Few thoughts

- Either we'll slowly become the Expanse universe (basic UBI, very few jobs, you win them via lottery)

- Or we'll go to simpler times - economics is supply and demand, if there will be more demand to human generated work (the same way there is demand for hand made arts, vinyls, paper books, vintage furniture), people will flock more to family, community. Think something between moving to the suburbs and the Amish. If people will "ban" some products generated by AI, or will prefer products generated by humans, then AI will have harder times to take their jobs. It's unlikely to happen, but think about the Organic food industry, about the high end products industry, about the farm to table / buy local industry, about the "support local artists" (farmers markets) - this will likely just grow. Won't help at scale, but it's a possibility

- Or, the Dune way, banning of thinking machines altogether on the state level, I assume some countries might go that way, for religious or other reasons, but again unlikely

- Or, current AI technology will plateau just short of full AGI, and the centaur period will stay for longer. As long as a human + AI can do things slightly better than just AI, (in my book this is not full AGI) - then there is economic incentive to hire a human instead of replacing them.

- Or full apocalypse, the matrix / skynet, idiocracy, hunger games, red rising. I hope for the ignorance is bliss option...

Nobody has one. If labor stops having value the economy will stop working and society will break down far in advance of building the infrastructure necessary for the promised AI abundance.

I like the idea of being ”post-scarcity” as much as the next guy, but I don’t understand how we get there. It’s a project in itself, it doesn’t just happen by magic, and nobody is actively trying to make it happen or has any logistical idea of what it involves.

We’ll also lose a huge number of jobs as soon as true AGI comes on stream, by which I mean the kind of AI that no longer acts like somebody who has read all the world’s books but can’t figure out that you always need to drive to the carwash.

We’ll lose these jobs and there will be no super abundance at that point, and not even government support.

There is the option of passing laws requiring companies to retain human employees. That to me is about the only viable stopgap measure.

There isn't much compelling economic data that AI has been the cause of any recent layoffs or job loss, yet you speak as if we are already in the throws of an AI takeover. Sam Altman is a salesman, he sells products that's all he is and ever has been, if you are looking for answers to why people can't afford house and food you should look at the politicians in power.

I think, like other disruptive inventions of the past, there will be pain for many, but it will pass. Society will grow and adapt. There's some statistic somewhere I will paraphrase and/or botch that goes like: 90% of the jobs people have today didn't exist 50 years ago. I think no one can imagine what possible opportunities will manifest in the future. It's a lot easier to imagine everything that might go wrong because we evolved to see a sabertooth in the rustling leaves.

Molotovs are the plan

Unless you need guillotines as well?

Not sure I understand what is so confusing about this

The game plan is the same as it was for globalization and previous rounds of automation: gaslight workers into thinking that they are the problem. Push all the taxes into the labor economy and all the money into the capital economy and use the inevitable budget shortfall to justify skimping on social services. That'll work until it doesn't, at which point the Ellison strategy will be employed: pay 10% of the poors to keep the other 90% in line.

AI will not take anyone's jobs. I, for one, don't consider AI something serious, it's still a toy, a curious tech demo, and will always remain one, outside of niche applications like NLP (there's no denying that LLMs are really good at this). The idea that anyone at all treats it seriously is just appalling to me.

Mass-production and other optimizations that use economies of scale to their benefit do take jobs. There's a serious problem in the world's economy that there simply isn't as many jobs as there are people; the world simply doesn't need this much work because the need for work doesn't scale linearly with the population. AI has nothing to do with this. It's a fundamental problem we'll have to deal with either way as our society develops, AI or not. It started ages before the current tech hype cycle.

soon after humans are economically irrelevant (unemployable) they will be existentially irrelevant (dead)

a system that can allocate the atoms and energy better than all of mankind won’t exist eternally to coddle hairless apes

There is no plan, besides the government using police to keep people in line.

Out of curiosity... why do you think this?

I think this is complete madness. Im not someone that is in a job so I have the luxury to think critically about what is going on and... I just dont see it.

What I see is that LLMs will complement Labour and the excess returns of model producers will be very minimal (if at all any) due to the intense competition - keeping switching costs to a minimum (close to zero). This is before mentioning open source models which I expect to continue to improve.

There is no specialisation re. models at this moment in time so it is very likely to be the case.

OAI and Anthropic have to generate enough after-tax cash flows from operations to cover their reinvestment needs to continue going on. If they can't cover reinvestment then they will obviously lose as their offering will not be competitive.

There's no certainty they generate this amount of cash profits either. They still have a high chance of going bust, of course that gets lower - IF - they can keep ramping up revenues.

> what is the game plan for society moving forward as AI takes more jobs

> What happens when more and more people can't afford housing, kids, food, health insurance, etc.?

What about when the opposite of this all happens, society massively benefits, and unemployment rates stay about what they have always been?

Will people still be yelling about the doomsday of societial collapse that has failed to materialize every single time?

You already know the game plan and what will happen (hint: see this very article), but speaking it out loud will get you into troubles.