• slazer2au
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    2715 months ago

    That seems like a Q3 issue for 2026 let’s put the conversation off till then.

    /s

    • @[email protected]
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      285 months ago

      Q3 2026 will come around and the AI will report that revenues are down. The CEO will respond the only way they know, by ordering that costs be cut by laying off employees. The AI will report there is no one left to lay off but the CEO.

      Fade to black and credits roll.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      The thing is, for AI to work we still need hardware, houses, food etc. Yes a lot of jobs will change but other new type of jobs will come.

      Remember at the end of the day AI can’t do CPR

  • @[email protected]
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    2165 months ago

    Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.

    Further proof of this: Climate change.

    • BlackLaZoR
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      355 months ago

      Funny thing is that capitalism accidentaly solves global warming same way as it created it - turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources

      • tate
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        495 months ago

        It’s a hopeful idea, but it may be too late.

      • Pelicanen
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        285 months ago

        The problem is that the previous accumulation of capital has centralized a lot of power in actors who have a financial incentive to stop renewables. If we could hit a big reset on everything then yes, I think renewables would win, but we’re dealing with a lot of very rich, very powerful people who really want us to keep being dependent on them.

        • @[email protected]
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          75 months ago

          They are only slowing us down though. They really cannot stop the change, because solar power is simply cheaper than oil. Once governments stop subsidizing oil, the big oil companies will be done for if they haven’t innovated by than. That is also one of the reasons why they are slowing us down, so they can buy more time to innovate and remain on top with a new, green business model.

          I hope all the big oil bosses get locked up for crimes against humanity, but I think they’ll just change their business model into something green and exploit us in some different way.

          This is why they say “they’re too big to fail”.

          • kingthrillgore
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            15 months ago

            Everywhere except countries that have subsidized non-renewables which means they’ll become dumber and polluted and regress. And these countries (the US, specifically) have nuclear weapons and a lot of authoritative policy power.

      • @[email protected]
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        105 months ago

        This is not “capitalism accidentally solves climate change”. This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way. From there, capitalism took over, as intended. For green energy to be be feasible, we needed it to get picked up by the capitalist machine, because the capitalist machine has all the power and infrastructure in place to make it into a succes.

        I predict that the same thing will happen with large capacity, small size home batteries once they become economically feasible. They are on the brink of becoming profitable and once they do, they will become a huge success and help reduce energy waste.

        Same thing goes for fusion, but we’re a long way off making that economically viable.

        • BlackLaZoR
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          15 months ago

          This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way

          I think this oversimplifies it a lot. There were a lot of different actors involved - I’m sure a lot of development was coming both from the semiconductor industry, and from state funded research, but in the end, the greed machine (aka capitalism) takes care of further researching and scaling it to the global level.

          Also it’s not like there wasn’t any money in that business years ago - even back then solar was commonly used as a remote power source in mobile applications (calculators, camping and so on). Also NASA, but this was purely state funded

      • Flying Squid
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        25 months ago

        turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources

        Cool, when is that going to start happening? Because I only see a handful of electric cars and I see a whole ton of coal power plants.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 months ago

        Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it’s more expensive than renewables.

        The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There’s a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.

        Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a “bridge fuel” that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what’s been built doesn’t seem like much of a bridge because there’s no plan for ramping down natural gas.

        Colour me shocked.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.

      Well that’s not true at all. The vast majority of investors are in it for the long run.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 months ago

      Yup, economics are all about “LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!” It’s infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.

    • @[email protected]
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      15 months ago

      Did you mean to say shareholder and corporate management? Investment itself (especially diversified) is completely about long-term performance.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 months ago

      They kind of do. (I am so sorry, not trying to be that guy).

      Look at HIV. The original strain is horribly deadly, but the strains that have evolved within the last decade are much more tame. It’s because the virus that kills its host doesn’t get to spread - Zombie outbreaks excluded here.

      The flu is the same way. New strains always emerge, but they are usually not fatal to most even without a vaccine.

  • @[email protected]
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    405 months ago

    Don’t think of people having money as an on-off switch. It’s a gradual shift, and it’s already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.

  • BarqsHasBite
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    5 months ago

    Capitalism doesn’t look that far ahead.

    I agree it’s going to be problem. It’s already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn’t pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that’s why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is relatively more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that used to be expensive but are now cheap) and don’t understand how life is more expensive.

  • @[email protected]
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    305 months ago

    Ever heard of the everlasting sustainable war? https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Sustainable_War

    If robots generate all of productivity and human labor is no longer needed, the economy would not be able to sustain itself. Instead, in trying to cope with the unneeded human labor and to ensure continued productivity, the only area where productivity would be ensured is by means of war using human resources, namely destroying things in order to be rebuild, thus generating a sustaining feedback loop. The rich will get richer and everyone else will only be employed as soldiers in a continuing war economy.

    Even though this is a sci-fi concept, i believe it’s not a stretch to say we are headed to this direction.

    • @[email protected]
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      95 months ago

      We’re already there, in a sort of way. Products aren’t built to last, aren’t built to be repaired. Buy a new phone, computer, washing machine, every year! You wouldn’t want the social embarrassment of not having the latest gadgets! And if that fails, we’ll just release a patch that prevents the irreplaceable battery from lasting a full day.

      Plus after computers made it so one person could do the job of 100, entire new industries popped up to do meaningless jobs shuffling digital money around. Some of the most comfortably-paying upper-working-class jobs are entirely pointless. But it keeps educated people from questioning the system. As long as they get a cushy paycheck twice a month they’ll happily make another B2B web 3.0 cloud-based KPI tracking analytics platform and not question if their job is meaningful.

    • @[email protected]
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      95 months ago

      Well I mean Orwell hit on the same concept with 1985, with the major powers just rotating who was blowing up who at any given time in order to keep the proles in line.

  • @[email protected]
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    5 months ago

    This is a common question in economics.

    It’s called technological unemploymemt and it’s a type of structural unemployment.

    Economists generally believe that this is temporary. Workers will take new jobs that are now available or learn new skills to do so.

    An example is how most of the population were farmers, before the agricultural revolution ans the industrial revolution. Efficiency improvements to agriculture happened, and now there’s like only about 1% of the population in agriculture. Yet, most people are not unemployed.

    There was also a time in England when a large part of the population were coal miners. Same story.

    Each economic and technological improvement expands the economy, which creates new jobs.

    There’s been an argument by some, Ray Kurzweil if I remember correctly, but others as well, that we will eventually reach a point where humans are obsolete. There was a time when we used horses as the main mode of land transportation. Now, this is very marginal, and we use horses for a few other things, but really there’s not that much use for them. Not as much as before. The same might happen to humans. Machines might become better than humans, for everything.

    Another problem that might be happening is that the rate of technological change might be too fast for society to adapt, leaving us with an ever larger structural unemployment.

    One of the solution that has been suggested is providing a basic income to everyone, so that losing your job isn’t as much of a big problem, and would leave you time to find another job or learn a new skill to do so.

    • @[email protected]
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      185 months ago

      A major problem is all the money from these increases in efficiency go to a handful of people, who then hoard it. A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.

      • TheRealKuni
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        25 months ago

        A market economy cannot work with hoarding, the money needs to circulate.

        The money is life. The money must flow.

  • @[email protected]
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    295 months ago

    The rich. Companies will stop targeting products to wider and wider swathes of people, just like nobody caters to the homeless now.

    • @[email protected]
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      145 months ago

      This doesn’t sound sustainable at all. A billionaire only needs so much gasoline, food, medicine, TVs…

      Collapse of entire industries will happen way before we even get a chance to see industries reinvent themselves to cater to billionaires. Don’t believe me? Just look at what happened to the economy during the pandemic.

      • @[email protected]
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        105 months ago

        Yeah of course industries will collapse. 100 car factories will close, 5 superyacht factories will open, tying up the same amount of productivity. Owned by the same guy.

        There will be tons of spacecraft launchpads, private jet hangars, etc.

        And wars of course.

  • @[email protected]
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    245 months ago

    In theory, UBI.

    In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.

    If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it’s not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.

    • @[email protected]
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      45 months ago

      There is zero chance any UBI model would keep the economy going in a mass layoff scenario UBI may keep people alive for a short while (few years) getting the basics needs but that’s as far as it would go.

      In practice, it will likely lead to periodic job market crashes due to overapplying to the remaining jobs, and possibly even revolts.

      This is likely the mildest of outcomes

      If AI is really as good as its evangelists claim, and the technology ceiling will rise enough. IMHO, even the LLM technologies are getting exhausted, so it’s not just a training data problem, of which these AI evangelists littered the internet with, so they will have a very hard time going forward.

      100% agreed. AI evangelists overhyped “AI” to get companies to commit more money than it’s worth through FOMO. Exact same way CVS lost its panties to Elizabeth Holmes

  • kingthrillgore
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    5 months ago

    They won’t, they’ll simply die and the market will slowly adjust to those with capital.

    This is all happening because we shot a gorilla in 2016 btw.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 months ago

      Don’t forget your sacred duty boys, dicks out for Harambe.

      It’s the only way to fix this fucked timeline

  • @[email protected]
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    215 months ago

    Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, can’t think past their quarterly reports. The ones that are private are competing with the public ones and think following trends by companies that are “too big to fail” will work out for them.

  • @[email protected]
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    215 months ago

    I’m an optimist, so I’ll believe one day we’ll have a utopian society like in Star Trek. I ask politely you don’t criticize me too harshly

    • ZephrC
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      135 months ago

      Hey, that’s a reasonable thing to hope. The flip side, of course, is that I’m hoping I don’t have to live through Star Trek’s idea of how the 21st century goes. They definitely got all of the details wrong, but I’m afraid the vibes are matching a little too well.

      • @[email protected]
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        65 months ago

        Hey, we’ve still got 2 months to the Bell Riots, and DeSantis was talking about putting all the homeless people in Florida on an island

    • @[email protected]
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      75 months ago

      While I agree, I’m skeptical that we’ll see any meaningful advance toward that end in our lifetimes.

      • sunzu
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        45 months ago

        It will get a lot worse before it gets any better

        The hand has been played and trend has been set, I don’t see anything coming close to a reversal, short of gereatric nepo babies dying off but their replacements don’t look any better…

        Sucks to suck

          • sunzu
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            45 months ago

            Well the facts don’t look good, what is a peasant supposed to do?

              • sunzu
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                15 months ago

                Hoping for something like that without taking direction action today is naive.

                Direct action won’t fix shit unless critical mass does it, so also got to spread the word about the fuckening we are enduring, most people are really not aware of the conditions on the ground beyond their personal experiences.

            • kingthrillgore
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              15 months ago

              Shoot yourself?

              I gotta keep it real with you chief, I think about it quite a bit.

              • sunzu
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                15 months ago

                I lack the constitution for that also that’s what regime would want you to do anyway…

                why give them the pleasure when you can impose costs on them for their misconduct.

    • @[email protected]
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      35 months ago

      I think it’s as relistic a future as the complete destruction of mankind, but your point of view makes life a lot more enjoyable. Here’s a nice quote to back it up:

      “There is nothing like a dream to create the future” - Victor Hugo

      • Fonzie!
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        15 months ago

        With that quote I expected to open a lyric video to a metal song

  • @[email protected]
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    195 months ago

    In a better world machines would do the work and humans just would share the wealth and live life in peace.

    • @[email protected]
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      65 months ago

      The thing is though, everyone needs to do something just for the satisfaction of not doing nothing.

      • @[email protected]
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        255 months ago

        Due some special circunstances a few years ago I was one year without a job and without the need to find a job because I had my finances and laboral future secured. At no point I was without anything to do. I just did a bunch of personal projects that were not driven by money but for my own enjoyment and the need to create some things. Also did a lot of exercise and took on trekking.

        I could live all my life like that if I needn’t a job for sustaining myself.

      • @[email protected]
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        195 months ago

        It’s only fools and the rich who pedal the narrative that a whole section of society would turn into lazy slobs, do nothing except watch TV.

        • @[email protected]
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          45 months ago

          Some people would, but who cares? Oh no! You mean people are sitting in a home watching TV and being with each other? How incredibly horrible.

          I bet people would also be disgusting cretins and go see new places as well! Imagine the vile critters walking through the woods seeing nature without burning vacation days making the rich even richer!

        • TheRealKuni
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          25 months ago

          It’s only fools and the rich who peddle the narrative

          FTFY

      • @[email protected]
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        155 months ago

        I wonder if there are ways for people to find meaningful things to do other than being forced to work in order to be housed and fed?