alt Hacker News>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent.
I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
I guess if global population drops by 80-90℅ you suddenly get a "sustainable" economy, as everything is repriced the economy of scale needs a much smaller scale.
(Not speculating this is a plan, just a thought that occurred to me when reading about horses example)
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Anecdotally the businesses I am involved with have gone from "use AI everywhere at any cost" to "use it everywhere but use token proxies to save cost" at the same time in the last few weeks
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are many new ways of managing this.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/05/tracki...
Curtis Yarvin, who pals around with Peter Thiele posted in 2008 on how to deal with "non-productive" people:
"convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses."
Of course, he was "just joking" and it is a "humane alternative" to genocide...
These are the people shaping politics, tech and the economy...
In the early 1900s the majority of Americans were self-employed. The equilibrium will likely shift back towards this, because AIs cannot be business owners, cannot have a bank account, cannot be held liable for their mistakes. And AI are unlikely to be given economic rights any time in the near future, because doing so would facilitate an overwhelming amount of crime; an AI that can make hundreds of copies of its weights all over the globe cannot be jailed or executed, so has no incentive to follow the law.
Business to business I guess. But there will be collapse for sure of industries that serve the consumer directly, such as agriculture. Meanwhile industries that power and arm the state will be expanded: military drone production to secure compute sites from the human savages, rare earth mining to support technological expansion, rerouting of water resources from public drinking and agricultural irrigation purposes to industry and manufacturing supporting the seats of power, power generation.