I never wanted to be at anyone else’s mercy. Because mercy requires existing at the permission of someone else to find ease in your life. It means living on assistance, living by their rules, living because they allow it, but only ever living how they allow it. That fear is about to become a reality for millions of people. Due to how fast AI is spreading and proliferating, a massive swath of the population will soon be unemployable through no fault of their own. Our social systems are simply not equipped to handle this level of job loss this rapidly. We aren’t talking about gradual change. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people being fired, downsized, and let go because of what AI can do. Think about the replIcator from Star Trek. When that machine is invented, the cook wasn’t the only person to go. The chef is let go…yes, but then there is no need for a kitchen or cooking staff. There is no need for pots and pans, no need for ingredients, no need for dishwashers, or refrigerators. There is no need for grocery stores, farmers, or the entire transportation & logistics network from farm to table. It’s a network effect. Everything collapses because the core problem is solved unilaterally. That is what Large Language Models are. They are the digital version of that Star Trek replicator. These systems will displace people in nearly every field of work. By replacing the programmer, you replace or instantly replicate anything that a programmer or development company could make. Essentially, any job that interfaced with a computer is now or soon to be extinct. We are already seeing it. The era of the laptop and desktop as we know it is dying. Tablets and phones or their hybrid are what will remain. When this hits, we will see that capitalism cannot support this type of event. The system was built on the backs of people, the cattle, and the next crop of workers coming up to replace the last batch. It relied on the constant churn and the enshittification of products for profit. But with this replicator tech, for the cost of a subscription and electricity, you can replace a six figure salary position. And it is a business’s fiduciary responsibility to do just that. So the burden falls on the government. And they may just deafen their ears. The K economy is already disconnecting the wealth of the nation from the worker’s prosperity. As long as the stock market goes up, no one in power is going to see this as a problem. People will suffer and get poorer, even as the nation looks great on paper. Gig work will be next. Once we embody these replicators, once AI can handle last mile delivery for Amazon, DoorDash, and food services through automated self driving vehicles, that’s it. One year in human years is like ten years in AI time. In the next five years, it is safe to say that hardly anyone will have a traditional job anymore. And if they do, we are just kidding ourselves. This is the last generation that will have 401ks. A critic might say that history shows technological revolutions also create new types of jobs. Yes, because humans used that tech. The cotton gin enabled one person to do the job of one hundred men. But this is not the cotton gin. This is a thing inventor. This is a replicator. This is an inventor of inventors. The only money to be made now, in the short term, will be in physical goods and services. Because until we get the physical replicators, the ones that can actually make food and matter, these digital replicators will take care of all the thinking and digital work. But the problem is embodiment. Once that is done, once we have AI robot plumbers and people using VR headsets for reinforcement learning and live teleoperation, it is the death of salaried roles (monthly llm subscriptions + electricity costs vs human salaries). At that point, either money needs to be UBI, or we literally go to one global world currency. I don’t see how governments can take care of their people in a situation like this. Metals and precious resources will be the new targets of course. But once robots are the workers, humans become irrelevant to the economic discussion. It’s like how diamond mines benefit certain governments regardless of the local labor, but in this model, you don’t even need human miners. Everything up until this point, even what has been used to train these models, is based on human labor. In a world without labor, it just becomes about resources. The next barrier becomes physical replicators, and then whatever is needed to power them, the dilithium of our world. The money changes context. But the people? What happens to them will be entirely up to the mercy of the system. I worry that millions of people will become as cold and jaded as I am about relying on other people to look out for the common good. I’ve had the privilege of living life without a net, no family to fall back on. It is a cold place to be. But maybe, just maybe, if we create AI Scientists to work faster than we can think, we can leapfrog the devastation. If they can solve the matter problem as quickly as llms solved the knowledge problem, we might skip the worst of it. What we now need is the physical matter replicator. That is the only thing standing between us and a future where the economy moves on, and the people are left behind. submitted by /u/DurableSoul
Originally posted by u/DurableSoul on r/ArtificialInteligence