If you buy into the unavoidable future where AI comes for everyone’s jobs then there is one truth that does not fit that narrative, really small companies. Often really small businesses have one person doing lots of ‘jobs’. AI might just make their life easier, or in a lot of cases of overworked multi hat employees in small companies actually get closer to getting there job done in an actual 8 hour shift and they can go home and have dinner with the kids more often than not, Small businesses constantly have to adjust to supply and demand and one way they do that is stay small. Maybe the small businesses hardly have any consequences. Maybe this all will be a huge lift to the existing small companies and how the unemployed get back to work. Maybe AI is just going to be the death of big huge corporations and both a hardship for their employees as well as an opportunity. When these huge companies finally see a path to fire most of their workforce and collectively save trillions of dollars reducing their largest line item (people) to a fraction of their pre AI levels they wont care about anything but getting the transition done and the savings banked. My guess is that the corporations shedding all of these jobs will just take the mindset they can just tighten up and figure they will come out on the other side, once the rebalance has happened, stronger than ever with so much less to spend in expenses they will just explode in growth and profitability. BUT what if the rebalance of so many hundreds of millions of people being out of work in such a short amount of time that it fundamentally changes the world economy and big corporations are no longer a viable business structure. I read one guy feeling that we could be heading into a ‘everyone is a company’ period. That seems to make some sense. I quit IT a few years ago to run a solo handmade product company. What if millions and millions of other hopelessly unemployed people to the same. I have a 600’ garage so not added overhead and the tools I need to produce, on a small scale, well made products that are very high quality. Price is my hill to climb because large companies can sell the same stuff for much cheaper. Higher quality is my only defensive weapon. Large corporations have dominated service and product industries for years because they can make and do stuff using the economy of scale. What happens if the AI transformation leaves large corporations no viable market for the scaled production of millions of widgets or cost savings from thousands of widget service routes? The cost of running these corporations even without the previous payroll is still huge and only workable because of huge volume. So for example with the massive unemployment downturn the huge multi national Widget factories start to fold. In short order all the Widget factories fold. Widgets are still needed but not nearly as many so Widgets are back to being manufactured and sold by much smaller outfits in much smaller numbers and higher prices. AI makes it easier for them to make money in a small widget factory. If this scenario is repeated for one corporate space after another will there ever be a financial appetite to ever rebuild these huge corporations again? Will the AI rebalance reverse the last hundred years of continuously growing corporations and consolidating all output in a few hands for less money or will we see a complete re-balance of the worlds economies with small, local companies being the norm. Has AI showed the world that condensing and concentrating supply into smaller and smaller numbers of bigger and bigger companies will never again be considered a healthy sustainable path. Could there actually be laws against corporations growing beyond a certain size? Will Facebook be the company that it is if the large corporate dollars stop flowing? Will Zuckerberg no longer be worth hundreds of billions of dollars for providing corporations a platform to grow and consolidate our markets. For many of us with garages jammed full of crap and even paying monthly storage rental for storing even more crap we didn’t need, and no longer use, the massive move a hundred years ago to consumer driven economies services by fewer and fewer bigger and bigger companies, already seemed wrong and now we are seeing that they were never destined to grow forever and with so many trillions of dollars and most jobs tied up into so few massive companies the collapse is going to be crushing. So my advice, go make widgets when they fire you. submitted by /u/Smart-Intern-4007
Originally posted by u/Smart-Intern-4007 on r/ArtificialInteligence
You must log in or # to comment.