The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

We will start thinking about jobs when the tech feudal lords find out there's no more growth, because consumers to their products are being replaced by AI.

Some are already worried: https://fortune.com/europe/2025/06/09/bnpl-loans-klarna-ceo-...

"How many jobs there should be for X" is not a question that can be answered by people whose main intent in the last few years has been to put others out of a job while claiming they're making the world a better place. Aka, us in tech.

> We will start thinking about jobs when the tech feudal lords find out there's no more growth, because consumers to their products are being replaced by AI.

The future feudal lords will just sell to each other and ignore the jobless, moneyless masses. We don’t like to hear this, but normal people will likely become less and less economically relevant, to the point where their total economic activity will one day be a rounding error next to the economic activity of the top 0.0N%.

I worked with a founder who dealt with only a small number of very rich customers. He would say “We only sell to the rich because they have the money.” The future looks like a more extreme version of this.

Rich people selling stuff to other rich people is just moving wealth around, it does not generate wealth.

I sell you stuff worth 5 billion, you give me 5 billion. Nothing happened. Maybe you even consume the product so there is less wealth.

Only labor can generate value. Work is what transforms a thing into another thing that has more value than before. Machines and AI do not create value.

You might wonder what would happen if they had an general AI, maybe actual autonomous robots? Would those create value? Well, at first whoever got the first AGI would get incredibly rich but if everyone had access to that tech, the prices for everything that can produced with it would plummet down until they are the cost of running the AI.

Rich people get richer by employing poor people. So they can extract the value they produce. If they don't employ anyone, they are not making any profit. (Well for actual free markets, you can of course make profit being a monopolist and stuff or just do crime.)

So yes, rich people are screwed. That is why they buy bunkers in New Zealand. That is why we see the rise of fascism, because they will have to tighten the screws to keep the ship running a little while longer.

That doesn't work for all industries though. iPhones and other mass luxury/ "masstige" goods are essentially high-end commodities. Apple can't stay rich just selling to richies, they need poor sods to line up to buy millions upon millions of Apple devices. And that can't happen if aforementioned sods have no income. Same with most electronics, with most travel, with autos, with apparel, most restaurants, videogames, furnishings and appliances, etc. Income inequality can only go so far without dire economic consequences. If the non-wealthy become a mere rounding error in terms of aggregate purchasing power, then we simply won't be able to buy enough to keep these lifestyle manufacturers flush.

Exactly, they are running for the haven of government to retain power.

>I worked with a founder who dealt with only a small number of very rich customers. He would say “We only sell to the rich because they have the money.”

So you worked with someone who you claim to be a direct -knowing even- participant in this trend. You presumably benefited from this work too. No?

It's impressive how many people bemoan the dangers they see in a thing, while continuing to contribute to its growth, again and again and again, as long as the personal benefit keeps working their way.

He's a real Adolf Eichmann, that one

Why keep any ships running other than their own? kill off 90% of the humans, starting with the poor, using robots, after robots can make new robots and fix themselves and do all the other jobs?

If we're looking at extremes, I don't think the ultra rich are in as bad a position as you want them to be.

This escalated quickly!

a lot of ifs there, most of which aren't really in the cards: aka laborless robotic self reproduction? seriously? if we have learned one thing in the last decades it is that complex systems need to be rebooted sometimes because <state>

silicone valley is grifting its own rich people with paper bomb shelters.

I don't necessarily disagree with working for a founder who has that as a philosophy, because I also don't think some of the arguments here about the elite of the world appropriating ever more wealth while crushing the masses into misery are realistic at all (They smell more like mid-20th century communist fantasies of capitalist decline than anything to me)

But, if your central moral argument about the subject does revolve around thinking such a scenario is likely and being disgusted by it, then being paid by the people supposedly promoting this kind of economic inequality and working with them while they do it is pretty goddam hypocritical.

I hope you realize I was using sarcasm and was trying to defend you against the criticism.

If there’s a constant in history about rich people is that they can’t even wipe their own asses without a slave/servant, so they still need the person responsible for pressing the reset button on the robot.