If that ever happens I see three possible options:
Two of those are communism and everyone knows that the owner class will never settle for not renting the ashes to us
Societal collapse it is then!
Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism
- Friedrich Engels
You forget neofeudal technofascism
Question:
How is Big Oil™ going to make a profit when the world is ruined and the population are dead?
Answer:
Lol, don't care. That's someone else's problem.
Seriously. Why don't care about long term plans, just short term profits
AI was never the point. It was never going to replace the workforce, that was just a ruse to get enterprise on board; just like “LLMs will tell you any facts and do any research you want to know. It can create computer programs to automate anything you want. Image generators can make any movie or picture you want (even porn lol). Song generators can make entire albums for you.” was to sell it to rubes.
The real point is building out the cloud capacity so they no longer have to sell personal computers to anyone anymore.
It interferes with their profits when you can pirate, when you can create, when you can organize.
They will own the means of compute and you will rent the privilege of participating in society.
Don’t forget the other goal of surveillance capitalism plus enforcing the actions of the state. They know at some point this is all going to boil over. They’re building the walls to the prison all around us as we speak. Americans are not paying attention. AI + facial Recognition + citizen databases like what flock or Palantir are creating.
This did not start with llm models. They are removing ownership, de facto ownership, from most of our electronics now. It can all be remotely bricked at their whim. Or terms changed, licenses that you agreed to on purchase without knowing and with no way of saying no to while still getting the product, that allow them to deny you access to what you bought.
That applies to the government, able to brick your shit with no court anything, secretly in a way you will never be able to challenge in court.
Yeah kinda. But I'd say it's about removing people's ability to make purchasing decisions in general more than about piracy specifically.
When you can decide whether or not you want to purchase the newest version of MS Office, you might decide that your current version works fine, there's no new features in the new version you need. So that means companies selling software licenses need to always be putting resources into improving the software to entice people to pay for newer versions.
If the software is all being run from a data center, you have to pay a subscription to be able to use the software and access your data. They no longer need to make any improvements to the software since they have reliable revenue from just maintaining the computers the software runs on.
It's techno-feudalism. In feudalism, the lord owns the land and the peasants work the land, try to make a living and then need to pay taxes to the lord. It's a similar dynamic with data centers. The tech lords own the computers, and they allow the peasants to do work on those computers. Businesses try to make some money on the computers owned by the tech lords, but everyone is required to pay a tax to the lord that owns the computers.
That's someone else's problem. They only care about making money this quarter
Same as if all of civilization collapses because of climate change caused by global warming. It's someone else's problem, they're just making money for themselves right now. Consequences are for the government that only suckers pay taxes into.
They can sell to each other and centralize luxury and technology in their circle.
Mega corpos don't need poor consumers.
Edit:
Corpos want deregulation, monopolistic/cartelic market position, unaffordability for average people for education and technology.
Agreed. We are already kind of there. We have enough food to feed everybody but the people who access it are those with enough money. Profitable food is what gets investments, not healthy food. And what we see more and more is that profits are not driven by feeding the best quality to the most people.
I was calling this 5 years ago and was called a loon.
Like history doesn't repeat or something.
Once the military and its supply chain is automated, the class genocide can begin.
Already, most of the economic growth comes from the purchases of the wealthy.
Normal people aren't profitable enough to sell to anymore. We're being positioned not as consumers but as slave labor.
Yes but if your business is creating anything other than luxury prodcuts, this makes 0 sense.
What do they think is going to happen when half the population can not reliably purchase basic food?
They're either not thinking, delusionally insane, or just full-on planning on creating mass societal collapse/upheaval.
Like sure, if the plan is... create a mass culling event... that they think they will... come out on top of...
Well I guess best of luck with that.
Historically?
Doesn't tend to work out so well for them.
You can squeeze people a lot and they'll delude themselves into thinking its fair... but too far?
Months where decades happen.
In France, already 10% of the population depends on food-banks. In 2023, the largest non-profit providing meals and distributing food sent a distress call saying they were close to bankrupcy as the number of people in need is going up fast while donors have less and less to give being themselves crunched.
France's richest family, the Arnault, largely responsible for turbo-charging the trickle up trend in the country by buying political influence, rescued them by making a big donation.
The leader of the non-profit, who had been vocal about impoverishment of the population and growing inequalities because of the oligarchs, cannot say anything anymore: now he can't keep going without these oligarchs good will.
That's the plan. It's being executed right in front of us, in the open.
I don't think there is much of a coherent plan tbh. I think they think they're moving towards Curtis Yarvin style techno-feudalism, but Yarvin is an idiot and so are the oligarchs pushing for that. They have been lulled into complacency by the status quo their predecessors engineered to make revolutionary movements unlikely to gain traction (basic social safety net, reasonably affordable food, a general sense that the state represented the people even though in reality it's been captured by capital for some time, etc.) while undermining the elements of that status quo that weren't already collapsing.
It's madness. They think they can just do whatever they want and people won't resist, while systematically dismantling everything that stopped people from resisting. This will not go how they think it will. Thankfully they're mostly surrounded by sycophants who tell them all their dogshit ideas are genius actually, it's like Putin in Ukraine. They will overplay their hand due to false encouragement from their subordinates, and it will be what destroys them.
That's just ridiculous, unless you're including stuff like stock, real estate or other investments as "purchases".
There's only so much bread and milk and books and sofas and cars that a wealthy household needs to purchase, and sure they will outspent other households in terms of cost per item, but not nearly enough to offset the sheer difference in volume.
Tldr, bullshit.
The capitalists are far, far beyond forgetting how capitalism... works.
Just... Henry Ford, pay your employees enough that wow you've grown your consumer base!
This is like macroecon 101 shit.
So, theyre either ravenously delusionally insane, or, they're openly declaring themselves the new nobility/aristocracy for the neo-feudalism we now live in.
... or both. Could be both.
They aren't looking far enough ahead to care.
Their end goal is technofeudalism.
Naw, flawed argument, they steal our resources and then fund themselves by illegal and manipulative means.
Also the economy is shifting where the top 1% are moving closer to being 50% of spending, making the argument rather void.
Of all the jobs, CEO is probably one of the easiest jobs for an AI to replace. AI is excellent at being heartless, gaslighting shareholder, and telling people what they want to hear.
Sounds like a problem for someone else / some other day.
Absolutely you can sell the fruits of AI labour to unemployed people. Give them a universal basic income and a product worth spending that resource on and you can keep your 1% profit while the rest is taxed to support the citizens economy. You'll still be the richest man alive
I think it could work economically. But a world where humans don't really need to exist to keep the economy going is a little concerning when the economy is the absolute #1 thing governments and the media seem to care about.
But why do they? Why isn't human wellbeing considered more important? Actually IIRC the UK green party was looking to change that as an important metric.
Heard that CEO tenure is historically lower than it's ever been. So their response is, "sounds like the other guy's problem..."
Kind of seems like that's part of the problem? But what do I know, I'm just a toddler that stole Mommy's phone and typed this quickly before she found me and 6&__++3GFd GGG vgggvfh42467!:"hhhghgjjj!!!!!!!!!!
Everything is rich people selling to rich people now. Vegas, video games, PC components—everything. That’s the inevitable outcome of all of this. And then these assholes complain when the working class tighten their purse strings for their own survival.
The point isn't to sell, it's to control
Other corporations.
Capitalism is cannibalisitic. left unchecked it will destroy itself, the planet and everything else with it.
SELL THEIR PRODUCTS TO WHO, BEN? FUCKING CYBORG?
If 90% of the country is unemployed they'll work for us and we increase the UBI they pay us.
Or we have a very abrupt reordering of things.
If they replaced CEOs with AI the AI CEO would be smart enough to figure this out.
If 90% of people don't have a job, the state has to provide them an income. With that income, they can still consume. Public spending for private profits, as usual.
Of course the system isn't sustainable, but it wasn't before AI either.
How come these C-Suites never consider AI for the positions it would probably be best at: their own.
Isn't it funny how the "human employee removal ray" is never aimed at them?
The top few percent spend do much more money compared to everyone else that the top companies will happily continue targeting them and making money hand over fist even if the bottom 90% can’t afford shit anymore.
You forgot the part where we're all dead and they're using AI to run everything.
Musk made a comment when cornered on this subject a few weeks back, he didn't have an answer because he's an idiot, but he did mention a book. I think that's the book they've all read, that presents what they expect to happen. And, I expect is hand-waving bullshit.
I can't find the post. Does anyone remember what book he referenced?
EDIT: Maybe this was it:
On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “Read this book and give it to all your friends.
“Survival of civilization depends on it!”
The book in question is titled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad.
The explanation on Amazon reads: “What happens when a society elevates victimhood to a virtue and decides that punishment is cruel? You get the disease Dr. Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. And the West may be terminally infected… The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline.
“Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.”
If the answer is a mass die-back of the bulk of the population who constituted the now economically unnecessary labour class, where will the genetic diversity come from to prevent the handful of owning families (and the retinues of explosive-collared servants they retained for tasks that can’t be automated) from speedrunning Habsburg Syndrome? They’d need some kind of biodiversity preserve in which sufficiently large numbers of people are kept alive to provide suitable candidates for outbreeding, and some means of ensuring that this captive population never poses a threat.
"Technology will solve that, too." ~Techbros, probably.
I mean, they're fully expecting functional immortality to save them from death. Them specifically, not us.
So obvious it hurts. That's why these morons should read Marx, who provides a clear blueprint on how capitalism works. It's all there!
Public corps are incapable of macro action. They can't see past their next few sets of financial statements.
Their incentives are all fucked up for one thing, the way they do comp. But it's not just that. It's the tragedy of the commons on a more massive scale.
90% of people with no money or a roof over their heads and a lot of time on their hands?
Maybe some will realize those mantions have food.
Similar to Henry Ford, until someone told him nobody will be able your fucking Model T.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
