If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?
AI agents are getting rolled into everything. Companies will use them because they’re fast and cheap. But if agents replace a lot of paid work, people lose income. Less income → less spending → businesses push even harder on automation. Feels like a loop.
Cheaper prices help, sure, but not if folks don’t have paychecks. New jobs might show up, but I’m not convinced the timing works. Also, if most gains go to a few owners, their extra spending won’t replace everyone else’s demand.
So what actually keeps demand up? Profit-sharing so workers own a piece? Some kind of income floor from “automation dividends”? Totally new markets that soak up all this output? Or maybe real-world limits (energy, compute, regulation) slow things down. I might be missing something—what’s the concrete mechanism here?
This Fred Pohl book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagonist of the story gets his robots to consume his good and fears that he'll get in trouble for this but instead he gets a medal. The original version of the short story as it appeared in the April 1954 Galaxy magazine is linked from the Wikipedia article.
Brilliant story and so clever. The despair at having to consume is excellent.
I've despaired at having consumed too much. It's commonly called hoarding, and it ruins your life.
Never pay to store your stuff somewhere else.
The strangest thing is that a lot of the people I know who pay a lot for multiple storage lockers are poor and the content of the storage lockers is not valuable at all.
I agree. Although there are some exceptions, such as people in the jobs that move a lot (military, traveling nurse, etc).
abundance without incomes stalls demand— what’s our real-world “robot consumer” to keep the loop running.
You're reaching from another, very narrowly scoped angle, but that's a wider problem with technology and automation. The economists since mid-20th century are talking about the UBI (universal basic income) to fight this problem:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income (wikipedia link)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22eQ9iLBfY4 (Varoufakis explains the concept very well)
Of course, that's easier said than done a non-fully, air-gaped controlled economy.
Most economists are of the belief that our wants are infinite, and there will be an endless stream of new services for which we will pay, once AI makes existing goods and services cheap.
IOW we will all become meditation gurus and lifetyle consultants and personal shoppers and perform other services that only the very wealthy can afford right now.
There's an ultimate end-game here, but we're not culturally ready for it yet.
Right now, we attach income to work. You get job, you get paid. The two are bound at the hip.
For over 100 years we've been watching as machines take over doing the work. Society is more productive than ever, but with far fewer people. Right now we kinda gloss over this by creating "bullshit jobs". We have some social safety nets, but we scorn those who use them.
Fast forward another 100 years. Machines now produce everything. 1% of people have (necessary) jobs. 99% collect a "basic income", machines do all the productive work, all "income" flows back around as taxes to become redistributed as basic income.
Right now this sounds very dystopic. Culturally we still bind "job" to "worth" in a very visceral way. If I suggest "everyone gets paid, even if they dont have a job", that provokes a very intense response in some countries and a less intense response in others.
As mechanization increases, actual jobs decrease. This trend is obvious. As a whole the idea of creating a "bottom level" of society is quietly becoming mainstream. Generally pushing that "bottom level" upwards is happening.
It's not hard to forsee a future where production is sufficient, energy is cheap, the "bottom" is quite high, where we tax production (not people), where we dispense with the fiction of bullshit jobs.
Some cultures are more ready for it than others. And there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth along the way. Societal change has always been thus. But the end result is inevitable.
> If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?
Simple answer - the Department of War.
- "But what about the others" - you ask.
- "What others?" - is the answer.
Confiscated AI profits will be distributed to consumers. Prices plummet. Abundance for all except homes in very nice locations will be relatively scarce.
Think about it this way: You have a middle-man between the producer (builder, ie: home builder) and buyer (ie: someone who wants to buy the house). Now this middle-man might be providing a "real service" (or not, ie: capture) and now he is replaced by AI or a combination of.
There is no real "loss" here. The transaction between the buyer and the seller still happens. The middle-man has to figure out a different way to earn a living by providing a different service that AI can't provide. There will always be a buyer and a seller if the product is something you want to buy.
Most of the economy is made up by middle-man trying to offer a "service" or capture value in-between. Getting rid of them is not going to "collapse" the economy. Some people will be displaced but I am not sure why the value producers or acquirers will really care.
The concept of "purchase", or monetary transaction may not exist in the future dystopian world.
For people who live low lives, barter is going to be good enough. For overlords, they can also barter with each other, because who cares about money when you can grab real stuffs? There are a handful of skilled human servants who serve the overlords, but they are not numerous enough for a mature market -- their overlords will provide them with whatever they need anyway.
I have long realized that monetary transaction is just one abstraction for the elites to buy human resources and nature resources. Some currency, like the USD, also serves as "entry ticket" for some transactions (like you cannot purchase X in bulk without USD).
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