If I'm unemployed, hungry—I'm pretty sure I'll be happy to swing a hammer, hang drywall…

I remember some archeologist saying that the first sign of civilization is not some tool or whatever but a healed fractured bone. That means the person that got hurt was cared for by other people who had enough resources to afford for one useless member of the group.

I can agree with that.

But don't assume it's without its own controversy. Maybe the point of civilization is to allow people to help eachother by providing safeguards against treachery.

Maybe they should be forced to help eachother under threat of violence. There's a massive spectrum of "solutions" between those two, and UBI could be considered pretty close to forcing, depending on how it's implemented.

It's not pedantry or technicalities, a lasting system needs to benefit people and support / build shared principles. Ideally it'd support the principles that enabled it in the first place.

The purpose of civilisation (or rather, why it exists in first place) is that “civilized” peoples managed to survive longer and reproduce more and produce better means to take over the land of those who didn’t adopt technology.

Now we are going to see if there is a limit or not. Or if AI changes the game (the dystopian end game is a small amount of people controlling all the production and getting rid of the rest by one way or another)

I don't understand. Could you elaborate?

If humans lost economic leverage (no jobs) but kept military leverage (usefulness as soldiers), that'd probably be utopia. We could all be a leisure class like the aristocrats of the past, and could defend that state of affairs.

Unfortunately we aren't in that world. AI+robots will deprive humans of both economic and military leverage. Most likely, powerful "blobs" of a few owner humans + a lot of automation will inherit the Earth and kick most humans to the curb.

>On the contrary, since truckers also mostly all own guns, they have a lot of political leverage. Everyone knows this; in the US at least.

What everyone knows is that American gun owners voted in the system that's eating them alive and that they don't care as long as that system doesn't touch their guns.

So they can just keep shooting watermelons in their backyards and being keyboard warriors on the internet, for as much as their "leverage" matters.

> Somewhere

Great plan, glad someone with your wisdom is thinking so hard about these kinds of problems.

We’ll take millions of displaced truckers and put them “somewhere” and they’ll do “something”.

Luckily picking up a new trade will be as easy as switching from JavaScript to Python for them.

They’re already overqualified for DoorDash and uber after all.

Please provide a few examples of what a knowledge worker can switch to and maintain even half of their income under the present scenario where all knowledge workers are (or soon will be) struggling to compete with LLMs?

> This is better than policies that create stupid incentives like in your example.

I wasn't aware that I promoted a policy. Can you point it out for me ?

> I don't think the difficulty is with the drivers, more with the logistics of retraining them all at once.

The only events that happen "all at once" are in our heads as hypotheticals.

In the real world, every change takes time to propagate.

It stands to reason, all of the "experts" of the world are going to be in less demand than they were before, because some percentage of people, will replace them with AI, for some percentage of tasks.

Stated another way, each of us will be consulting with AI more, and assigning some number of tasks to a non-expert, with the help of expertise from AI, and talking to human experts less frequently.

Interactions will decrease in frequency. In the commercial space, this means transactions will decrease in number and amount. This is "bad" for everyone, in the financial sense. Corporations lose revenues, governments lose revenues, employees get pay cuts, etc.

But downward trajectories on financial charts have been a problem for every fiat based economy we know of, long before AI came into the picture. The only thing people universally agree upon when sales, taxes, salaries, etc start going down, is that "confusion" is the first response, followed shortly by "panic", followed by "doing something to fix it" followed by "pretending it worked, even if it didn't."

Maybe AI will teach the world what to do when the charts turn down instead of up.

Infinite growth doesn't exist in a closed ecosystem, and we arent expanding into space yet.

For decades magazines and other media have promoted the idea that some day, technology will relieve us of the base burden of existence, and free us to do all those wonderful leisure activities we enjoy.

Now that AI seems to be able to deliver on the promise, the thing we seem to fear the most is the deflation of our own egos.

A conversation with an AI agent carries as little as $0.00 transactional cost, with a few cents in electricity expense, after the small fixed capital outlay for the computer.

A conversation with a consultant costs $200 an hour, and benefits taxing authorities, gas stations, phone companies, etc etc etc.

Again, it stands to reason, if we replace an expensive form of communication, with one that is almost free, that people are going to use it, and all those "expenses" they save on, were someone elses income.

The end game ... most of us will adapt, and some of us will self destruct during that process, and in 1 or 2 generations, everything will be "normal" again, and AI will be taken for granted, and we'll all be worrying about the new crisis.

Lets all remember, "the economy" as studied by economists, is the study of human behavior at its core, and its generally agreed that the human animals greatest natural defense is its intelligence and ability to adapt to its environment.

Keep calm. Carry on. This isn't a scarcity problem. It's an abundance problem.

You don't need to do anything to retrain someone.

You let them retrain themselves.

People in "coal country" who can't get a job in a mine, do something other than mining. Hunger is a powerful motivator.

A $10 a month cell phone plan is all it takes to get 24/7 access to all the worlds information, and AI's intelligent queries into it.

And yes, you will have millions who never learn how to use said information to their own benefit, but we've known for awhile that poverty is a behaviorial problem as much as it is a resource problem.

Jobs are not a zero sum equation. Six million unemployed workers, means six million units of production looking for an outlet that was not previously feasible due to a shortage of available labor

This seems like a non sequitur? The US military can staff its own bases without relying upon native labor, as it does in places like Diego Garcia

I am very confident that this has not historically been, and is not today, a major or minor consideration in US foreign policymaking

Doesn’t negative income tax without any qualifier imply that b is zero?

> You just mean food stamps, right?

A variation of.

> We already have that in the US.

Dandy. It's different to cash.

> because multiple people are at Walmart with a cart full of sodas. They buy as many as they can and sell it to friends or family to have the cash instead.

Some do that, yes - not everybody can (eg: small communities, limited travel, few people with cash that want to buy basics)

I often see people in my area buy organic produce from local small businesses at the farmers market. So I suppose my anecdote balances out yours?

Are you also angry that Walmart bought those things and is selling them on?

The US has by far the lowest spending (fed + state + local) among the major advanced economies in the world. [1]

The US also has by far the lowest taxes (fed + state + local) among them too; in fact, the US could have raised taxes by more than 15% and still been lowest. [2]

Regardless, if someone does believe spending should be cut:

A) What specifically should be cut, and

B) What % of the 11.5T/y [3] gov spending does it add up to?

[1] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2025/Ap...

[2] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2025/ap...

[3] https://www.bea.gov/data/government/receipts-and-expenditure...

Let’s start by cutting the military budget (including all the ways they indirectly fund the military) by at least half

In theory I agree with you.

In practice every time someone goes to Washington to "clean house" the first things to get gutted are welfare and funding for science and research, because unfortunately a lot of Americans consider all of that to be waste. Never the military, never the police, never the pork.

Hah, oh the way Trump manages to drive businesses into bankruptcy I'm not so sure. It might be cheaper to feed everyone forever than let him run the corporation.

That would seem to imply that even those at the poverty line can already afford 3x the basic necessities.

Come on, read it again. You know what the word 'universal' means, so stop playing stupid.