the Globalists, they are the capitalist billionaires running every country in the west.
As you say, they are weak men, very scared men [and women] and have no agenda except to keep and maybe increase their wealth.
They use socialist terminology to keep the morons from seeing what is really going on.
Humans recognise that 'fair [unforced] exchange' is the only moral means of interaction, every form of government violates that norm.
The only reason that I and others cite the French is because that is the most well known, and best documented. The Aristos have pushed to the point that US and all Europe is about to see that the guillotine is the only answer to the crimes inflicted upon them.
As is true for so many things, Paine grasped the crux of the matter and expressed it as well as it can be expressed.
"The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed."
The technocracy backstopping those billionaires is fundamentally globalist neo-Marxist. Marxism for thee, capitalism for me, iow. It is rising in most American cities and blue states, but increasingly all of America. Let the infrastructure collapse, we have a patronage network to expand. Flood the country with illiterate third worlders, put ‘em on the dole and give ‘em id’s and ballots. Mine taxpayers to give middle class lifestyles to legions of do-nothing DEI hires. Bankrupt your political enemies, seize their shit. Indoctrinate the kids on social justice and gender woo.
Cutting off some bilionaire heads is not going to stop that.
Why wouldn't these elites not just engineer a virus that kills most of us off, or better yet, sterilized most of the populace to solve their prole problem? I find that to be far more likely and optimal from the perspective of these reptilians than tolerating any of their loot being redistributed.
I read Clancy's "Rainbow Six" decades ago when such an idea seemed unimaginable. Today it is more unimaginable that it hasn't happened yet. The plandemic probably was meant to be more lethal but the elites are likely also affected by the crisis of competence.
I received a great letter from Diego Costa of Foundation for Economic Education (which isn't on their site for some reason) with a very good explanation of why AI will *not* replace human labor. A few snippets:
Labor-intensive services become relatively more expensive as productivity rises elsewhere in the economy. The plumber gets expensive.
When cognitive inputs become cheap, new physical services become viable: all the physical work we might desire that isn’t being done today because it’s too expensive. Services we can barely imagine because we’ve never lived in a world where they were affordable. The question isn’t “Will there be enough physical work to go around?” The question is “How much physical work would people want if it were affordable?” The answer is almost certainly “Far more than currently exists.” This latent demand exists but remains unexpressed because the cognitive and coordination costs of providing these services make them unaffordable for most people
And the robotics problem may prove stubbornly difficult. The data needed to train physical AI doesn’t exist the way text and code do. Human skin senses pressure and texture with extraordinary sophistication. We don’t have good sensors, we can’t easily generate the training data that would teach machines to replicate them. The marginal cost curves for physical production remain steep in ways that don’t apply to software.
When mass production made textiles cheap, handmade became a luxury category. It’s about signaling taste, authenticity, story, *scarcity*. When perfectly adequate AI-generated content becomes infinite, people will crave the imperfectly human.
Also, a lot of economic life isn’t “Compute a solution”; it’s “Who is accountable if this goes wrong?” People want someone to sue, to blame, to insure, to certify, to sign. The scarce thing becomes the ability to produce credible commitments under uncertainty.
Who will do that work? If we create work our own people won't do we will destroy our culture by importing people who will, for one generation. If we impoverish our own people to the point they will do anything, they will also be susceptible to mob recruitment.
I may be rich enough to hire someone to wipe my bottom, but should I? There are always pragmatic as well as moral considerations. Will we rely on government to make such decisions? or return to a more robust self government founded on a common culture?
When I read the types of jobs that were being automated, it triggered a thought. Somebody wrote about exactly these types of jobs... Then it hit me: David Graeber's book titled "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" AI is automating exactly those jobs that Mr. Graeber thought were pointless but maintained for social, political purposes. Conversely, the types of jobs the Mr. Graeber thought were real: nurses, doctors, teachers, mechanics and repair people, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, "dirty jobs" etc. will be the last automated won't they?
Maybe AI is pruning away all the economic deadwood that has accumulated since the beginning of our civilization. The remaining vines and trees will be stronger, healthier. And what about the people who are pruned? The movies "The Island" and "Soylent Green" offer possible answers...
Yah, it will definitely destroy all bullshit jobs. It will also reduce a lot of real jobs to bullshit in the same way that automation has done in the past to other types of highly skilled work.
Hopefully Soylent Green will not be made of game designers. Yeesh.
No, many of their rote duties will be further automated by AI, but their accountability roles cannot be. Who's going to trust AI to broker their big deal, make sure their diagnosis makes sense, or teach their children? Those professions are highly corrupt today, but their original functions are still important.
I know multiple people who already trust their AI advisor more than their attorney or their doctor. I have a friend who is a $1,200 per hour attorney in NY and his whole firm is plagued with clients who listen to their AI over their attorneys. He says this is widespread. I have seen firsthand the same with doctors and health care because my wife is active in those circles.
Whether that's a good or bad thing, depends on your view of these professions, but I can testify with 100% certainty that at least some people will be happy to rely on AI. The response from attorneys and doctors will (almost certainly) be to make it illegal to do so. They'll rely on a coercive moat for as long as they can...
The biggest obstacles to AI replacing your physician are convincing humans to accept the errors, convincing humans to accept sound clinical decisions routinely and distributing the liability. I am MD. I truly think AI could replace me today without significant adversity in outcomes. In my casual experiments, the diagnostic accuracy of the AI in my field is poor compared to me. But most of my diagnoses, by far, are clinically insignificant. Most of my errors, by a large margin, are typographical and proofreading errors, so my error rate may even have more clinical significance than AI misdiagnosing something common and benign as something else common and benign.
AI is already being used in direct patient care where imaging is involved. It makes sense, because radiographs and reporting have both been digital for years, so the training material for the models must number in the billions of cases. I consider the same trend in general surgical interventions must be on the horizon. Surgeons have been operating using robotic assistance for quite a long time, and I assume that the surgeons' activities were recorded and archived. Anatomy varies quite a lot, but if the AI has access to digital images, video and the entire physical procedure as 1's and 0's, it can learn how to do appendectomies, tubals, cholecystectomies, hysterectomies...operations where currently the CRNA earns more than the surgeon doing the case.
Process automation carries significant risk over time. For example, when a process is automated its operators’ ability to understand how it works atrophies. They just see the input and the output. As fewer and fewer operators actually understand those implementation details, who will maintain and enhance and improve the tools? What happens if they break? What happens if the energy required to sustain them becomes scarce and too few can “manually“ fill the role, do the work? Net, all these complex fancy things are tools for us to leverage not for us to be leveraged by. I fear that our ruling class has become disconnected from some of these fundamental realities. Hope we can find a way to bring their feet back onto the ground and out of the clouds.
As long as AI is better schooled on the Hippocratic Oath than most of today's doctors, it will be an upgrade.
That said, as a pattern recognition tool and analyst, it is likely already better than any human can be. As a reader of unsaid things and communicator of difficult things, I suspect it has a ways yet to go.
Some people might remain in those jobs but basically as exception/hallucination handlers for AI. AI, like most labor-saving devices, also functions as a force multiplier for remaining labor.
I'm honestly not sure I'd see a lot of difference between AI Equity and a UBI in practice- are citizens supposed to be free to trade their shares in AI companies after the initial distribution occurs? Because in that case some will make more prudent trades than others, and... yeah, given time, a tiny handful of shareholders will just wind up monopolising ownership again. If they're not free to trade their shares, how do they "own" them, precisely?
On the Data Dividend/Matrix Scenario: Even if it turns out that human neurons are somehow architecturally required for generating original insights- which I'm a little skeptical of- I will just remark that machine learning researchers are already using vat-grown human-brain-cell-organoids as a computational substrate in some cases, ironically enough on the grounds of energy-efficiency. Which I think should absolutely and obviously be illegal and makes me want to scream at the fucking wall... but hey, I guess the Torment Nexus remains the undefeated champion.
One other wrinkle that seems under-discussed, in my view, is whether AI tech companies overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of cities in the US, UK, and maybe China are going to be writing UBI cheques to the citizens of... every other country on the planet that will be ravaged by the job losses they have caused? Do these tech companies not defend their IP with internationally-enforced patent moats? Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I'd like someone to ELI5 as to what happens here.
"Given time, a tiny handful of shareholders will just wind up monopolising ownership again. "
Well put. That's exactly the problem! If they're non-tradeable, it's just UBI; if they're tradeable, you'll end up with inequality because people make different decisions.
I don't have good answers to your other questions. I don't think anyone does, though Dave Shapiro genuinely seems to be trying to figure them out.
We already have UBI in the form of EBT cards and the like. We already know how that plays out; fraud, misuse and greater misery. Money does not create virtue, it exacerbates the effects of a lack of virtue.
The digital grain dole seems the likeliest because we already have it in place via welfare systems. As such it's a question of optimization.
We could posit the emergence of a potential data dividend scenario (Larnier) created by AI firms for a specific substrate of workers: creatives: creating original feeding lots for training their AI models.
The issue of wage labor not being equivalent to purpose (Aristotle; but also Marx: alienation from means of production) you identified at the end is the real problem. In the middle ages, when the word gentleman appeared, it originally meant someone (aristocratic) wealthy enough not to ruin his touch by doing things (in the extreme, getting bathed and dressed by others).
Our current crisis, if you want we can link it back to the Romans, even though it's modern version is much harsher, has more to do with a loss of meaning in life. This is the ultimate purpose and we can look at figures, like JFK, as individuals who exhorted us to dream and do hard things. Unfortunately, until the 60s, Westerners were building on top of an existing religious-spiritual architecture, which even though was in the process of being abandoned through materialism (ever since the agricultural and industrial revolution), this process of mass consumer culture really only emerged in the 20th century.
The issue of purpose you identified is the crux of the issue. According to how we derive the meaning of life, our social, political and economic systems develop downstream of this. So in the pre-modern era, when we had the priests above the king who ruled through warriors and the merchants took their orders from them, below whom are the artisans and farmers, there's a certain logic. Even the king is accountable to an external force (the Gods/God), a relationship mediated by priests.
Whereas today we have inverted the pyramid, we have the illusion of "the people" (artisans and farmers) commanding (elections vs selections) while oligarchy (merchants) lord over everything.
We've reached a stage where it doesn't really matter who gets elected (selected), the cake's already baked, the "system" is maintained through an almost infinite number of laws and regulations, served by a PMC and PBC (professional bureaucratic class), with priests no longer offering communion with God (, just religion) and warriors turned into a PAFC (professional armed forces class).
I would propose that automation has already done most of the damage in Western manufacturing, and most of the labor remaining in settings such as assembly lines is already bare bones, even in the AI era. It's somewhat ironic that employment in the automotive industry has not declined more drastically. But it may just be that almost half of the automotive employees in administrative and clerical roles will soon be "Blocked."
In lower-skill, lower-wage labor jobs, such as cleaning the floors and toilets, cooking institutional meals, replacing roofs, mowing lawns, there probably is not much of a threat. If you've been around you might have noticed that quite the proportion of these workers are marginal in various respects. That's not meant to be offensive; borderline trainable individuals can contribute and earn a wage. These are not people who are likely to engage in politics, philosophy, music or poetry in their leisure time. I would expect that replacing them with reasonably functional robotics would cost a lot more than employing them, and then additional resources would need to be invested to keep them occupied.
I suggest you are less exposed to these types than you imagine. They represent a broad spectrum of people from the dregs to the highly motivated and upwardly mobile. That is precisely why these types of jobs are critical to a functioning society. For some, it will be their highest aspiration. For others a stepping stone to empire.
Also, none of these scenarios take into account the propensity for humans to figure out new and creative ways to make themselves useful to others. It's the main thing we do: make ourselves useful to our tribe, so that we pull our weight and get a share of the food.
We'll come up with all kinds of new ways to make ourselves or the product of our labor indispensable, ways we can't even imagine today. On that I'd definitely bet.
I think the data dividend model takes that into account - Lanier's approach assumes you're being paid for the value you add in generating data, thru your creativity, authenticity, content, etc., for example. It's not UBI disguised as a data payout, it's actually related to value added.
One, we already have an enormous number of people on the dole, either directly or through do-nothing make-work jobs (some now being cut by novel forms of automation). If this spells doom, it's already over (I say it does).
Two, the jobs being automated by large language models are all very low or negative value. Verbiage nobody ever wanted to read, but which is considered necessary or fashionable (pointless emails, reports, compliance documents, marketingspeak, legalese, trash fiction, other forms of filler copy). Graphics nobody ever wanted to look at but which makes filler copy look more important (i.e. clipart, stock photography). Code nobody ever wanted to write but which is marginally necessary to the function of software (boilerplate, routine copypasta business logic).
The people who make that low value stuff roughly fall into two categories. First, aforementioned make-work employees: those with no business being in white collar jobs, but who are there because policy or regulation demands it, or because it is cheaper (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) to give them busywork than to get rid of them. Second, entry-level employees, who one hopes use these small tasks as training wheels and quickly develop competence that LLMs cannot replicate.
The former category can go and nobody will miss them. Most who remain will be relieved they're no longer around producing an endless profusion of worthless tertiary tasks '("did you read my email?" "please give me feedback on my report" "can you help me figure out..." bla bla). They'll receive some other variety of welfare and little will change functionally about the macroeconomics: they'll continue to be worthless drains on productivity, churning money flows, and consuming excess production.
The latter category is the problem. Because those people replace the senior employees lost to churn, retirement, and death. That is the crucial pipeline being broken by every CEO looking to boost quarterlies by laying off half his staff and replacing them with API subscriptions for his competent senior employees.
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ~Buckminster Fuller c 1930
He unfortunately, although absolutely brilliant, did not put his mind to economics.
Lycurgus and the Spartan society tried hard and for 700 years was mostly successful, but they fell to the greed of outsiders eventually.
A great deal of the current commentary about artificial intelligence “destroying jobs” & somehow threatening to break the circular flow of the economy rests on a remarkably Optimistic reading of what is actually taking place in the real, physical world, because the layoffs that people are pointing to in the technology sector & across white-collar industries aren’t primarily the result of some sudden technological singularity in which machines have abruptly rendered human labor obsolete, but rather the very predictable unwinding of a decade-long financial & organizational distortion that was created during an era of near-zero interest rates, cheap energy, & thus... effectively free capital, when companies (especially in the tech sector galore) were incentivized to expand their payrolls far beyond what underlying productivity or long-term economic fundamentals would justify. When money costs nothing & investors reward growth above all else, firms accumulate entire internal ecosystems of analysts, consultants, product managers, brand strategists, communications teams, culture officers, & other nonsensical layers of managerial & administrative complexity that can exist comfortably only in a world where capital is abundant, energy is relatively cheap, & demographic growth ensures a continuously expanding consumer base; but once those background conditions begin to shift, those layers of complexity become economically fragile & are quickly pared back, which is precisely the process we are witnessing now! 😉
At the same time, the deeper macroeconomic reality unfolding across the developed world points in almost the exact opposite direction from the fashionable AI-technophilia narrative, because the fundamental structural problem facing advanced industrial societies isn’t an excess of workers whose labor can no longer find productive use, but rather a steadily intensifying shortage of them driven by demographic collapse (Japan is a textbook case of this), as birth rates across Europe, North America, & East Asia have fallen far below replacement levels & working-age populations are beginning to contract even as the number of retirees continues to rise, producing the peculiar situation in which fewer & fewer workers must support larger & larger dependent populations. In that context, automation & advanced computational tools function less as destroyers of labour than as compensatory mechanisms designed to maintain economic output in the face of a shrinking labour pool, effectively substituting for workers who were never born rather than displacing masses of existing workers who suddenly have nothing to do... & these tools are just a Zombie & a Dead Man Civilization's way of delaying the inevitable... akin to how a dying man may yet live a few months longer with some chemo! 😘
More fundamentally still (& this is the level of analysis that much of the popular discussion simply ignores)... the economy doesn't ultimately run on abstractions like “labor” & “capital” in the way simplified textbook models suggest, but rather on the far more basic foundations of energy flows, material throughput, ecological capacity, & demographic structure, because every complex economic system is in the end a physical system embedded within the biosphere, dependent on the availability of usable energy, extractable resources, stable ecosystems, & a population structure capable of sustaining the institutional & productive complexity that modern industrial economies require... & when those underlying biophysical conditions begin to tighten (whether through declining energy quality, resource constraints, ecological degradation, or demographic contraction)... the system does what complex systems always do under pressure: Namely, it sheds layers of complexity, meaning that entire categories of bureaucratic, managerial, & low-productivity service work disappear not because a machine has replaced them but because the broader economic structure that once sustained them can no longer be maintained at the same scale:
Seen from that perspective, the attempt to interpret the current wave of layoffs as evidence that artificial intelligence is somehow undermining the fundamental mechanisms of the economy is less a profound insight than a category error, because it mistakes the most visible technological tool of the moment for the far deeper forces that actually govern the expansion & contraction of complex economic systems; for what we are witnessing isn’t the arrival of a machine economy that no longer needs human beings, but the gradual adjustment of an overextended economic structure to a world of tighter energy margins, more expensive capital, aging populations, & ecological limits that were always going to reassert themselves sooner or later regardless of whether large language models or generative algorithms had ever been invented! 😊 🤭
Tl;dr- Pater OPTIMIST Confirmed! 😊 🤭
Excellent comment
Nonsense, it takes approx one generation [30-40 years] for new technology to become integrated. This applied to steam, internal combustion, computers, TV,s, cell phones and pretty much anything else you can think of.
After that, the old jobs are done away with and new different skills are trained and acquired
The economic systems change, slowly, to accommodate the new products. I don't know of anyone claiming that AI is undermining the economic 'system' merely it does and will require a major sift in distribution and outlook.This happens regularly and causes enormous pain and suffering.
Sometimes it is the plebs that suffer [like 90% of the time] and occasionally it is the rich elite.
I think that China is somewhat successfully managing the transition but i cannot see any other society making it without riots and revolution.
Thank you for not doing your typical doomer shtick. And of course he’s an optimist; that’s why I and I suspect many others subscribe: he consistently identifies the woeful realities we face and tries to identify and share potential solutions. Sometimes you then comment that evil America will and should soon be destroyed and that western civilization will fall allowing your intellectually sophisticated Muslim spiritualist future to emerge… and for that reason I almost did not read your comment today, although I definitely would have eventually :-). Having said all that, I cannot disagree that America has evil powers, internal and external, influencing it and that western civilization does appear to be bent on self-destruction. So I guess I’m a bit of a doomer too.
I do think your comment is spot on, you said what I was gonna say and a heck of a lot more than occurred to me. Despite your doomerness, perhaps you might share some possible solution paths too? Maybe even some that don’t end with the deaths of all the people that would come from a true collapse of western civilization?
Just hearsay, but still... Reminds one of how Twitter still functioned after Elon fired 80% of the employees. Dorsey over-hires.
https://substack.com/@chriswasden/note/c-220748621?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1cemqd
Right. That's the best evidence that these layoffs aren't AI-driven but are just purging excess fat from the COVID/DEI era.
That's part of it. Tech companies that grow fast and pull in a lot of money to play with, especially woke ones (and few aren't), tend to hire a lot of extra people just because. I'd also like to compare Block's outsourcing numbers today with three years ago and three years from now. Some of the "Sorry, but AI is taking your jobs" stuff is cover for switching to (more) foreign labor.
Still, I assume at least some of this is real, at least at companies that do one high-tech thing and are really pushing to use AI for it. It *is* going to replace a lot of so-called knowledge workers, as fast as the inertia within industries can be overcome.
We're already seeing perfectly serviceable commercials being made with it, for instance. They're not high art, but commercials never were. So ad agencies will still exist, but they won't need casting agencies, actors, crews to build sets and light them, etc., which will mean far fewer people getting paid. That seems inevitable, and the only reason it hasn't already happened across the board is that people keep doing their jobs the way they've been doing them out of habit, and not many are sure exactly how to use it yet.
One roadblock might be that the AI companies still aren't profitable, and presumably will have to charge a lot more for their services to get profitable before the investment money stops pouring in, unless they achieve some breakthrough in compute/energy costs. So the ad agency owner who wants to fire everyone and make ads from his computer probably isn't going to be able to do it on a $200/month subscription. Maybe the AI company will want $20k or $200k per month for the amount of compute he needs, and then it won't be such an obvious move.
I derive much of my sense of purpose from self-employment - building things and remodeling; but also growing more food than I can eat, hunting and fishing, binding books, playing guitar, fermenting alcohol, reading and writing extensively.
Theoretically I would still thrive on UBI, as I could supplement my income in many ways. But for the vast majority of people who spend most of their life with their face in front of a screen, UBI would be devastating to a sense of purpose and agency, destabilizing society.
UBI will be delivered in digital currency (programmable, expirable). Its use will likely be mediated through the Digital ID, which will be subject to “positive” social credit and carbon credit scores.
Yes. Which is part of why gold and silver are up, but bitcoin is down I suppose.
Only if UBI provides more than mere subsistence. If you have any excess, then landlords and merchants will grab it [force it] from you.
How do you supplement income when 90% are in the same boat as you and the other 10% are looking to reduce any payment?
Talk to retirees who have spent decades in productive employment, now there only possible source of income is standing as 'security' in a society that is paying excessive amounts for police and justice,
Of course, like I said, if society is destabilized, opportunities for making money will be few. What the centralizing control freaks always forget though, alternative currencies will rise, the black market would expand exponentially.
The black market in what?
You doing someone's nails and their washing of your underwear is not a market or economy.
You are still thinking that life will be like it was. It won't. When there is no profit to be made in maintaining the buildings, roads, transport, food distribution, they will stop.
It will be slow, but the end is not negotiable. Either there will be a revolution and a new economic system, or 90% will die. It has happened over and over and over.
Matt Taibbi summed up how the system is rigged rather succinctly in a recent article:
“And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air. The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.”
“Anyone who has seriously studied applied macroeconomics knows that crony capitalists hate free markets, with all the fairness and transparency that they imply. Competition is a serious drag on enormous profits and introduces significant uncertainty and risk. As soon as the game is underway, successful capitalists are constantly pushing the envelope of the rules, seeking to establish rents, monopolies, unfair advantages, and debt traps to snare the bulk of the players and stifle the profit-eroding tendency of real competition.
This is the basis of all aristocracies, which are merely the institutionalization of privilege. Once they make it they bloody well want to change the rules to hang on to it, and take the risk out of their equation. They foster a culture of two sets of books, two sets of rules, and two systems of justice.
The oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens across the globe to insure their wealth and power remains intact.
Overtaxed, sometimes homeless, unemployed, hungry, and deprived of any hope of justice, the vast majority of French citizens were not blind. They saw their own children starve while stolen riches bought velvet outfits for children of the elite. When their desperation erupted abruptly into unbridled rage, the French Revolution had arrived.
Matt Taibbi
Nails and underware? Are you calling me a fag now?
Charles Eisenstein just called up the spectre of the French Revolution too. I’m not sure why these guys keep refering to the French, when we are Americans. It sounds like you think something similar should happen, about which I do not necessarily disagree. But its also true, the globalist, neo-marxist goal is the destruction of America. So be careful what you wish for.
All I’m saying is, the control freaks over extend their hands. People create markets even in the midst of total war. We are anarchic that way at our core, in the sense that it is spontaneous, it does not need to be directed.
Otherwise, Friday I was watching Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, and Sam Altman, CEO of Open-AI, interviewed by Aaron Ross Sorkin.
These are not strong men. They are weak men, parasitizing society, building nothing beautiful, leading society to collapse.
Globalist, neo-Marxist? There is nothing Marxist about the Globalists, they are the capitalist billionaires running every country in the west.
As you say, they are weak men, very scared men [and women] and have no agenda except to keep and maybe increase their wealth.
They use socialist terminology to keep the morons from seeing what is really going on.
Humans recognise that 'fair [unforced] exchange' is the only moral means of interaction, every form of government violates that norm.
The only reason that I and others cite the French is because that is the most well known, and best documented. The Aristos have pushed to the point that US and all Europe is about to see that the guillotine is the only answer to the crimes inflicted upon them.
As is true for so many things, Paine grasped the crux of the matter and expressed it as well as it can be expressed.
"The privileged have regularly invited their own destruction with their greed."
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty
The technocracy backstopping those billionaires is fundamentally globalist neo-Marxist. Marxism for thee, capitalism for me, iow. It is rising in most American cities and blue states, but increasingly all of America. Let the infrastructure collapse, we have a patronage network to expand. Flood the country with illiterate third worlders, put ‘em on the dole and give ‘em id’s and ballots. Mine taxpayers to give middle class lifestyles to legions of do-nothing DEI hires. Bankrupt your political enemies, seize their shit. Indoctrinate the kids on social justice and gender woo.
Cutting off some bilionaire heads is not going to stop that.
We can raise taxes and hire excess labor for make work programs, only this time it is to terraform Mars.
Why wouldn't these elites not just engineer a virus that kills most of us off, or better yet, sterilized most of the populace to solve their prole problem? I find that to be far more likely and optimal from the perspective of these reptilians than tolerating any of their loot being redistributed.
Some might say that they already have done so, or at least test ran such and some wonder if said bugaboo is the virus or the vaccine?
I read Clancy's "Rainbow Six" decades ago when such an idea seemed unimaginable. Today it is more unimaginable that it hasn't happened yet. The plandemic probably was meant to be more lethal but the elites are likely also affected by the crisis of competence.
I received a great letter from Diego Costa of Foundation for Economic Education (which isn't on their site for some reason) with a very good explanation of why AI will *not* replace human labor. A few snippets:
Labor-intensive services become relatively more expensive as productivity rises elsewhere in the economy. The plumber gets expensive.
When cognitive inputs become cheap, new physical services become viable: all the physical work we might desire that isn’t being done today because it’s too expensive. Services we can barely imagine because we’ve never lived in a world where they were affordable. The question isn’t “Will there be enough physical work to go around?” The question is “How much physical work would people want if it were affordable?” The answer is almost certainly “Far more than currently exists.” This latent demand exists but remains unexpressed because the cognitive and coordination costs of providing these services make them unaffordable for most people
And the robotics problem may prove stubbornly difficult. The data needed to train physical AI doesn’t exist the way text and code do. Human skin senses pressure and texture with extraordinary sophistication. We don’t have good sensors, we can’t easily generate the training data that would teach machines to replicate them. The marginal cost curves for physical production remain steep in ways that don’t apply to software.
When mass production made textiles cheap, handmade became a luxury category. It’s about signaling taste, authenticity, story, *scarcity*. When perfectly adequate AI-generated content becomes infinite, people will crave the imperfectly human.
Also, a lot of economic life isn’t “Compute a solution”; it’s “Who is accountable if this goes wrong?” People want someone to sue, to blame, to insure, to certify, to sign. The scarce thing becomes the ability to produce credible commitments under uncertainty.
I don't know why the whole thing isn't online.
Who will do that work? If we create work our own people won't do we will destroy our culture by importing people who will, for one generation. If we impoverish our own people to the point they will do anything, they will also be susceptible to mob recruitment.
I may be rich enough to hire someone to wipe my bottom, but should I? There are always pragmatic as well as moral considerations. Will we rely on government to make such decisions? or return to a more robust self government founded on a common culture?
When I read the types of jobs that were being automated, it triggered a thought. Somebody wrote about exactly these types of jobs... Then it hit me: David Graeber's book titled "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" AI is automating exactly those jobs that Mr. Graeber thought were pointless but maintained for social, political purposes. Conversely, the types of jobs the Mr. Graeber thought were real: nurses, doctors, teachers, mechanics and repair people, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, "dirty jobs" etc. will be the last automated won't they?
Maybe AI is pruning away all the economic deadwood that has accumulated since the beginning of our civilization. The remaining vines and trees will be stronger, healthier. And what about the people who are pruned? The movies "The Island" and "Soylent Green" offer possible answers...
Yah, it will definitely destroy all bullshit jobs. It will also reduce a lot of real jobs to bullshit in the same way that automation has done in the past to other types of highly skilled work.
Hopefully Soylent Green will not be made of game designers. Yeesh.
The only bullshit jobs are government jobs. Pruning another 10 million of those would be most welcome.
So exactly how many 'buggy whips' are being bought today?
What about switchboard operators, Kardex clerks, data entry or comptometer clerks?
Bar-codes destroyed 50 million [or more] jobs, all of which are now bullshit.
They weren't bullshit jobs when they were needed.
Lawyers, doctors, and teachers will be replaced by AI.
No, many of their rote duties will be further automated by AI, but their accountability roles cannot be. Who's going to trust AI to broker their big deal, make sure their diagnosis makes sense, or teach their children? Those professions are highly corrupt today, but their original functions are still important.
I know multiple people who already trust their AI advisor more than their attorney or their doctor. I have a friend who is a $1,200 per hour attorney in NY and his whole firm is plagued with clients who listen to their AI over their attorneys. He says this is widespread. I have seen firsthand the same with doctors and health care because my wife is active in those circles.
Whether that's a good or bad thing, depends on your view of these professions, but I can testify with 100% certainty that at least some people will be happy to rely on AI. The response from attorneys and doctors will (almost certainly) be to make it illegal to do so. They'll rely on a coercive moat for as long as they can...
The biggest obstacles to AI replacing your physician are convincing humans to accept the errors, convincing humans to accept sound clinical decisions routinely and distributing the liability. I am MD. I truly think AI could replace me today without significant adversity in outcomes. In my casual experiments, the diagnostic accuracy of the AI in my field is poor compared to me. But most of my diagnoses, by far, are clinically insignificant. Most of my errors, by a large margin, are typographical and proofreading errors, so my error rate may even have more clinical significance than AI misdiagnosing something common and benign as something else common and benign.
AI is already being used in direct patient care where imaging is involved. It makes sense, because radiographs and reporting have both been digital for years, so the training material for the models must number in the billions of cases. I consider the same trend in general surgical interventions must be on the horizon. Surgeons have been operating using robotic assistance for quite a long time, and I assume that the surgeons' activities were recorded and archived. Anatomy varies quite a lot, but if the AI has access to digital images, video and the entire physical procedure as 1's and 0's, it can learn how to do appendectomies, tubals, cholecystectomies, hysterectomies...operations where currently the CRNA earns more than the surgeon doing the case.
Process automation carries significant risk over time. For example, when a process is automated its operators’ ability to understand how it works atrophies. They just see the input and the output. As fewer and fewer operators actually understand those implementation details, who will maintain and enhance and improve the tools? What happens if they break? What happens if the energy required to sustain them becomes scarce and too few can “manually“ fill the role, do the work? Net, all these complex fancy things are tools for us to leverage not for us to be leveraged by. I fear that our ruling class has become disconnected from some of these fundamental realities. Hope we can find a way to bring their feet back onto the ground and out of the clouds.
As long as AI is better schooled on the Hippocratic Oath than most of today's doctors, it will be an upgrade.
That said, as a pattern recognition tool and analyst, it is likely already better than any human can be. As a reader of unsaid things and communicator of difficult things, I suspect it has a ways yet to go.
AI is a hammer. People will use it to drive screws...
Some people might remain in those jobs but basically as exception/hallucination handlers for AI. AI, like most labor-saving devices, also functions as a force multiplier for remaining labor.
I'm honestly not sure I'd see a lot of difference between AI Equity and a UBI in practice- are citizens supposed to be free to trade their shares in AI companies after the initial distribution occurs? Because in that case some will make more prudent trades than others, and... yeah, given time, a tiny handful of shareholders will just wind up monopolising ownership again. If they're not free to trade their shares, how do they "own" them, precisely?
On the Data Dividend/Matrix Scenario: Even if it turns out that human neurons are somehow architecturally required for generating original insights- which I'm a little skeptical of- I will just remark that machine learning researchers are already using vat-grown human-brain-cell-organoids as a computational substrate in some cases, ironically enough on the grounds of energy-efficiency. Which I think should absolutely and obviously be illegal and makes me want to scream at the fucking wall... but hey, I guess the Torment Nexus remains the undefeated champion.
One other wrinkle that seems under-discussed, in my view, is whether AI tech companies overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of cities in the US, UK, and maybe China are going to be writing UBI cheques to the citizens of... every other country on the planet that will be ravaged by the job losses they have caused? Do these tech companies not defend their IP with internationally-enforced patent moats? Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I'd like someone to ELI5 as to what happens here.
"Given time, a tiny handful of shareholders will just wind up monopolising ownership again. "
Well put. That's exactly the problem! If they're non-tradeable, it's just UBI; if they're tradeable, you'll end up with inequality because people make different decisions.
I don't have good answers to your other questions. I don't think anyone does, though Dave Shapiro genuinely seems to be trying to figure them out.
We already have UBI in the form of EBT cards and the like. We already know how that plays out; fraud, misuse and greater misery. Money does not create virtue, it exacerbates the effects of a lack of virtue.
Great essay!
The digital grain dole seems the likeliest because we already have it in place via welfare systems. As such it's a question of optimization.
We could posit the emergence of a potential data dividend scenario (Larnier) created by AI firms for a specific substrate of workers: creatives: creating original feeding lots for training their AI models.
The issue of wage labor not being equivalent to purpose (Aristotle; but also Marx: alienation from means of production) you identified at the end is the real problem. In the middle ages, when the word gentleman appeared, it originally meant someone (aristocratic) wealthy enough not to ruin his touch by doing things (in the extreme, getting bathed and dressed by others).
Our current crisis, if you want we can link it back to the Romans, even though it's modern version is much harsher, has more to do with a loss of meaning in life. This is the ultimate purpose and we can look at figures, like JFK, as individuals who exhorted us to dream and do hard things. Unfortunately, until the 60s, Westerners were building on top of an existing religious-spiritual architecture, which even though was in the process of being abandoned through materialism (ever since the agricultural and industrial revolution), this process of mass consumer culture really only emerged in the 20th century.
The issue of purpose you identified is the crux of the issue. According to how we derive the meaning of life, our social, political and economic systems develop downstream of this. So in the pre-modern era, when we had the priests above the king who ruled through warriors and the merchants took their orders from them, below whom are the artisans and farmers, there's a certain logic. Even the king is accountable to an external force (the Gods/God), a relationship mediated by priests.
Whereas today we have inverted the pyramid, we have the illusion of "the people" (artisans and farmers) commanding (elections vs selections) while oligarchy (merchants) lord over everything.
We've reached a stage where it doesn't really matter who gets elected (selected), the cake's already baked, the "system" is maintained through an almost infinite number of laws and regulations, served by a PMC and PBC (professional bureaucratic class), with priests no longer offering communion with God (, just religion) and warriors turned into a PAFC (professional armed forces class).
I would propose that automation has already done most of the damage in Western manufacturing, and most of the labor remaining in settings such as assembly lines is already bare bones, even in the AI era. It's somewhat ironic that employment in the automotive industry has not declined more drastically. But it may just be that almost half of the automotive employees in administrative and clerical roles will soon be "Blocked."
In lower-skill, lower-wage labor jobs, such as cleaning the floors and toilets, cooking institutional meals, replacing roofs, mowing lawns, there probably is not much of a threat. If you've been around you might have noticed that quite the proportion of these workers are marginal in various respects. That's not meant to be offensive; borderline trainable individuals can contribute and earn a wage. These are not people who are likely to engage in politics, philosophy, music or poetry in their leisure time. I would expect that replacing them with reasonably functional robotics would cost a lot more than employing them, and then additional resources would need to be invested to keep them occupied.
I suggest you are less exposed to these types than you imagine. They represent a broad spectrum of people from the dregs to the highly motivated and upwardly mobile. That is precisely why these types of jobs are critical to a functioning society. For some, it will be their highest aspiration. For others a stepping stone to empire.
The lack of human data will matter. Unsure of how much.
If all the internet is AI, then you are burning power to burn other peoples power?
There are still phsycial constraints.
A haunting read—one that illuminates and unsettles.
Also, none of these scenarios take into account the propensity for humans to figure out new and creative ways to make themselves useful to others. It's the main thing we do: make ourselves useful to our tribe, so that we pull our weight and get a share of the food.
We'll come up with all kinds of new ways to make ourselves or the product of our labor indispensable, ways we can't even imagine today. On that I'd definitely bet.
I think the data dividend model takes that into account - Lanier's approach assumes you're being paid for the value you add in generating data, thru your creativity, authenticity, content, etc., for example. It's not UBI disguised as a data payout, it's actually related to value added.
" add in generating data, thru your creativity, authenticity, content, etc., " really?
You obviously don't get out much.
How many people do you know that you feel you should reward for their creativity, authenticity, content, etc.
Kim Kardashian is, I am sure, at the top of your list.
Value can only be determined by a free and open market. It cannot be assigned by fiat.
When do you think Block (formerly, Square) will be renamed to [black] Cube?
Couple of thoughts:
One, we already have an enormous number of people on the dole, either directly or through do-nothing make-work jobs (some now being cut by novel forms of automation). If this spells doom, it's already over (I say it does).
Two, the jobs being automated by large language models are all very low or negative value. Verbiage nobody ever wanted to read, but which is considered necessary or fashionable (pointless emails, reports, compliance documents, marketingspeak, legalese, trash fiction, other forms of filler copy). Graphics nobody ever wanted to look at but which makes filler copy look more important (i.e. clipart, stock photography). Code nobody ever wanted to write but which is marginally necessary to the function of software (boilerplate, routine copypasta business logic).
The people who make that low value stuff roughly fall into two categories. First, aforementioned make-work employees: those with no business being in white collar jobs, but who are there because policy or regulation demands it, or because it is cheaper (monetarily, emotionally, or otherwise) to give them busywork than to get rid of them. Second, entry-level employees, who one hopes use these small tasks as training wheels and quickly develop competence that LLMs cannot replicate.
The former category can go and nobody will miss them. Most who remain will be relieved they're no longer around producing an endless profusion of worthless tertiary tasks '("did you read my email?" "please give me feedback on my report" "can you help me figure out..." bla bla). They'll receive some other variety of welfare and little will change functionally about the macroeconomics: they'll continue to be worthless drains on productivity, churning money flows, and consuming excess production.
The latter category is the problem. Because those people replace the senior employees lost to churn, retirement, and death. That is the crucial pipeline being broken by every CEO looking to boost quarterlies by laying off half his staff and replacing them with API subscriptions for his competent senior employees.
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ~Buckminster Fuller c 1930
He unfortunately, although absolutely brilliant, did not put his mind to economics.
Lycurgus and the Spartan society tried hard and for 700 years was mostly successful, but they fell to the greed of outsiders eventually.