alt Hacker NewsThis might be a bit of a gold rush of sorts at first, in that the first people to transition from tech to running a small business, whether tech-enabled or not, will find a bigger piece of the pie waiting for their taking. But as the stream of many others increases over the years, the pie's slices will get smaller as competition for the same market segments increases. Not trying to paint doom and gloom, just that I'd imagine, as the author says, this kind of white to blue collar shift will accelerate, and as it does, competition will rise, lowering the chance for overall profits.
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Is it a gold rush or a pie eating contest? (I need to know if I should be selling shovels or forks).
Sounds great for people who need pest control tool services!
What's the gold rush in this scenario, just business in general?
Doesn't seem like it can be a tulip if it encompasses all productive endeavors.
The end game is a resource based economy as all sorts of labor becomes cheap.
Think of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Putin's Russia, or Norway. I.e. risk for highly nepotic dictatorships, with the potential that it might end up well despite the odds (Norway).
Before, if you made a product that improved the lives of everyone, say you invented Google or Heinz ketchup, you could make a lot of money through that, and you did a good deed and became rich the same time. The masses of humans would reward you for delivering the benefits of your invention to them by giving you a piece of their work output.
As their work becomes less and less worth, why focus on those humans though? I am asking rhetorically of course.
An economy that thrives from innovation enriches the innovators, making them powerful. A brute in power causes the innovators to leave or in the worst case, he mass-executes them outright (think of what Stalin did in Russia). With AI, you can have a brute in power though, as an oil rig or datacenter can be protected by a bunch of machine guns.
An economy with AI everywhere will be, after a short and very innovative period, just be about who controls which resource, i.e. water for a datacenter, production lines for robots, mining rights, operational control of robot fleets, etc.
The working 95% will probably experience a sharp decrease in purchasing power, making a lot of products unaffordable to them, so consumption wise we'll have a further shift towards plutonomics. The owning top 10% will probably be affected by this major shift in consumption as well, E.g. a tower full of condos becomes worthless if the tenants can't pay rent because they got laid off, etc.
Need for robots and AI will further increase. Eventually most economic activity will revolve around those robots. It's a bit like paperclip optimizer here, whether those robots protect gay luxury space communism from counterrevolutionaries, or they project the will of the Davos council of Forbes 400, economically it will be quite similar.
There will still be human societies, humans will still talk to other humans. We won't be all exclusively conversing with LLMs, I doubt that. There will still be social mobility but it will revolve around nepotism, lying, and various escalation steps of war.
We might end up in different scenarios depending on the country, but some countries like Germany might lose relevance as most of their value lies in stuff that is going to be replaced by AI, i.e. they have less natural resources, or they have been depleted already.
We might also see companies that automate everything from end to end, from mining to producing and running weaponized robot fleets. Shareholders of those companies will do great too, if the leadership of the companies respects minority shareholder rights that is (why should they though, they will outgun any law enforcement).
Do I like this future? I don't think so. We will probably have solved cancer, communicable diseases, and aging in the next 30 years if AI continues its successful trajectory, but not sure if it will be accessible to 8 billion humans.
In my limited “ai transformation” experience the biggest gains seem to be just forcing down some of the walls between these different systems. Larger, more well run places were probably integrating all of their systems/data/etc so there was none of this low hanging fruit. It seems AI as a forcing function of combining data sources to feed into the AI just had the beneficial side effect of connecting all the crap.