AI could create a ‘Mad Max’ scenario where everyone’s skills are basically worthless, a top economist says

I think I’m going to leave this sub. It’s just post after post of this kind of thing.

When this happens, i guarantee the grid will get hit continuously. Cant AI if you cant power AI.

Ok but then what would the AI be doing the work for? If there’s no one to read/buy/move etc because we’re all out stealing gas from each other?

Reckon this economist has never spoken with an 86 year old lady over the phone about a medical appointment……

Surprise! Everyone’s skills were always basically worthless.

So who is going to buy the products that the companies using AI are selling… if nobody has a job.

That’s not how economics works – coming from an economist. 

Supply doesn’t make a market – supply and demand do – demand is people who earn incomes. 

Oh no, we’d have to find meaning and happiness in life without being forced to spend 40 huors a week slaving for the absurdly rich….

Litearlly all that’s needed is a UBI so peopel could live without **needing** to work and then people can find their own joy, take part in volunteering, help in the community, learn skills, have hobbies, litearlly anything one could want.

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And as last time this was mentioned there was a lot of confusion:

“UBI will lead to slavery to the rich” – Already happened. UBI does not solve bad govenrments, it only allows the poor to live even if the govenrment is terrible.

“UBI will be too expensive” – A tax clawback scheme, massive decrease in public spending for other inefficient existing social welfare programs, and improvmeents across society (less crime, better education, fewer work place injuries, fewer sick days, lower rates of family abuse, and more, were all seen in the Canadian Minincome study in Manitoba), all make it far more affordable than most think. Last time I did the numbers it was ~$100 billion for the entire system **before** the societal improvements were factored in. Health care and police savings alone would shrink that even further. A massive tax increase on the top tax bracket would pay for mst of the rest.

“The rich will flee to other countries” – They always claim they will but the reality is most ahve family, friends, work, and a life where they are, fleeing your country isn’t as simple as they claim. And if the decided countries can simply HEAVILY tax money leaving the country as many other countries already do. Make the taxes to leave far higher than their income tax and very few will be leaving.

“UBI will cause laziness/deincentivizes work!” – You just build in a gradiated pay scale so for every $1 you earn working, you lose $0.50 (or something less than $1) and then if you work more (even part time), you earn more.

“You’re a communist!” – No, I’m a realist, jobs are already being removed and it will only get worse as AI gets better. If we don’t have some way to live like a UBI, there will be violence.

“The rich will never allow it” – Maybe, that’s on them then as if they don’t, the poor will get violent and their anger will target the rich. There is no other options. Either we let the poor live, or the poor doesn’t let us live.

“It’s fantasy! Never happen!” – Smae for anti-slavery, women’s rights, LGBBTQ+ rights, Minority rights, and every other movement for societal improvment in history. Nothing every seems possible until it’s actually happening and then everyone pretends it was always inevitable.

The reality is more nuanced.

New technologies don’t cause mass unemployment; they reduce the usefulness of creating more jobs.

Since our society is determined to maximize employment anyway? This means we create unnecessary jobs. Machines could be saving us all labor, but because people remain dependent on wages for income, we choose to ignore this savings.

There’s a perfectly valid alternative: to support aggregate consumer spending directly through a UBI instead of through employment.

A UBI in this sense increases the efficiency with which the economy uses labor. It allows for a state of more production / more purchasing for *less* overall employment.

This is important to get our heads around. Robots aren’t going to just magically take away all the jobs, because governments and central banks have to support aggregate spending one way or another. If we don’t implement UBI, we end up generating makework instead.

Freeing people from work in the face of new labor-saving technology is a *good* idea, but without UBI, achieving this is financially impossible.

Apocalyptic visions of a jobless world straight from sci-fi movies distract us from the importance of UBI, and they are built on a flawed understanding of how the aggregate level of employment is generated.

Polecat, guitar, and race car driver skills are in high demand in mad max. Can’t wait to see gpt do that

Ai barely does what it’s supposed to now there’s no way it’s actually going to, people will just stop working on it

Please note that economists think about how changes to productivity/etc will alter society. Automation is a structural, not technical notion for them. They do not actually know anything about AI.

Although there have been narrow transformative applications of neural nets (e.g., protein folding), the chat GPT etc craze is just language models that have learned to talk by looking at how people speak but don’t have a concept of knowledge and aren’t fit for almost any work. Industrial automation is slow, continuous capital-intensive process requiring stable growth conditions (which have not always been present).

I recognize a lot tech CEOs hype this stuff and use it to justify streamlining their companies (streamlining is an enduring, more fundamental shareholder interest), and that these sort of visions play into the broader notion of futurology, but it is really agonizing how this sub absolutely eats up these utterly intellectually vapid maximally-speculative takes because its mostly intellectually worthless notion seems futuristically cool or appealing to some kind of doomer mental worldview.

(If you actually read the article, the economist who was interviewed could possibly have slightly meaningful hypothesis about how perhaps automation will cram the population into a collection of relatively less-skilled service-related jobs that can’t be automated, such as cooking and hairdressing. There is even a fair argument that this transformation has already been underway throughout the 20th century, when you can identify certain well-paid skilled labor certain jobs that no longer exist today alongside the enduring presence of the low-paid service jobs I noted. But the Business Insider neglected to say *anything* about the actual economic hypothesis itself, and instead went running with what I can only imagine was some offhand comment about these social ramifications during the interview that I really can’t really figure out and the most insufferable buzzword of all time. If clickbait were an entire article, this would be it. It is the most utterly disappointing execution of journalism, yet I bet hardly any of you even made the intellectual effort to read this intellectual equivalent of cotton candy, so who do I even blame at this point?)

Or, hear me out, we learn to utilise it to do our jobs even better, and only terrible companies rely entirely on subpar AI output.

AI could make people go poopsy in their pants.

There, another far reach, sensationalist or plain obvious scenario that those “specialists” come up with. Now give me an article too.

I was having a similar chat with my wife. I was saying I’m worried that there will be record unemployment levels due to AI.

However this won’t be a distopian nightmare if we do it right. This is because we’re already in a state where the collective productivity of humanity as a whole, if shared and allocated well would mean everyone could have decent living standards while not working.

The prices of many things would plummet as they are better managed and there would be no real or manufactured scarcity.

The main thing would be we’d have to reframe the success of the individual from being a work related one into a personal one. People would have to not gain their purpose from working 40 ours a week but finding their own things… Gardening, sports, family, travelling, art and more.

I think people will struggle.. And there will be a period of crappy AI art everywhere but we can reframe and then appreciate human endeavour again and happily coexist as the complicated stuff which we do badly is managed by AI.

The thing is someone have to decide which result is the best proposed by AI.
AI can’t go to jail if bad things happen?

AI could create utopia, a world of plenty for all, activities and adventures, sports and education, safety and medical advances..

But that’s not the human way

I am frankly so tired of these articles coming out when ai cant even get a burger order in mcdonald’s right

Very very mad Max. 

With one major caveat

The world will be a “wasteland”, at least not the same way it’s portrayed in mad Max. 

No, the world would on the contrary be an oasis as far as the eye can see…. 

Owned by the Uber wealthy. 

One step in their property, you’re dead. 

This is the path we’re headed. 

The characters in mad Max had it easy, at least they could die of thirst juxtaposed an arrid, inhospitable desert. 

No, we’ll all die of thirst while we’re engulfed by abundance. I think that will hurt worse 

Couple of thoughts.

It is possible, but I feel some factors don’t match.

MadMax happens in heavily ressource constraint environment. Deceasing population and explosion in productivity makes that less evident.

The warlords actually need the few ressources for themselves. Our billionaires consume extremely little of the production of their companies. Even if 100% living on a flying jet plane, this would still amount to almost nothing.

People are getting old, around the world. They won’t have nor the will or the means for any violent confrontation and be well happy in their VR world with A/C and easy to chew food.

That sounds like the shit my drunk ass tells people at parties, dont listen to me, i dont even know where the bathroom is.

I imagine there are a few politicians who could easily be replaced…