THIS is the question!

Henry Ford II: "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?" Walter Reuther: "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"

Ah, the elephant in the room. Nobody seems able to answer this point, or even talk about it. Occam’s razor sure doesn’t imply a good outcome.

For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.

And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.

I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.

So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.

Well the essence of capitalism might be that people who own the capital receive money for owning it, not doing any labor on it necessarily.

So when we talk of people doing labor for money, we are assuming they can only own their body and receive money from that?

owning capital comes with risk...

you may not like the fact the fat capital owner may not be lifting a finger, but they certaintly aren't getting a free lunch.

5,283 workers were killed on the job in the United States in 2023.

The only thing capital owners risk is losing it and becoming a worker.

Fair, I never said there wasn't risk involved with ownership. I even made sure to qualify when I said that people who own don't do labor, because often there is labor involved in ownership.

So I don't think it's a free lunch, it's more risk-for-lunch than labor-for-lunch. Maybe you could argue laborers are still risking their body or something, but I think the point might stand.

The economic model is inconsequential to my point. Latching on to that as a boogeyman is a distraction, the point stands on its own.

> Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”

You paint the economic model as a false dichotomy, and the main point of my posting was that it is not a false dichotomy. It is not either have a job (and be exploited by someone else) or be helpless and rely on government handouts.

For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?

The whole conversation seemed to be about the economic model, so I'm not sure how it is a distraction, a boogeyman, or inconsequential.

> For example, what if people who got laid off from companies were given significant stock in the company, so that they might partake in the potential savings and gains from replacing the workers with AI or other tools?

You have described less than 0.1% of the US population, not to mention the rest of the world.

I get it, you have an idea in your head and you're struggling to see past it. Read Brave New World.

It seems that you may not want to actually have a discussion, rather just reinforce the idea that we're either screwed by employers or screwed by helplessness.

Fair, my one example on layoffs may not land with you.

But do you want us to just sink into the helplessness of us all being screwed or do you want to try to find solutions that might allow us to feel some sense of agency and hope?

Dissmissive, thats a way to handle it for sure. I'd be much more interested in you adressing what I said. Dismmissing is lazy.

You wrote 7 paragraphs originally. What specifically do you want me to address?

Ah, well, nobody needs to buy them if the robots just provision everything for the people who would have otherwise had their businesses make cars.

Driving a car is a chore, not a job (usually), much like washing dishes is. Dishwashers did not produce an economic collapse.

OTOH replacing people with AI would indeed bring about a huge economic downturn. What would be good is augmenting humans so that they can do 10x more. That would enable things that are hard to imagine exactly now, much like computers enabled interesting transformations in the society from 1980s to 2010s.

The current crop of AI is by construction unable to reach the human level of cognition, but it is quite good at doing some symbolic manipulation tasks. We will get used to that, and will integrate that in our workflows. Humans are still going to be needed.

Tractor-trailer trucking alone is the 13th largest profession in the US. It’s not unusual for driving to be a whole profession in and of itself.

Fair, but I spoke about cars, the commute / chore kind of work, not trucks, a commercial job.

And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?

If an employee brings in more profit than before, you want more such employees, not less.

You have to cut costs when the costs do not bring you enough profits.

That assumes the market is infinitely expandable.

If in fact you can meet the same market demand with fewer workers and the market does not expand accordingly, you get deflation and job losses.

Huh?

Hundreds of billions are changing hands globally, every week, at the retail level alone.

And that happens literally every week, week after week.

That constitutes a massive market in any sense I can think of.

That won't happen any more if nobody has jobs. It's also completely irrelevant because how did you just connect the self driving car market to the entirety of retail sales?

So you think a trend that is growing year after year, yes global retail sales grew from 2025 to 2026 week over week, indicates a future collapse?

That needs a way more complex explanation than simple gut feeling.