Nothing in capitalism suggests that consumers have to be human. In fact, the whole enshittification trend suggests that traditional consumers are less economically relevant than they've ever been.
A robot, who I will name Robort, over time becomes, say, 1/10th the price of human labor. But they do 10x the work quality and work 10x longer.
In that scenario, you could pay them the same wage but produce significantly more economic value. The robot, who won’t care about material possessions or luxuries, could make purchases on behalf of a human - and that human, overworked in 2025 or jobless - has a significant quality of life improvement.
Help, an economist or someone smarter, check my math.
Yeah, I meant more in the sense of businesses being the primary consumers for everything, but maybe you're right. In the same way that everyone owns a car today, maybe everyone will own one or more robots that do what they otherwise would have done, and get paid on their behalf. I think it's unlikely because machines are a lot more fungible than people, and I don't see businesses offloading ownership of the means of production in that way unless you're also covering hardware and running costs. You would also have to compete with very large corps that will almost certainly own vast worker capacity in the form of frontier ai and robots.
But that kind of gets back to my original point, which was that I think the vast majority of economic interaction will be business to business, not just in value (the way it is today) but also in volume. I.e. in the same way that everyone has a license, maybe every family also has a registered household business, for managing whatever assets they own. The time it takes for self hosted models to approach frontier model performance isn't huge, and maybe we see that filter in to households that are able to do decent work at a cheaper rate.
The company that built the robot simply takes the money that would have gone to the human workers. The robots will exert strong downward pressure on wages. Humans will have to look for jobs the robots can't do, and when they fail taxes will make up the difference, else people will revolt.
When you think about it for a moment, you've merely described the relationship between a parent and a child.
Children (under the age of 18) are less productive and spend significantly less time doing anything that could be considered work and they don't pay their parents in any significant capacity.
So, okay, that’s interesting. Let’s play it out. Unilever buys a Facebook ad in hopes a robot will buy a razor and shave? And even if a robot needed to shave, what reason would a company have to pay it a wage where before it was only a capex?
More likely businesses than robots, but robots will consume on behalf of the business that owns them, same as currently happens with procurement.
If people don't have the money to pay for shavers, shavers either won't be made, or they'll be purchased and owned by businesses, and leased for some kind of servitude. I'm not sure what kind of repayment would work if AI and machines can replace humans for most labor. Maybe we're still in the equation, just heavily devalued because AI is faster and produces higher quality output.
Alternatively, government might have to provide those things, funded by taxes from businesses that own machines. I think, realistically, this is just a return to slavery by another name; it's illegal to own people as part of the means of production, but if you have a person analog that is just as good, the point becomes moot.
I think it gets scary if the government decides it no longer has a mandate to look after citizens. If we don't pay taxes, do we get representation?
mrcwinn|4 months ago
A robot, who I will name Robort, over time becomes, say, 1/10th the price of human labor. But they do 10x the work quality and work 10x longer.
In that scenario, you could pay them the same wage but produce significantly more economic value. The robot, who won’t care about material possessions or luxuries, could make purchases on behalf of a human - and that human, overworked in 2025 or jobless - has a significant quality of life improvement.
Help, an economist or someone smarter, check my math.
coderenegade|4 months ago
But that kind of gets back to my original point, which was that I think the vast majority of economic interaction will be business to business, not just in value (the way it is today) but also in volume. I.e. in the same way that everyone has a license, maybe every family also has a registered household business, for managing whatever assets they own. The time it takes for self hosted models to approach frontier model performance isn't huge, and maybe we see that filter in to households that are able to do decent work at a cheaper rate.
esafak|4 months ago
imtringued|4 months ago
Children (under the age of 18) are less productive and spend significantly less time doing anything that could be considered work and they don't pay their parents in any significant capacity.
mrcwinn|4 months ago
coderenegade|4 months ago
If people don't have the money to pay for shavers, shavers either won't be made, or they'll be purchased and owned by businesses, and leased for some kind of servitude. I'm not sure what kind of repayment would work if AI and machines can replace humans for most labor. Maybe we're still in the equation, just heavily devalued because AI is faster and produces higher quality output.
Alternatively, government might have to provide those things, funded by taxes from businesses that own machines. I think, realistically, this is just a return to slavery by another name; it's illegal to own people as part of the means of production, but if you have a person analog that is just as good, the point becomes moot.
I think it gets scary if the government decides it no longer has a mandate to look after citizens. If we don't pay taxes, do we get representation?