alt Hacker NewsWhat I don't understand is if nobody has jobs, who's paying the machines to do anything?
So okay cool you don't need people to design and build cars. Who's going to buy the cars and where exactly are they finding money?
But see also the "radiologists driving to work" meme for why I think tech in general is currently getting high off their own farts.
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I think the Amish will mostly be fine. Maybe that's how the future looks like.
Long term, or short term?
Short term, money physically exists and gets spent, so if you wave a magic want of oversimplification and transition all labour to AI instantly, all the money currently in bank accounts and wallets gets spend on the same businesses it was already getting spent on, a lot of which gets spent on stuff from other businesses who have in this scenario also replaced all their labour with AI.
Eventually, perhaps quickly, all this money ends up in the hands of shareholders and landlords. There's a lot of both in the economy; famously retirement funds, but smaller-scale shareholders and landlords also exist. I wouldn't want to guess what the distribution looks like, probably highly variable between countries not just social classes (the definitions of which themselves can vary between countries).
Long term, money exists as a convenient fiction to help us organise transactions of goods and services: while it may be physically possible to eat gold and banknotes, you're not getting any real nutrients out of it when you do. So in a world where goods and services come from machines, the options are too broad to forecast: humanity could be relegated to the same role and economic stature as other primates (both in and out of zoos), or we could get universal UBI denominated in machine labour credits which lets each of us live better lives than the most extravagant billionaires live today.
The overwhelming majority of the labor force remains service, manual labor, and other such stuff that LLMs will have no real effect on. So the economy will be fine, but I do agree with you from a different angle. The entire goal of LLMs seems self destructive. If they're successful then the endgame is completely removing the barriers to entry to producing software and other digital tech. But if we do reach that endgame then the value of tech is going to plummet because there will be absolutely no barriers to entry to compete, or even just individuals homebrewing up what they need on demand.
Like imagine there was something you could buy where you insert some lumber, give it some passable description of furniture, and it outputs it. And you paid $20/month for access to this. And this was all being bankrolled by the furniture industry? I mean, sure guys - it's much appreciated, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody so enthusiastic about digging their own grave. I think it's already obvious that the gazillion dollars of API calls isn't going to materialize - it seems the handful of companies that trialed that are already reversing course hard. And in the future where LLMs are successful, that'd be even more true.
Rich people become the only consumers.