What will happen when every job becomes automated?

Then who is going to buy the stuff that these automated jobs create, and with what money? AI won’t replace and automate all jobs, to me it just doesn’t make economic sense.

I’m talking strictly out of my own opinion, and have no research to back it up.

If all current goods and services could be provided for free, I guess one possibility is we’d all have everything we (currently) want and never have to work again.

But based on past performance I think it is much likely we will all collectively discover entirely new classes of goods and services we simply must have, and that we will continue to work just as hard for in the entirely new jobs that go into making them.

Maybe politicians will also be AI.. they for sure would do a better job

Isnt it obvious whats going to happen when jobs are automated? Once they don’t need us… the Rich will just make AI driven androids to hunt the poor.

Expanse covered it well – jobless go on basic and pretty much just sleep walk through life on the absolute minimum. There’s a black market, and a lottery to escape to an education and vocation

Unless they introduce UBI, you either adapt or go into obscurity. Simple as that. The world goes on.

If machines make everything, then the machines will still have to be designed, built, transported, maintained, fueled, and repaired. If the machines do all that, then everything will be essentially free. Just like music is now, for example, since the cost to distribute it is so low.

If, somehow, someone owns the machines and tries to demand money for everything, and no one has a job or money, then people will work for themselves and each other and pay each other and have a human-based economy, as in, exactly what we have now, with the machine-based stuff off somewhere else not being used in any significant amounts.

First, there will be riots in highly populated centers. Since poverty will increase, so will the systematic spread of pathogens. At least one major outbreak will rise to pandemic proportions. The result will a massive decline in the general population of peasants, serfs and other lower castes. The rich, and those few commoners necessary to provide their support, will be protected and immune.

/s

I have absolutely know idea what I am talking about. The above is just one of my many fever dreams that lately I experience while reading OP’s post.

I dont believe it will happens until a few decades. Specialty jobs are… special?
My job cant be done by a robot, I can be helped but done entirely by AI ? Nope

Hopefully we have a lot of free time to enjoy all the art created by AI/Robotics.

Unfortunately history shows that disruption like this in the value of work is not really great for the masses.

what will happen is downsizing, that’s what will happen, in the time honored tradition of the bean counters balancing the equation. When i talk of downsizing we are talking about the surplus in human resources, that number will be reduced. i wont tell you how that process is done, you folks are smart, figure it out. At least it will be efficient and orderly process, we will admire it for it effectiveness and fear it at the same time.

Perhaps there will be large industrial automated factories, where 100’s of thousands of people funnel in to the front door of this factory, and 55 gallon drums come out the other side, from an outside observers point of view it will looks wired, all those people entering and nobody coming out, just truck loads of stainless steel 55 gallon drums of slurry, this observer knows because one fell of the truck and the lid came off and slurry splashed all over the pavement. well, I paint an ugly picture, so you decide how that will be done where most everyone you know is no longer needed.

Our political and economic structures are a systematisation of primate social status instincts. Therefore it contradicts human nature for all jobs to become automated.

The psychological motive for the rich who decide our economic and political structures is beig able to control other people. If nobody is being made to perform tasks in return for financial compensation, most of that control evporates.

That effect is already quite apparent, and has been for a hundred years. Plenty of the jobs we already have are entirely pointless from a practical point of view, but people still do them to flatter the monkey instincts of the rich.

Sure, many jobs which don’t sufficiently flatter those instincts will be done by machines, but there will still be jobs in which a richer person gets to treat a poorer person as beneath them.

It’s not as fun for them to treat a machine like a thing as it is to treat a human like a thing.

Why don’t we need millions and millions and millions of immigrants if AI and automation is going to replace the human worker almost completely in the next couple of decades?

The rich will have their society walked in. Some of the poor will be used as security and as servants. The rest will gradually be left to fend for themselves as governments slowly disappear and corporations take over.

Manual labour/construction work will be available for many many years…. corporate people (like me) are going to need to learn some manual skills…

Could you please suggest me any AI or LLM to perform my western blot.

What if…AI is a gigantic Tech Marketing Bubble that is primarily fueled by fearmongering?

What if this post is PART of that marketing?

What if the same companies that spent $20 billion just to fail at VR last decade are blowing similar amounts on AI, and these articles and posts are the REAL spending, not the 8 fingered monstrosities and shitty copypasta code?

The reality that many of these ignorant people don’t realize is; if AI takes all the jobs, who will have money to buy the products or pay for the entertainment? There would no longer be income for the companies, and the Economic Engine will stop.

The only option would be a Universal Basic Income, to give money to the population so that they could buy products and entertainment, but there are problems with that as well. For one, corporate taxes would have to skyrocket to pay for the UBI (the rich really don’t want that), and the amount of money a person is provided by U I, will be controlled, thus controlling what people can afford and buy.

When there are many billions of people being controlled and held down by the thousands (maybe millions) of rich, and they are struggling to survive; things will get ugly. The French Revolution will pale in comparison to a World Revolution.

The rich are fearful of this scenario, and understand the possibility of it occurring. That is why you see so many rich bunkers being created and advancements into security/weaponized robotics. A robot doesn’t care about the economy.

Our media has been controlling the masses to accept the changes and have empathy towards the rich because the rich own the media. Our media is trying to convince the masses that the killing of a health insurance CEO (who has profited from the pain, suffering, and death of the non-rich) is bad. The fact that a vast majority of the masses are not caring and actually celebrating the death of the CEO, shows that a shift is occurring toward a revolution.

We used to think that the machines could work and we could all just have enough to be able to pursue leisure activities.

Now it looks more like the machines will work, a few people will be unfathomably rich, and most of us will just starve.

The poors will starve and die-off. The rich will have no one to trade with or sell to except each other.

Let’s be real, governments aren’t going to implement UBI to feed a bunch of useless eaters.

Collapse at that point.

One thing it’s worth noting is the assumption that AI will continue to evolve at the same pace it has been is shaky at best.

There’s an interesting conundrum with the way AI works and learns, which is that it scraps the internet to learn and recognise patterns, it’s gotten as good as it currently is by scraping everything out can find on the internet, but now it’s running out of material and having to scrap newly generated content. The problem with this, is that a lot of new content is AI generated, and so you have imperfect AI trying learn from imperfect AI.

There’s also its very obvious tendency to hallucinate false information, quoting and referencing things that don’t exist.

AI as it currently exists isn’t able to assess a situation and decide on the best/safest outcome, it’s only able to predict what someone might say in that situation. (see all the countless examples of people asking AI how many “Rs” are in “raspberry”)

Next, you have the fact that it’s only as good as the person using it. AI doesn’t ask for extra information and context, if you ask it to write you a formal letter or contract, it’ll do it without knowing the context and if someone isn’t there to review it, what it’s generated may not be applicable to the specific context.

Regarding more creative endeavours, movies, TV shows, books, etc. I dunno about other people’s experiences, but in my tinkering with AI, I’ve definitely noticed it becomes repetitive over even fairly short time frames within a story, I honestly don’t see it being able to write an entire movie script on its own, and certainly not a very good one.

I think AI shines as a first draft, or prompt. Unless it gets wayy better than our actually is, any company that completely runs on AI is almost certainly destined to fail.

Of course, if it does happen, most countries are still democratic. I can’t imagine any political party lasting very long if it let’s its entire population become unemployed, without a safety net built in.

The peasantry starves,the wealthy get to pursue leisure activities.

Same as ever but more extreme.

1. I don’t think there is any risk right now of all jobs being automated. AI is likely a bubble. That doesn’t mean it won’t actually have applications or anything. But at some point investment will probably hit diminishing returns and then implode. And then a bunch of AI companies will go out of business and only some will remain. And then it’ll continue development into more. But the current version of AI, despite all the hype about it, I don’t think is capable or will at any time soon be capable of doing all jobs. Not to mention you need cheap and advanced robotics to make that work too, not only AI. It has to be remembered that the people heading these AI companies are incentivised to significantly overpromise to keep the hype up, and a lot of investors or governments are jumping on that bandwagon because they fear being left behind.

2. There are jobs that may potentially be replaced by AI. That won’t actually cause a drop in total jobs though, most likely. New jobs that can’t be automated will likely appear due to the increased efficiency and thus more money being left over to create demand for those. Nevertheless, there are risks. If the jobs that are replaced are some of the few jobs people actually LIKE doing, that’s a huge problem. If the jobs that are remaining are some of the most undesireable jobs, that’s a problem too. As someone said better than me: I want AI to do my dishes so I can spend time making art, I don’t want AI to make my art while I do more dishes.

3. To the extent that jobs are eliminated it will be most likely to create an upward transfer of wealth to the people who own the companies that use AI, thus worsening wealth inequality. Though it is possible that some AI goods will also reduce in price. Omnipresence of AI may also enable smaller creators, though it may also fill the internet with bad stuff that’s hard to sort through. So it’s complicated.

4. If all jobs are replaced at some point, there really are two major options:

* The first is the desireable one. Which is that everyone gets some sort of UBI. I’d say that such a thing should be funded by a “robot tax” which taxes things like AI and automation that a company uses as if they were workers doing those jobs. And then directly transfers that wealth to a central pot which is divided by the total number of citizens and given out to them every month. In this scenario humans would basically be free from needing to work. Though it still raises things like questions about meaning.
* The second is the non-desireable option. Which is that the wealthy will own all of the AI and robotics and wealth inequality will reach unprecedented levels. Ordinary people will no longer have power through organized labour because they don’t need our labour anymore. They also won’t have the power to mount a revolution because autonomous military drones will be better than anything any person can muster and be able to created in greater numbers. As such the rich will claim all the valuable land and resources for their purpose worked by robot and AI, defended by military drone armies. And the rest of us will live in a hellscape beyond imagining.

And, of course, there are options in between.

Which one will it be? As it is now, the second seems far more likely. But it also isn’t inevitable. But we should push now that we still have power to get something like a UBI. Because if we wait too long we won’t have the power to get it anymore.