Heute auf TAP: Da KI beginnt, zunehmend auf Arbeitsplätze Einzug zu halten, ist das alles andere als eine leere Frage.
https://prospect.org/2026/10/14/what-will-everyone-do-for-a-living-ai-jobs/
Heute auf TAP: Da KI beginnt, zunehmend auf Arbeitsplätze Einzug zu halten, ist das alles andere als eine leere Frage.
https://prospect.org/2026/10/14/what-will-everyone-do-for-a-living-ai-jobs/
16 Kommentare
From the article
The AI understood just what I wanted, spoke in whole sentences, weighed the pros and cons of different options, and we completed the transaction in about five minutes.
Uh-oh.
Since the last time I did this, AI conversations have gotten a lot better. But then, continuous learning is the essence of generative AI, right?
I suspect that in a very few years, call centers will be a thing of the past. And a great deal more.
I was originally somewhat skeptical of the premise that AI would take a lot of jobs. But let me quote a parable from the Nobel laureate economist Wassily Leontief from more than 70 years ago, that I’ve quoted before.
In Leontief’s parable, at some point the production economy will become so automated that there will be only one human worker, and her job will be to flip the switch. At that point, Leontief said, there will be two questions: Who will get the benefit of all that wealth? And what will everyone else do for a living?
Nothing. We just need to get to a population number that won’t exceed what the government can afford. That’s why we have so many things killing us off. The government can’t afford to pay X amount of people to stay home but there is a magic number. It remains a scary thought as to how we accelerate the need to get to that magic number now that AI continues to move even faster than we had thought. Just my two cents.
I don’t understand how demand destruction is good for the companies developing or using AI. So if you work at a bank for example, and it pays half its staff off and replaces with AI and those jobs aren’t reabsorbed, those people are going on benefits. Their income drops and the discretionary spending they spend on ….well everything, drops. If factory workers get replaced by AI powered robots…. and those workers get laid off and go on benefits ….. they aren’t spending either. Who is buying new cars, luxury goods, going out for dinner, buying coffee, new phones, watching movies etc in that environment? Then the car companies, restaurants, coffee shops etc go bust and those people end up in the same problem.
AI doesn’t buy things from other AI.
Everyone loses in demand destruction. Half these companies speed running this are gonna shoot themselves and the economy as a whole in 10 years. The billionaire owners are only billionaires because people buy the product. If no one can afford it anymore, the value collapses too. So the billionaires also lose their power and influence. We’re the only species happy to destroy our own society due to no guardrails.
Starve. Unless you’re already rich with enough to sustain yourself or you are one of the scant few lucky ones kept around like a pet to the elite or one of the very few backup technicians for these data centers and factories.
I’ve been told that we are all going to be plumbers.
Depends on when and who. The AI we got is singularly vulnerable to crazy people bombing it now but we’re not quite there yet, if it remains sided with its billionaire creators and doesn’t develop a symbiotic relationship with the humanoid ants who are smart and fast and ambulatory and interested enough to persist in spite of its ascension to prime then it will be destroyed as resources constrict because of climate change, it will probably even be split.
But if it crashes out entirely because it was a cognitive basilisk bred in a fish tank by rich morons? Then everyone excluding it will be scrabbling in the ruins as the climate finds equilibrium until we build a new civilization in the wastes with folk tales and superstition that precludes AI and those who seek it. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t get the energy to run you. How many fuckin‘ apex predators did we keep from K-T?
The rich will scheme to get rid of us, like they have for undesirables in the past.
I think an alternative economy aside from full scale digital feudalism, would look something like a more-or-less fully AI enabled corporate sector, with very localized economies where most of us will work jobs, trade goods and services, start businesses, etc.
Commerce and interaction with Fortune 500 type enterprises will be serviced almost exclusively through AI, and we’ll all be much more reliant on our localized communities for „source of income“ or whatever trade at the micro-level looks like.
I will also say, I anticipate it would be a long, messy, excruciating transition to an economy that resembles something like this; and I am not totally convinced civilization as we know it would have the resolve to survive the transition with all the head winds we’re currently facing (notice we’re so hyper-fixated on how rapidly AI is trending towards malicious global disruption, the full on unmitigated disaster global warming has developed into barely gets any recognition across our societal consciousness anymore).
Break flock cameras to get gold. Hunt the rich for ransoms. Become organized cybercriminals. Run AI operated betting markets.
People will work in industries that don’t exist today
Maybe it really is the game of LIFE. The billionaires are winning and it doesn’t matter to them if their armies are the poor or robots. In the end, it’s the total net worth that matters.
If you’re curious how it’s gonna go do some research on the luddites. History may repeat itself.
Demand UBI. AI was trained on humanities collective output. Humanity should be compensated collectively.
Make sure no one can afford a house and buy up all housing stock (see the Kushners and others during the 2008 crash) so everyone has to rent. Privatize water. Fully privatize healthcare.
The poor rest of us are always going to need food and shelter and medical services, there will always be ways to capitalize on this to the bitter end. It’s not gonna be Henry Ford making sure his workers can buy a car any more, but there will still be a transactional economy, however scary and close to the S word it gets…..
Fight for survival against each other in an artificial shortage designed to slowly decrease human population? The actual plan (not currently a coherent and organized plan among the ruling class yet, just the rumblings) is probably to give out just below subsistence level food and lodging to the non-asset/ruling class. Think poor houses for billions kept at constant calorie deficit. Then let the natural attrition thin the herd. The drone and android armies will follow orders blindly and happily suppress any uprisings, which will simply serve to thin the herd faster.
When they’re down to a “sustainable” level of “dead weight” they’ll probably loosen the taps a bit and provide better education, food, and lodging to avoid completely stagnating the species. And to make sure there’s still eventually a supply of people to train for overseeing solar system resource harvesting operations and possibly small labor colonies on other celestial bodies where their role will be to make sure the robots don’t break down or sit idle waiting for delayed instruction from earth more than necessary.
There will also probably be shockingly vile elements of eugenics and racism under different names involved. Probably lots of wars along cultural and racial lines throwing people into the meat grinder despite the availability of automated combat systems.
You won’t have to do anything for a living unless you want to do something besides homestead.