If everyone is fired by AI, who's going to buy the products and services made by the companies if no one has money anymore?

That seems like a Q3 issue for 2026 let's put the conversation off till then.

/s

Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.

Further proof of this: Climate change.

Pathogens don't really think of what will happen after the body they're abusing dies

Back in the 1980's they told me it'd trickle down.

...eventually.

Ever heard of the everlasting sustainable war? https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Sustainable_War

If robots generate all of productivity and human labor is no longer needed, the economy would not be able to sustain itself. Instead, in trying to cope with the unneeded human labor and to ensure continued productivity, the only area where productivity would be ensured is by means of war using human resources, namely destroying things in order to be rebuild, thus generating a sustaining feedback loop. The rich will get richer and everyone else will only be employed as soldiers in a continuing war economy.

Even though this is a sci-fi concept, i believe it's not a stretch to say we are headed to this direction.

This is a common question in economics.

It's called technological unemploymemt and it's a type of structural unemployment.

Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.

An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there's like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.

There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.

Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.

There's been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there's not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.

Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.

One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn't as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.

The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.

In theory, UBI.

In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.

If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it's not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.

They won't, they'll simply die and the market will slowly adjust to those with capital.

This is all happening because we shot a gorilla in 2016 btw.

I'm an optimist, so I'll believe one day we'll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don't criticize me too harshly

In a better world machines would do the work and humans just would share the wealth and live life in peace.

The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we'll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.

As stated, the companies that push AI aren't concerned with the long-term consequences. But if you want to know how the individuals who run those companies personally feel, do a search for billionaire doomsday preppers.

TL;DR: They've got a vision for the future. We're not in it.

Why would we need anyone to buy things? Remember that money is an abstraction for resources. If you can do everything with AI, then you already have all the resources you need. Whether or not someone else needs what you produce is irrelevant when you already have access to everything you could want.

Everyone will be working multiple shitty service jobs that robots are not cost effective to automate. Our miserable wages will be just sufficient to keep the wheels on the cart from falling off.

Look at empires of the past.

Things were so bad in Dickens' London that living in sewers to live off whatever scraps you could find was an actual occupation.

Wealth creates its own reality.

That's the neat part. No one.

If the rich can hire a handful of the middle class to build and maintain their robots, then they can just cut the poor and working poor out of the economy entirely, and they will be willing to accept any conditions for food and shelter.

We can arrange the economy anyway we choose. Taking all of the decision making for themselves is part of the plan.

You’re implying AI has the intelligence to remotely achieve this. It doesn’t. It is all venture capitalist porn for over glorified keyword copy paste. Thats it.

Look up crisis theory, the rate of profit tends to fall in capitalist systems. Because each company is driven by competitive self-interest, it is incapable of acting for the good of the whole. You simply cannot devote resources to anything but trying to out-compete your rivals and in doing so the profit for everyone tends lower and lower until you have a crisis.

The whole increasing concentration of wealth and fall in median quality of life can be traced back to basically each individual of the Owner Class thinking that somebody else will keep the system going by employing people and paying them well enough so that they keep on buying stuff.

The whole think is pretty much a Tragedy Of The Commons as defined in Games Theory, only instead of a shared grazing commons that would be fine if just one person had a few more sheep than they should (but gets overgrazed and then everybody looses if more people have a few more sheep than they should), we have the Economic system.

Historically one of the big reasons for the invariable appearance of some kind of social construct above the individual with the ability to make decisions for the group and force individuals to comply (from the "council of elders" all the way to the modern Democracy) is exactly to stop people from, driven by pure selfishness, "overgraze" in the various "commons" we have and ending up destroying the whole thing for everybody - if you have one or two doing it the "commons" can handle it, but too many and you get a tragedy.

And here we are after 4 decades of Neoliberalism whose entire purpose was to reduce the power of entities making decisions for the good of the group to overseeing the commons and force individuals from overexploiting it, so it's not at all surprising that we are seeing various common systems starting to collapse due to over-exploitation.

I'm pretty certain that whatever societies will be dominant next are not those which embraced Neoliberalism the most as those will be the ones with the most collapsed systems and that stuff takes a lot of time to recover, plus the very people who overexploited them to collapse will do all they can to avoid having stop what they've been doing and that gave them so much personal upside maximization and they've basically bought politics in the West, so there is no actual will to do it in the Power Elites (there's a will to get the upsides of a well functioning society but no will for they themselves to do the concessions needed, only for somebody else to do it, which is exactly the mindset that when not stamped out by some kind of oversight entity causes the problem in the first place).

This question was asked, and the answer was "Kill the poor, make line go up."

The real answer is no one. They will quickly realize that at the root of the economy are the regular people, and since the economy is a cycle, when you cut off a part, the cycle doesn’t work anymore.

People (doomers) here are saying businesses and rich people will, but this can only, work for a limited time, because either the products will shoot up in price since only the rich can afford them, or the businesses won’t be able to sell their products, so they can’t buy new things, which means no more revenue to the shareholders.

Think of all the companies that live from b2b models, when you look closer, they are all at some the suppliers of b2c businesses, except, maybe military companies. That company that makes the lithography machines (asml) only sells to other businesses such as tsmc. Tsmc also only sells to other businesses, but they sell to businesses that sell to consumers.

If all the money is hoarded by the rich, who is going to spend money to make the economy run?

Well, in the purely fictional hypothetical that an LLM could advance to the point of reliably replacing humans without a stark loss of quality and marginal cost-benefit before legislations step in to make the cost of increased power consumption and environmental damage reflect on what these companies pay in:

Their will be an owners class who have stake or claim over facilities and technology to utilize the AI, and then there will be an everybody else who have to fight tooth and nail politically for basic human rights as well as shelter and food. Just the current system but whether it's that much worse or better depends on how well our democracies function.

Personally I welcome a post scarcity economy

You are more likely to be fired due to offshoring

1024: This new farming technology means one person can feed 1000 people! What are the other 999 people supposed to do? Are the lords just going to conscript all us serfs and have us fight for their entertainment?

People will find other things to do that AI can't. Like welding, or tapdancing, or sex work.

Nobody has money anymore