No one needs to. With robotics and AI, as soon as they hit the point where necessities and luxury goods can be produced via automation, they have no need for 99% of the human population. They don't need us to build things or buy things or do jobs or do anything. There's no paradox. Just several billion humans who will soon be made fully redundant.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
154 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
84816 readers
3949 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
the government, apparently
Okay, next question. Who funds the government if they fire us all? Because it certainly won't be the billionaires who fired us.
Good question, billionaires by definition avoid taxes like the plague.... maybe they'll resort to slaving us directly to the burgeouise after culling any who dissent
The UBI talk from the AI execs smells like private slavery with public minimum wage.
/tinfoilhat
The top 10% of earners account for 50% of consumer spending.
As long as that’s the case nobody cares if anyone else can afford anything.
History has many examples of what happens where there is no middle class, it's not pretty
Remember when the future was so bright you had to wear shades?
Pepperidge Farms remembers
Sounds good. When?
Later on the top 1% will start to extract all wealth from the 1-10% class. Then the 0.1% will do the same. Concentration of wealth will continue.
Hell yeah. K-shaped economy embodying the core value of “fuck everyone else because I got mine.”
The rich. Corps. That's who they are selling services to these days. Especially the AI stuff. You can't afford AI. I can't afford it. But the corp you work for can. The no longer care about us plebs.
And what about when we burn down the data centers?
They'll imprison us and use us as cheap labor. At least in the US. Unless they kill us.
They will try that regardless of what you do.
Labour without workers. Somehow that's their dream
Gen AI will do that in 10 years /s
Well see, a lot of businesses are B2B. Now yes for sure ultimately their customer's customer's customer is going to be a normal person. So eventually the lack of custom and with it, revenue will hit them. But, here's the thing I've observed about large organisations (not just businesses). I liken their operation to be very similar to insects. That is, they don't really plan ahead, they're reactive purely to stimuli, and mainly just do "what the other orgs are doing" without thinking about the effect beyond the only horizons they can see. Month end, quarter end and year end. Anything after the end of their current financial year. They're not even thinking about right now.
So, the point is, this logic while completely correct will fall on deaf ears.
They don't want us: they want only business-to-business contracts: higher profit, less people.
Yes, there's truth in that article, but the get-rid-of-the-peons current is much more significant than people understand..
& it'll probably get guns, in the coming 7 years..
_ /\ _
They don’t want us: they want only business-to-business contracts: higher profit, less people.
Ok, but the business that buy need someone to sell to. It is maybe not the first or the second or the third but at some point along the chain b2b must become b2c, a business need to sell to someone that is not a business, else there is not reason for the business to buy in the first place.
Then you don't understand slavery deeply-enough:
They can outright remove-human-validity-from all lives except their-own, & they'll still have "business" happening.
Citizens are not required outside of oligarchs..
& they can simply pivot to serving the prisonworld, instead of having "humans" in the bottom of the pyramid.
Humankind's history is waaay worse than you're understanding.
_ /\ _
Then you don’t understand slavery deeply-enough:
They can outright remove-human-validity-from all lives except their-own, & they’ll still have “business” happening.
True, but a very limited one.
In a situation where you need to continually grow, removing all the human side of business will end with bankrupcy.
Citizens are not required outside of oligarchs…
Citizens are required, oligarchs can prosper only because there is something that produce their money. You remove the citizens, who in a form or another can buy oligarchs services/products, and the oligarchs are left with nothing, their money is useless.
We can discuss that then people will become money (the more slaves you have the better) but to keep slaves have a price, low as you want but it have it, and without a way of producing something you will end with no money and then no slaves.
Here we are talking about business that on one hand are trying to sell something to people and on the other are firing people to replace them with AI agents. We can replace, at the beginning, people who buy AI services with other business who then fires the people they hired to replace them with AI agents and so on.
At some point you will end with all the people fired (not that it could end this way in a pacifically), that cannot buy anything other then some food (if any) and a lot of business that are producing and trying to sell something to... who exactly ? The slaves ? Other business ?
Humankind’s history is waaay worse than you’re understanding.
Maybe, I never had the time to study history as much as I'd liked but I understand that there cannot be oligarchs without a society behind them.
Sorry: I meant citizenry won't exist except for the oligarchs.
Inferiors won't be citizens.
They'll be alive, they'll not have civilrights.
That kind of thing..
_ /\ _
Rich people. BAM! Cycle complete.
Rich people are people too, sort of.
I was thinking about this yesterday. Even in the implausible world of tomorrow scenario where AI and robots are doing all the work, how does money retain value? Capital is created by exploitation.
I would be seriously surprised if any billionaire asshole is thinking more than one step outside of their own personal interest.
Yes, three or four steps down the line you arrive back to their personal interest in the terms you speak of, but I think everyone involved in the AI/robotics circlejerk only think: "how can I get this to make me $626,373,637,478,226,748,483?"
They aren't even thinking into as far as 2028. All of this comes crashing down by Q3 2027, possibly sooner if a general recession comes first. Throwing more compute at their LLMs aren't going to achieve AGI and that's what they need to payoff their loans and investors. This is like analagous to Enron, but bigger. Music will stop soon.
Everyone is worried they are losing their jobs to AI when there hasn't been a single company to show efficiencies from adoption yet. Some of these companies are paying 4x in tokens than they were in salary for a worse output. Now I am not saying mass layoffs aren't coming... But it has nothing to do with AI.
The giant economy ouroboros will keep devouring itself while the rest of the world comes up with a different system, I suppose. At one point there might be entire parallel societies spanning around the globe. They physically exist within and around the ouroboros of the overly rich but they‘d barely interact with each other.