What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?
What kind of "left" version are you imagining?
The Open Society Foundation.
This is an interesting question and I’d love to come to a good answer that works for all, but can we also accept that we went from a world that had people manually light lamps around the city like 150 [1] years ago to the full electric lights. Do we then stop that progress now and keep people manually collecting garbage when a replacement tech is around the corner?
[1] mm more like 120 years. The last lamplighters strikes was close to 1907 in NYC
No we take the tech and socialize its control
If you “socialized” Edison’s electricity and gave the control to the lamplighters, we’d all be living under gas lamps now. There is zero reason for the lamplighters to negotiate any progress whatsoever.
Not all change is progress. Just because you can mass-remove populations of people from the economy does not mean that doing so is "progress".
We can't even have a conversation about extended unemployment benefits, retraining credits or lamplighters transitioning to utility workers, which is what happened with the "basket of jobs"?
That's all we've been doing while labelling it "progress".
I am pointing out that not all changes are progress. I am not claiming that all changes are not progress.
Right but my point was who gets to decide? If you make it a council of elders and people whose jobs might be affected the answer is always going to be All change is bad progress. End of story.
Who gets veto powers?
I dunno; I never addressed that.
I'm saying that, in any discussion, I am not willing to accept it as established fact that some $NEWTHING is progress just because its a new thing.
The conversations and arguments I am seeing in favour of AI is along those lines - "it is change, therefore it is progress". I am saying that I dispute the argument even if the conclusion is unclear at this moment in time.
I think this is a caricature of the argument. Even my original comment said progress is happening, but not just because some arbitrary change was happening.
Productivity improvements are measurable and they have an outsized impact on the standard of living. Progress is happening.
That would be different from giving lamplighters control over conversion to electric, who would claim that electricity is too dangerous to use and just kill it. Case in point [1]
[1]: https://www.cambridgeday.com/2026/10/26/rally-against-waymo-...
I’m happy to socialize the automation companies once the conversion and takeover of automation increase the standard of living of everybody cannot be blocked.
Socializing and then having committee meetings about “how much automation is appropriate” is the situation I’d want to avoid.
None that threatened jobs. "Switching to solar" didn't require people to transition to different jobs.
That's the crux of my point, ignore it, is obfuscation.
People got very very angry at me for pointing this out.
So I stopped doing it.
Why do you think Americans don’t go on strike like the French? Not many workers can afford to be out of a job, out of health insurance and eggs $30 a dozen.
>> What happens when a group of people goes from the driver's of the economy to a cost center?
> Perhaps the real answer is people’s buying power. If people can’t withhold their work, they could withhold their spending, ie boycott misbehaving entities.
But if they don't have work, they won't have buying power to withhold. Post AI-displacement, the economy will reorient around serving the people who still have buying power (the oligarchs and their hangers-on).
Expect demand for food to plummet and demand for dick-waving pyramids and rocket cars to skyrocket.
It depends on how hard they'll fight, but technology just doesn't seem like it's a force for good anymore. I could imagine that, in the face of a revolt against automation, some fraction of the oligarchs will just establish a Ukraine-war like AI-drone kill-zone to protect their assets. If they do that, they'd probably win.
But it probably wouldn't get to that point, because, given the online nature of culture, AI-powered surveillance and AI-powered social interference could very likely thwart any revolt before it starts.
Otherwise you might end up with disruptive things like protests, blockage of value creating infrastructure, etc.
Another less dramatic option would be containment in prisons or similar where minimal costs can be incurred.
I imagine a human body will still be cheaper and more agile than robots for a long while.
A machine has superior eyes and reflexes, a single robot with a gun would kill a infinite number of humans with the same gun.
I say this who is voluntarily returning to university to pursue a different profession after working 10 years as a software engineer. This isn't going to work for 95% of people, people who have dependents children and partners, mortgages.
> mass extermination of those that refuse
I have no words, but you sound like a dickhead.
Given the current economic trajectory there will be a line to put on uniforms, I don't think I am more eligible for this task than many others who have more dependents.
It wouldn’t be economically rational to do this. Nations have a monopoly on violence (policing, military & enforcement of through force) within their own borders, and nations are in competition with one another, even during times of peace.
It does not make sense for anyone nation to start culling people who do not get onboard with some radical social engineering programme. Through the stroke of a pen these companies are under the control of the government.
Say you want to make an even more pessimistic argument, say the oligarchy in one country get control of this monopoly on its violence. That country is still in competition with other countries.
Russia still has nukes, and thanks to their little war, they lack the technological expertise to go to toe to toe with China and the US on AI. Countries wanna mobilise what resources they can to survive this strategic competition and that includes humans.
Say the oligarchs are smart enough to maintain the status quo in foreign policy, and they seek to enslave their entire country. There is no amount of resources in the world that would prevent the amount of disenfranchised people from revolting and over-throwing any such government that didn’t give them a fair social contract, especially one that’s already gone through higher levels of economic development.
Once AI can replace them, keeping the peasants around means they gobble up your energy, food, land, resources while returning nothing.
He is not advocating for exterminating people, he is just being a realist, like it or not this is the most likely outcome. Having humans is not a advantage since their usefulness is low and their resource consumption is high. The first country to get rid of them and replace them with machines will have a unassailable economic advantage. China and Russia will ultimately lose since they are nationalists dedicated to preserving the chinese and russian ethnicities. They will keep their humans around and be outcompeted.
Think through the logistics of maintaining power after a sudden transfer of institutional power to an oligarchs where humans come obsolete and are being lined up to be exterminated? Do you think those people just disappear? Do you think jobless, aimless people, or the new poor have historically accepted such reversal of economic standing?
History almost suggests this leads to a complete breakdown of society
Do you think this is gonna be enforced by robots?
Do you know how much power comes from the fact that energy come companies reliant consumption?
Think, do you think of that power they built on goods sold to consumers stays around after the consumers disappear?
Calling this economically rational probably goes hard if you have a rudimentary understanding of second-order effects, and an understanding of economics built on YouTube videos & hot takes online.
Something you learn in most introductory economic classes, is slave labour is less efficient than free salaried workers, an observation that goes as far back Adam smith & Richardo.
It already looks like this is underway if you look at the state of health care and how little is being done about it.