What happens to an economy when AI makes most human labor optional
I keep seeing two extreme futures discussed around AI.<p>One is techno utopia: AI does everything, productivity explodes, humans are free to create and chill.<p>The other is collapse: AI replaces jobs, wealth concentrates, consumption dies, society implodes.<p>What I don’t see discussed enough is the mechanism between those states.<p>If AI systems genuinely outperform humans at most economically valuable tasks, wages are no longer the primary distribution mechanism. But capitalism today assumes wages are how demand exists. No wages means no buyers. No buyers means even the owners of AI have no customers.<p>That feels less like a social problem and more like a systems contradiction.<p>Historically, automation shifted labor rather than deleting it. But AI is different in that it targets cognition itself, not just muscle or repetition. If the marginal cost of intelligence trends toward zero, markets built on selling human time start to behave strangely.<p>Some questions I keep circling:<p>Who funds demand in a post labor economy
Is UBI enough, or does ownership of productive models need to be broader
Do we end up with state mediated consumption rather than market mediated consumption
Does GDP even remain a meaningful metric when production is decoupled from employment<p>I’m not arguing AI doom or AI salvation here. I’m trying to understand the transition dynamics. The part where things either adapt smoothly or break loudly.<p>Curious how others here model this in their heads, especially folks building or deploying these systems today.
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I keep seeing two extreme futures discussed around AI.<p>One is techno utopia: AI does everything, productivity explodes, humans are free to create and chill.<p>The other is collapse: AI replaces jobs, wealth concentrates, consumption dies, society implodes.<p>What I don’t see discussed enough is the mechanism between those states.<p>If AI systems genuinely outperform humans at most economically valuable tasks, wages are no longer the primary distribution mechanism. But capitalism today assumes wages are how demand exists. No wages means no buyers. No buyers means even the owners of AI have no customers.<p>That feels less like a social problem and more like a systems contradiction.<p>Historically, automation shifted labor rather than deleting it. But AI is different in that it targets cognition itself, not just muscle or repetition. If the marginal cost of intelligence trends toward zero, markets built on selling human time start to behave strangely.<p>Some questions I keep circling:<p>Who funds demand in a post labor economy
Is UBI enough, or does ownership of productive models need to be broader
Do we end up with state mediated consumption rather than market mediated consumption
Does GDP even remain a meaningful metric when production is decoupled from employment<p>I’m not arguing AI doom or AI salvation here. I’m trying to understand the transition dynamics. The part where things either adapt smoothly or break loudly.<p>Curious how others here model this in their heads, especially folks building or deploying these systems today.