AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics

It is not about mass unemployment. It is about efficiency. Producing the same thing for cheaper. Leading to cheaper products to buy.

That is what allowed our current lifestyles. It is good thing. Now it is just coming to next area.

In a capitalist society?

It is the one thing I believe capitalism at some level works for. Invest capital to build something that gives competitive advantage over other capital. Buying newer bigger factory that allows producing more for cheaper to compete with others.

With AI it is white collar work.

This is exactly it. I was talking to my wife about this this morning. She's a sociologist researcher, and a lot of people that work in her organization are responsible for reading through interviews and doing something called coding, where you look for particular themes and then tag them with a particular name associated with that theme. And this is something that people spend a lot of hours on, along with interview transcription, also done by hand.

And I was explaining that I work in tech, so I live in the future to some degree, but that ultimately, even with HIPAA and other regulations, there's too much of a gain here for it not to be deployed eventually, And those people in their time are going to be used differently when that happens. I was speculating that it could be used for interviews as well, but I think I'm less confident there.

It's allowed our lifestyle for a short period of time, to small amount of people. It's not given to poor people, to people in places we've bombed, or extracted resources from, or people in the future since it's destroying the planet.

We're all far closer to poor than we are to having enough capital to live off of efficiency increases. AI is the last thing the capitalist class requires to finally throw of the shackles of humanity, of keeping around the filthy masses for their labor.

Ok, but who benefits from these efficiencies? Hint: not the people losing their jobs. The main people that stand to benefit from this don't even need to work.

Producing things cheaper sounds great, but just because its produced cheaper doesn't mean it is cheaper for people to buy.

And it doesn't matter if things are cheap if a massive number of people don't have incomes at all (or even a reasonable way to find an income - what exactly are white collar professionals supposed to do when their profession is automated away, if all the other professions are also being automated away?)

Sidenote btw, but I do think it's funny that the investor class doesn't think AI will come for their role..

To me the silver lining is that I don't think most of this comes to pass, because I don't think current approaches to AGI are good enough. But it sure shows some massive structural issues we will eventually face

The poor of today (in developed countries) live absolutely lavish lifestyles compared to the middle class of 80 years ago.

> I do think it's funny that the investor class doesn't think AI will come for their role..

investors don't perform work (labour); they take capital risk. An ai do not own capital, and thus cannot "take" that role.

If you're asking about the role of a manager of investment, that's not an investor - that's just a worker, which can and would be automated eventually. Robo-advisors are already quite common. The owner of capital can use AI to "think" for them in choosing what capital risk to take.

And as for massive number of people who don't have income - i dont think that will come to pass either (just as you dont think AGI will come to pass). Mostly because the speed of these automation will decline as it's not that trivial to do so - the low hanging fruits would've been picked asap, and the difficult ones left will take ages to automate.