For awhile yes. Its ironic that the least productive people in knowledge work with the cushiest jobs will probably survive the AI wave the most. Because they do little they were probably employed for reasons other than utility/output in the first place - there isn't much to automate anyway.

While all the grinding skilled workers get displaced the bureaucracy jobs will remain. Ironic.

AI feudalism and/or monarchy although that could be quite awhile from now - there will be niches that are harder to integrate with AI that are protected for longer. A few owning everything; most other people surplus to requirements. Capitalism rewards scarcity with higher prices with both financial and social status for those with those scarce outputs - unfortunately what humans can do will become more less scarce relative to capital, land and other resources often owned by the wealthy. Economic rent will move away from skilled labor to other economic inputs.

Even people that go off grid and develop self sufficiency will eventually be subsumed by the need to feed more resources to the AI genie to grant more wishes. Whether it is land taxes, forced relocations, etc. Their land will be taken over, mined and or farmed - similar to colonies of old that were technologically less advanced than their invaders.

You are already IMV starting to see the beginning signs of the above as AI gets better. More competition in jobs, less certainity for the working class, businesses with other moats using AI to increase profits, data centres vs local communities taking land/energy/water over, AI required commodities increasing in value (e.g copper) and others. There will be more.

Modern times where we have democracy and capitalism are a relative recent phenomena when looking at the whole of human history that we take for granted when we shouldn't.

> if you own a warehouse and you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year, automation has minted a very comfortable living for someone while dropping your labor costs significantly.

So I've seen this argument made before, but they never seem to explain convincingly enough why that sole technician (or small group of technicians) would be paid so handsomely.

In a market in which there's a glut of labor, wouldn't there be plenty of desperate, and very capable, workers competing for the few available positions, thereby driving down the wages for those positions significantly as well?

No, the other guy is just wrong. Capital and labor are complements. If one is plentiful (capital) and the other scarce (labor) then the scarce one gets bid up.

You pay the one technician $200k instead of $80 because that technician has an outside option that will pay him $199k. He has that outside option because everyone is automating their warehouses and factories and stuff, and so in aggregate we basically wind up with 6 times as many warehouses and factories each employing 1 person.

It's a little more nuanced. There is not infinite demand for warehouses. So some of what happens is an $80k/year warehouse worker becomes a medical technician making $90k/year providing non-automatable services to the warehouse guy making $200k/year -- but the general story is everyone's wages go up. And history bears that out.

And the dream of AGI, and what has been promised, and what has effectively happened in some industries already, is to have a fleet of robots and 0 technicians.

> you replace 6 warehouse workers making $80,000 a year with a fleet of robots and 1 technician earning $200,000 a year

Why not paying the technician $80,000 a year?

Taxing capital? Impossible! Obscene! Everyone knows that only labor can/should be taxed.

Historically, such things have been brought about by extreme political violence, brought about by poverty. For instance, worker's rights (any at all, e.g. the right to go home every day) were a compromise between workers owning the workplaces (what workers demanded) and workers shooting their bosses to death every few weeks in frustration (what was actually happening at the time).

Because, think about it. Let's assume techno-feudalism is complete. Every piece of infrastructure is going to have usage fees attached anyway. Everyone is using AI, so are you going to be the only one not using it? Of course you'll use it. It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre?

From a cost-benefit perspective, I think it's a terrible idea. In the case of a massacre, long-term instability makes it hard to build a supportive faction. But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. There are already plenty of people who blindly defend corporations even when they do terrible things, right? In my opinion, UBI is simply the cheaper option. Historically speaking, post-massacre recovery has always ended up costing much more.

> into ghettos

No. Send to fight a war. To capture resources.

Me too. Here is some history to back up how absurd the statement is.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"

He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours!

He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time!

We only have to wait 4 more years to relax.

Is it because UBI is cheaper than a massacre? Since it will all end up being absorbed by the capitalists anyway.