When you don’t need as many people because of automation, you also don’t need them to fight your wars. You use drones and other automated weapons. You don’t need things like democracy because that was to prevent people from turning to revolution, and that problem has been solved with automated weapons. So then you don’t really need as many people anymore, so you stop providing the expensive healthcare, food production, and water to keep them all alive
We have seen a lot of use of h1b and outsourcing despite the massive job shortage. Seeing lots of fake job sites filled with ai generated fake openings and paid membership for access to "premium jobs."
They're using ICE to effectively pay half the country to murder the other half, but the ICE budget is limited so that automated systems can then gun down the ICE community to replace 99.9% of humans with machines.
Ultimately this is great for Russia because they'll still be able to invade even if they have only 300 soldiers left in their military, after they hit a low orbit nuke blast to shutdown the Ai US, basically only Melania swinging her purse at the troops will be one of the few left alive to resist.
[0] I was going to going to mark this as sarcasm but then I remembered that the US elected Donald Trump as president, 2 times so far, so I'm going to play it straight.
This argument is vacuous if you consider a marginal worker. Let's say AI eliminates one worker, Bob. You could argue "it was better to amplify Bob and share the gains". However, that assumes the company needs more of whatever Bob produces. That means you could also make an argument "given that the company didn't previously hire another worker Bill ~= Bob, it doesn't want to share gains that Bill would have provided blah blah". Ad absurdum, any company not trying to keep hiring infinitely is doing rent extraction.
You could make a much more narrow argument that cost of hiring Bill was higher than his marginal contribution but cost of keeping Bob + AI is lower than their combined contribution, but that's something you actually need to justify. Or, at the very least, justify why you know that it is, better than people running the company.
"Furthermore, employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor."
No mention of rent-seeking.
No evidence they are being economically short-sighted.
> they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity
They're using cheap AI to replace more expensive humans. There's no reason to think they are missing some exponential expansion opportunity that keeping those humans would achieve, and every reason to think otherwise.
Competition would fix a whole lot of problems.
Ancient egypt (elite in pyramids, slaves otherwise) is more likely.
> That's optimistic.
> Ancient egypt (elite in pyramids, slaves otherwise) is more likely.
No you're both being optimistic. The feudal lords had a vital need for serfs, and the pharaohs slaves.
It'll be more like elite in pyramids, everyone else (who survives) lives like a rat in the sewers, living off garbage and trying to stay out of sight. Once the elite no longer need workers like us, they'll withdraw the resources they need to live comfortably, or to even live at all. They're not making more land, and the capitalist elite have "better" uses for energy than heating your home and powering your shit.
Your perspective is so contrary to reality I'm actually not sure if you're trolling or not. There is no such thing as pure value creation. In order for labor to create value, it must be aligned with the company's value proposition, i.e. what convinces customers to pay for the value that the company provides. Half the people off in the corner building something that they think is valuable are actually building something that customers do not care about, won't pay more for, and increase the company's maintenance burden.
Keeping labor aligned with value creation is the whole game. If it wasn't, then all these rent-seeking-first enterprises would have fired their layers and layers of middle management a long time ago; the company needs to pay them a salary (reducing profits) but they don't write any code / "produce any value". All these massive corporations would have moved to a flat management hierarchy a long time ago, if labor was truly capable of aligning itself to improving value generation; and if you think there's some nefarious/conspiratorial reason why massive corporations don't do that, then most of them would have been out-competed a long time ago by co-ops with flat management hierarchies that could produce the same value at a lower price due to lower administration costs.
Needing to hire employees is a necessary evil for businesses. Aligning employees is hard. Motivating employees is hard. Communication is hard. Businesses do not exist to provide people with jobs, which are created out of sheer necessity, and are destroyed when that necessity goes away.
Wat
The forces of capital do not want to share a single penny and are solely focused on getting to a place of rent.
Not at all. The majority of office jobs can't be automated by current generation LLMs, because the jobs themselves serve either creative or supervisory functions. Generative AI might be able to fill in creative functions one day, but the whole point of a supervisory role is to verify the status of inputs and outputs. A lot of these roles already have legal moats around them (e.g. you can't have an LLM sign financial statements), but even if we assume that regulations would change, the technical problem of creating supervisory "AI" hasn't been solved; even if it was, implementation won't be trivial.
israel is already using sniper drones in Palestine that use AI to fly around and headshot whatever moves, as well as AI to select their bombing targets.
the future is now, isn't it exciting?