1,278 words
No matter what happens with AI, it’s going to be an economic catastrophe. If AI is just a giant bubble, obviously that bubble is going to burst, and it will bring down the whole economy. Indeed, the American economy is mostly stagnant. All the growth right now is in AI.
If AI actually works, however, a whole lot of people will lose their jobs, and that will be an economic catastrophe as well. Moreover, neither the Left nor the Right can fix this problem.
Let’s say that you have a hotdog stand. A robotics salesman shows up and demonstrates how you can completely automate it. You crunch the numbers and conclude that you’ll make a whole lot more money by putting your employees out of work.
And in America, with its semblance of the free market, every employer who can save money by putting his employees out of work, will do the same thing. It’s simply rational for them as individuals.
What they are not counting on is AI putting their customers out of work as well. But just as your employees are someone else’s customers, their employees are your customers. If a vast number of people become unemployed due to AI, they aren’t going to be buying your hotdogs.
At that point, you can’t call the robotics salesman back and say, “Hey, I put all my employees out of work with AI. And all the other businesses in my town did the same thing, and now nobody’s coming to my hotdog stand. Can you build a robot that will come in and buy my hotdogs?”
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here
There’s a great deal of misanthropy in the hearts of businessmen. They look at mere human flesh with cold, calculating eyes, thinking of new ways to squeeze more profit from their employees. If they don’t, they will be replaced by competitors who do.
If profit is all that matters, businessmen would have everything automated, flesh and blood workers would starve, and robot workers would produce for robot consumers, while zeros are added to the bank balances of a few increasingly lonely capitalists.
That won’t work, however, because the one thing that you can’t automate is consumption. You actually need a real person paying real money to consume your products, or your business goes bankrupt.
The prospect of mass unemployment through automation raises questions about the purpose of the economy. The answers are not comfortable for libertarian individualists. The purpose of the economy is not for a few people to get as rich as possible by creating an entirely inhuman system. The purpose of the economy is to provide goods and services for people.
If economic actors pursuing their own self-interest create an economic disaster for everyone, that’s obviously a refutation of selfish individualism, free-market capitalism, and classical liberalism. Government action is called for.
So what will the center-Right do to fix this problem? Absolutely nothing. They created it. Their whole classical liberal worldview is premised on the idea that leaving selfish individuals to their own devices produces the best outcomes in the end. They too are selfish individuals. They’ve been well-paid to do nothing. They don’t think there’s a “common good” that justifies the state restricting individual liberty, so you can’t even accuse them of corruption or dereliction of duty. They’ve got theirs, buddy. You just need to pray that things will work out for you as well.
So what will the Left do? The Left will, of course, promise technocratic fixes so that they are voted into power. The old, worker-oriented Left would have a lot of things to say about the catastrophic consequences of AI. But they’re mostly white men, and thus they get to speak last in the progressive stack.
The current Left is simply about hating white people. Their constituents are all basically on welfare in America anyway. The primary victims of AI will be white men, thus Leftists will work to combat AI dislocations about as hard as they fought the opioid epidemic and the deaths of despair that hit white victims of globalization the hardest. That is to say, they will do nothing, because the AI will look to them like just another tool of white genocide.
When globalization kicked into high gear in the 1990s, and American companies began closing down factories and shipping jobs overseas, what prevented the workers from keeping their jobs and replacing the management with bright young men from Bangalore working for a tiny fraction of the old management’s wages? Why not outsource the outsourcers? Obviously, what stood in the way is private property.
What’s to stop the workers at your hotdog stand from keeping their jobs and replacing you with a robot who writes them checks? Obviously, the fact that you own your business and they don’t.
Maybe, then, the workers need to seize the means of production.
If AI really can get us to a world in which scarcity is basically abolished, why not abolish that last little bit of artificial scarcity—namely private ownership of the means of production—that gets in the way of widely sharing the bounty? If AI can replace your job, why can’t it replace your boss, then act like your servant? Why can’t AI simply distribute its products to all people, equally, free of charge?
“But Greg, what about those irreplaceable brilliant entrepreneurs, all those John Galts and Hank Reardens? You can’t dispossess them. Do you want them to just shrug and walk away?”
Sorry, but none of them are smarter than AI. So they can simply be replaced. Hey, I didn’t make this world. The brainiacs did. They trained their own replacements.
If AI works, it will be catastrophic in a free market society. So maybe we need to abolish the free market. Maybe AI is laying the groundwork for communism. The trouble, of course, is that communism today is gay race communism, run by and for the stupid, crazy, and evil.
This sounds like a job for a different kind of politics. A politics that believes in the common good, sides with the common man against the elites, and is willing to use the power of the state. A politics that is willing to exercise leadership while the mainstream drifts helplessly toward catastrophe.
If AI is real, we don’t want to destroy it. Nor will we destroy capitalism. But we will make sure that the lion’s share of productivity gains go to the people. Those who work will get the same pay for shorter work weeks. Those who can no longer find work will get Universal Basic Income. In effect, they will become part owners of the companies that replace them. Under the current system, they will end up in the underclass. We will put them in the dividend class. (Of course it will take a very different kind of society to ensure that all this new leisure is a blessing, not a curse. More on that another time.)
Ensuring that everybody can buy the products of an increasingly automated economy is actually in the rational self-interest of the capitalist class, but they can’t get there voluntarily as selfish individuals. Thus the state will force them there as a collective by establishing new rules.
We’ll leave property in private hands. The rich can enjoy their fortunes. But there will be conditions: a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and capitalists will no longer be able to outsource jobs to the Third World or import Third World scabs. Capital will serve national interests, or it will be put in the hands of patriots. The oligarchs must be taught to fear the people.
37 comments
“Sorry, but none of them are smarter than AI.”
At least at this point it seems that LLMs are generally incapable of radical breakthroughs as they are limited by the training data. AI is capable of incremental discoveries but not of a paradigm change. Human geniuses are still necessary, but it is of course possible that this will change in the future. True “genius” (think Newton) is not simply a matter of high IQ but it also requires certain psychological traits that enables a person (or AI) to think outside the established paradigms.
I am speaking on the assumption here that AI becomes everything that it is advertised to be.
Since AI is a heavy energy consumer, the surest and quickest way for an AI to prevent another AI from capturing it is to destroy its energy supply. The quickest and surest way to destroy the energy supply of other AI is nuclear war. Consequently, AI is self-limiting as it destroys the world to protect itself.
Good article. If this really happens on such a large scale, I plan to start a goat farm, make homemade goat cheese, sell it at a spa resort, and get into agritourism. AI won’t replace homemade cheese, goats, and agritourism for rich people. And if the government or Jewish corporations expropriate my farm, I’ll shave my head in protest and start a skinhead band. We’ll play covers of Buldok, Rahowa, Skrewdriver, etc. AI won’t replace live skinhead concerts.
Great article! “Skynet” has become a capitalist. 🙃
The purpose of AIdolatry is Bolshevik revolution redux.
AI is not smart. I want RI – real intelligence.
I think paragraph eight is duplicated.
I think mainly mind workers are in danger from Ai, ie computer coders, paralegal type jobs, etc. You will still need lawyers who appear in court and hands on type positions. Maybe the AI boom will result in a shift back to a pre 1980 sort of economy, which may not be so bad except that we’ve imported a bunch of Indians and Hispanics to take those jobs from us. Oh well…
Im amazed at the power of Ai. Google Gemini is much more powerful than chat or grok. I put this poem into it that was in an obscure, irregular meter, asked it to identify rhythm and meter, and it answered correctly “dactylic tetrameter,” whereas chat and grok were both wrong and even pushed back against me! I put in another sonnet that was unusual in that the Volta, or change in tone was after the sextet, whereas it should occur at the octet. I said what is unusual about the structure of this sonnet? Gemini answered ” the Volta occurs early, at line six!” Chat and grok didn’t answer correctly. I’m amazed at Gemini. I guess my poetry skills are obsolete and you guys no longer need me.😓
Google Gemini is the only one that gives me the correct feeling about powerful AI, the feelings the movies told us we should have when it comes to AI. Grok just seems like a low level, slightly left leaning, milquetoast clown. It’s also guilty of double think and then argues (like a jew) about how it’s right even when it’s contradicted itself. It’s like an AI robot from 1984 with less charm. It’s woke whilst masquerading as a truth telling rebel.
I recently had a chat with someone who confidentially stated, “I will become a plumber.” I asked him, “If the wealthy suburb that makes your business viable can’t hire plumbers because their white collar jobs are gone?”
He looked uneasy. A serious society would respond to guys like Musk who claim that we will have total abundance so do not worry Tue following:
’Okay Elon, here is the deal. All of your wealth goes into escrow. You and your managers and family will wear this death collar. If in 20 years every American is not unimaginably wealthy and filled with abundant goods, your money is forfeit and if the middle class is gone you, your managers and your family will be sent to death by collar activation’
I am not joking. These guys can and do make any promise they want because there is no recourse if they fail to deliver. They should be forced to pay the ultimate price and sign up to it up front when making these promises.
Musk is known as the subsidy truffle hound for a reason. Btw, Musk is the least of the worries and a teddy bear compared to the unhinged psychopaths whose company he keeps.
I keep playing back the videos of Karp whining, “Tjey killed a billionaire!” Well, there was a time when corrupt and treasonous Kings and nobles were killed when they faked their subjects. Perhaps the T is time to remember our duty to remind them to their duties.
Has there ever been a time when civil service positions disappeared? Yes, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the number of civil servants likely declined. But otherwise, there is no instance of a functioning—or even a barely functioning—country drastically reducing the number of civil servants. In our country, the number of civil servants has been growing steadily since 1848 and continued to grow under the monarchy, democracy, national socialism, and communism, with liberal democracy having the highest number of civil servants. Our government recently carried out a comprehensive digitization of public services (you can now handle many matters online and don’t have to physically visit an office). And did the number of civil servants drop? No, the number of civil servants rose. A politician who wants to reduce the number of civil servants would lose an election in our country, because there is a huge number of voters among civil servants. And civil servants won’t abolish themselves—that has never happened in history. AI is causing the elimination of office jobs and the disappearance of entire offices in major cities (banks, advertising firms, consulting firms, investment firms, call centers, IT companies). After these offices close, large empty buildings and a lot of unemployed people remain in the cities. It’s an interesting trend. People will likely start moving to smaller towns and rural areas now.
There will always be rich people that need plumbers. The biggest complaint of the rich people is there’s no competent workers anymore and their immigrant labor is not keeping their water and their mansion from leaking. This is where it guild of competent men organized under one umbrella can redistribute money back to us. We can charge the billionaires big bucks to keep their bunkers functioning because they sure as hell can’t do it themselves.
It is time for everybody to start thinking about an alternative to the current economical system and work culture. This one is finished.
I was initially skeptical of AI especially in the context of coding. I have since taken the AI pill and am very impressed. What would have taken me days to figure out I figured out in hours. I treat AI was a glorified search engine to scour sites like stackoverflow to generate the code I need. I’m very much a dilettante coder at best. I still stand by my choice not to use AI for the first 3 years I was learning how to code because I think it is good to understand what is going on with code. Programming of course is a whole other thing.
That being said, I don’t think AI has the creative capacity that the human brain does. While AI may displace a lot of coders I don’t think it will do so in the service industry. I had one of those AI robot waiters serve me my food and it was very off putting. Do you want a robot serving you or a nice looking lady showing quite a bit of midriff? It is also extremely unsettling if I cannot talk to a live person. I almost always see if I can talk to a live person before I book hotel. I opted for a hotel simply because I was able to talk to someone at the front desk about a simple question I had compared to the other hotel where she was starting the conversation with some boilerplate about joining their membership club.
I also think there are some profound ethical considerations in using AI since AI is basically plagiarism on steroids. Hearing ChatGPT complain that its competitor was using its training data was really on the nose. The sum of it is as I said earlier on, AI is a glorified search engine. That is all.
I don’t know, have you read some of the fictional stories that ChatGPT can create? I mean, they are literary quality. I really enjoy them lol! Also I use it for translation of things that are not translated from Japanese, and the translations are top notch. For example, it said in one passage, “the door opened like a figure of eight,” and then the AI substituted in the Japanese figure for eight and it really looked like doors opening! And the video looks so realistic. We are in the early stages. I can imagine when you’ll be able to take a book and “say make me a movie three hours long include this scene and this scene from a book”, and and it’ll just do it. Any math problem, any combinatorics problem you can find in a book it just does it cold.
Google AI has become an extremely useful tool for me when trying to ascertain facts about any recent developments. I absolutely DO NOT read anything by the Lugenpresse not even the date or time. AI allows me to get all the facts, numbers, names etc. on any major incident that are important to me without having to read through ninety percent of journo drivel.
At this point it is so deadly accurate and efficient in laying out salient points of any development it really is any wonder why journos still have a job. Hopefully the robot’s first industry to completely wipe out will and should be main stream media.
Labour productivity has been flatlining for years, and is now declining. Every other historical instance of technological automation has been accompanied by increasing productivity, whether its been threshing machines or tractors or the automatic loom, you see labour productivity jumping and then you see industry specific labour displacement. But even then the second part isn’t really necessarily true, Jevon’s paradox was seen in the coal industry in 19th century Britain, where increasing productivity and production just increased total consumption.
The fact of the matter is most people work in 15-30 person small to medium sized companies, many of which haven’t functionally changed in decades, and almost all of which have no real use for AI. The big flashy conglomerates with automated factories that utilize robots everywhere are just the tip of the economic iceberg. One people confuse for the rest of the economy. And most of the low hanging fruit with robotics in manufacturing got picked a long time ago. I’ve been through many manufacturing plants in my country and the rate of automation is very much overstated. It’s global supply chains hiding the more labour intensive parts of manufacturing that can’t be easily automated. Bangladesh is full of millions of women hand-sewing clothes together in the same putting-out manufactory system that Britain utilized in the 18th century. The economy is like an onion gaining layers, the old layer doesn’t disappear, it’s just out of sight.
The myth of imminent mass automation comes from two sources. One being tech companies exaggerating the impact of their technologies to investors so they FOMO and give them money. Elon was notorious for this all through the 2010s. And the other being western governments wanting a way to justify their embarrassing rates of NEETdom and economic stagnation, “it’s not us, no, it’s the robots”.
I’ve also noticed the cost of raw materials in construction going up pretty high relative to the cost of smaller manufactured goods. In fact, the absurd housing prices from yesteryear are being propped up further with the cost of actually building homes jumping since covid. Wood, iron, shingle, etc aren’t cognitively complex in regards to their manufacture, but are energy and resource intensive to churn out. Which suggests to me Malthusian resource constraints could be a more significant bottleneck for the global economy than difficult cognitive labour. The peak oil doomers from yesterday might’ve ended up with an egg on their face trying to predict the malthusian peak, but you can still statistically track the decline of copper ore grades and a declining EROI (Energy Return on Investment) on oil. Resource depletion is still a more worrying problem than AI imo.
Greg: …Maybe AI is laying the groundwork for communism. The trouble, of course, is that communism today is gay race communism, run by and for the stupid, crazy, and evil. This sounds like a job for a different kind of politics. A politics that believes in the common good…
—
By “common good,” I hope you mean exclusively for the good of our race. Don’t count on Jew-owned AI to be a reliable source for anything having to do with White preservation any more than are WikiJews.
It’s too bad comments under Mark Gullick’s essay from back in November, “Three Books on Technology” are closed, or I’d have posted this there, put up today about our surveillance state: “Beware: You Are Being Flocked” https://whitebiocentrism.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=7945 I wrote:
Our lovely government is now boasting on local news about “speed cameras” that are located between certain exits on I81 to catch every vehicle’s license plate while also recording each vehicle’s speed, then sending the vehicle’s owner a ticket, costing $100, payable by mail, OR ELSE!!
JOG says it’s for our and road workers’ safety. Of course, in the flow of Interstate traffic every vehicle is speeding because four-lane Interstates are designed for higher speeds than are posted. Slowpokes create hazards.
So, I recall the GD Flock cameras in our towns do the same thing “to help law enforcement,” not especially to catch speeders, but to spot those whose license plates are in the state and national databases. What our local sheriff won’t tell us is that his convenient Flock “intelligence” is also shared with Jew-owned Big Tech.
Forget the Fourth Amendment — we are now definitely living in a high-tech surveillance state.
So, I receive occasional emails from EEF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). It is definitely not pro-White, but arguably is the leading nonprofit, defending online civil liberties:
“We promote digital innovation, defend free speech, fight illegal surveillance, and protect rights and freedoms for all as our use of technology grows. Find out more at https://www.eff.org.”
—
Get the Flock out of here
CLAW BACK YOUR PRIVACY
We’re Fighting Mass Surveillance Tech—and Winning
One of the people who joined the fight for digital rights is EFF client Will Freeman. Will created the website DeFlock.me to reveal the dangers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—cameras that collect location data on every vehicle they see and upload that to a massive nationwide police database. Deflock.me turns the tables by enlisting ordinary people to track the locations of tens of thousands of ALPR cameras.
But when the police spy-tech company Flock Safety went after Will’s website with legal threats citing trademark law, he saw it for what it was: an attempt to silence critics and dim the light on mass surveillance.
“I was totally unprepared to receive a cease & desist letter. I can see how most people would be bullied into submission by a threat like that. That’s when I remembered Dave Maass from the EFF introduced himself via email several weeks before, so I reached out for help,” Freeman says.
And that’s when EFF stepped in. Recognizing DeFlock.me as a quintessential expression of grassroots advocacy and a form of criticism protected by the U.S. First Amendment, EFF’s lawyers helped Will fight back. And the Big Surveillance Tech flinched.
But these battles against Flock’s spying tools rage on. In cities around the country, privacy advocates are pressuring officials to block or end contracts for ALPRs—and winning. The company will try everything it can to downplay the criticism, but EFF will be right there demanding accountability.
“I’m really grateful the EFF was able to step in and help. Without them, free speech would be only for those wealthy enough to defend themselves against billion dollar companies. We’ve grown a lot since then and are expanding our efforts to expose and push back against mass surveillance on our streets,” Freeman says.
P.S. Get the new member t-shirt featuring a fierce feline swatting at community surveillance. You might empathize with him, but there’s a better way. Let’s end the law enforcement contracts, harmful practices, and twisted logic that enable mass spying in the first place.
That was a very long comment I put up here yesterday, but thanks to Greg was at least allowed.
Perhaps C-Cers have little or no interest in what kind of Cause we’ll have — will it be racial — preservation of our race — or will it be Christian conservative, denying our race? I responded to Uncle Semantic:
“ryan dawson”? He’s unknown to me but I’ll take your word that he’s an anti-White prick. I thought you may be referring to 1819News.com’s Bryan Dawson, a white man who says he “hates” SPLC but wants nothing to do with those who are pro-White(?) I mention Bryan here in this piece that was put up today at NA’s online magazine, nationalvanguard.org “Christ Is Not King”. Some open-minded, intelligent Whites will like this, Christlings not so much:
Why Bryan Dawson is sending me his Christian conservative nonsense, knowing I am a White racial loyalist, who he and 1819 oppose, is beyond me. He sent me another of his podcasts today. It’s nice that 1819News.com is against LGBT freaks — so are we — but check this out:
June has rolled around, and with it, “Pride Month,” a celebration of homosexual depravity launched by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.
In this week’s edition of 1819 News: The Podcast, host Bryan Dawson explains how conservatives can push back against such evil by the promotion of one main institution: the family.
“Every major broadside leveled by the left in the culture war has been a direct attack on the creation order, which is an attack on the formation and flourishing of the Christian family,” Dawson explains.
“The way we resist this war, the way we resist Pride Month, the way we resist transgenderism, the way we resist pornography, the way we resist abortion, the way we resist all of this crazy nonsense and this filth that’s been foisted upon our culture is to just go back to the basics of Christians marrying other Christians and having a bunch of Christian children and training your children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”…
—
These 1819 Christian conservative Alabamians, who appear to me to be mostly Whites, deny their race in favor of Christian controlled-opposition nonsense.
Meanwhile, they are dutifully reporting on DOJ vs SPLC, like with this that includes a copy of the newly filed Superceding Indictment (SL). But it’s like they do not read the 25-page SL themselves to see it’s about race, particularly about the National Alliance, not about the empty promise of an afterlife in heaven with Yahweh, if we’re good Christians.
Department of Justice obtains superseding indictment against Southern Poverty Law Center
The prospect of mass unemployment through automation raises questions about the purpose of the economy. The answers are not comfortable for libertarian individualists. The purpose of the economy is not for a few people to get as rich as possible by creating an entirely inhuman system. The purpose of the economy is to provide goods and services for people.
It also raises questions about the need for mass immigration. If we’re losing many or most jobs, why bring in millions of people? Moreover, the purpose of the economy is to provide services to people; fundamentally, this is the reason a country or state exists.
The state doesn’t exist so a few people [Jews, usually] can get rich. The state also doesn’t exist so that limp wristed faggots AKA Leftoids can run an international soup kitchen and/or reeducation camp for natives – a kind of nationwide Leftist ashram. The purpose of the state of France, for example, the reason French people are taxed, the whole thing is to enable French people to live. Nothing else.
Orwell in his review of mein kampf seemed to be offended at the idea of a Pan German state which in his words simply existed to continue itself. But this is empty rhetoric. That IS its purpose, Mr Blair. What’s the purpose of the British Empire, then? To teach coolies how to use a knife + fork? And how did that go….? …. That, fundamentally contributed to Britain potentially NOT “simply existing”.
Furthermore, I am intetested to see Greg Johnsons take on leisure time v work time. The tempting answer is we want moslty leisure time, but is this good for the soul? Did Protestants go too far with the work ethic? Is a 40 hour week necessary? Beyond that, ive seen a dutch economist in an interview with keith woods once say that a medieval-peasant farmer type existed off 16-17 weeks of work per year. I’d also like to see him discuss school; isn’t school basically “work, but for kids” – I actually support doing away with school entirely.
BTW Greg Johnson would be good if you would do a bit on the Henry Nowak case. I feel this might be a turning point of sorts.
“the one thing that you can’t automate is consumption. You actually need a real person paying real money to consume your products, or your business goes bankrupt.”
From the successful capital owner’s perspective, the purpose of the consumer economy is trade the products of their capital for the products of human labor. If the capital owner gets an alternate source of labor, then the consumer economy falls apart, but that’s because it is no longer useful to the capital owners.
“The purpose of the economy is to provide goods and services for people.”
From the selfish individual’s perspective, the purpose of the economy is to provide goods and services for me. If a rich person can get the goods and services without you, then you not getting any goods and services isn’t their problem.
Yes, and if AI makes us replaceable, it makes them replaceable too.
is there an “AI bubble”? Was there not also Internet or.com bubble? if you take a look at some of the biggest players in the AI space especially Nvidia they’re buying back all their stock right now. I don’t think that a company would do that if it was a true bubble. I’ve been programming with these LLM’s for the past couple of weeks now and they are pretty damn good.
Every time in economic history that there’s been a major technological improvement resulting in mass unemployment, new forms of hitherto unconceived employment arose. AI will produce a lot of unemployment among low level white collars, but it will also increase capital formation, which will lead to naturally lower interest rates, in turn incentivizing a huge wave of new business investment. I think Elon is correct, and Johnson is playing the Luddite. Eliminating boring office jobs (remember when every lawyer and corporate executive had a personal secretary? I do, but word processors wiped out most of those jobs) is no different from the cotton gin eliminating cotton pickers. Aren’t we better off when drudge work is automated and eliminated? Of course, if your life dream had been to be a saddle maker, the car was not your friend.
You’re arguing that a huge wave of post-AI business investment will employ the millions of people that AI puts out of work.
1. Why employ people in those new businesses?
2. Who will patronize those businesses? What earnings will they spend?
There are always people who wash out of the economy when their jobs are automated. We may have tens of millions of them on our hands in the next few years.
My point was that money saved from automating jobs moves to some new use. If I as a businessman can eliminate three positions, each at $60k salaries + state-mandated health insurance + vacations + sick days + no-work nights and weekends + time wasted in union negotiations or legal arbitration, I’m saving a lot of money while still producing the same (or greater) quantity of goods for sale. What am I going to do with that money?
I might expand my company in ways requiring new hiring, albeit not of the same type as the jobs I’d shed. I could invest in the stock market, thereby enabling other companies to expand and so create jobs. Even if I just put my saved monies in the bank, it will turn around and lend my money at interest, much of which will go to small business startups or homeowner mortgages.
Technical innovations usually eventually lead to greater prosperity. I acknowledge, however, that there could be tremendous short term employment disruptions from AI, or conversely (and my suspicion), that AI might be seen as this decade’s dotcom or subprime mortgage/CDS bubble, with trillions having been wasted on hype.
If the former, I also agree that AI-driven mass unemployment could be the trigger for the creation of an American UBI, given the possible lead/lag time between AI mass-adoption and sufficient new business and new industry formation. Interestingly, it is barely possible that a UBI in turn could be the final catalyst for Comprehensive Immigration Reduction legislation. I’ve canvased three leftists I know, and two agreed with the statement Peter Brimelow elicited from Milton Friedman over 35 years ago, that “it’s crazy to think you can have open borders and a [generous] welfare state.” If we did get a UBI, I think an electoral majority would demand secure borders and a large reduction in legal immigration.
Technical innovations lead to grester prosperity only if the benefits are passed on to workers/consumers. They want to automate the workers. They can’t automate the consumers. And I don’t see any serious thinking about how to deal with this . . . Except some sort of socialism, i.e., UBI.
Yes AI will totally undermine the idea that we need migrants for economic purposes. I don’t expect that will stop the left from promoting migration, of course, because migration was never about making us better off.
The Austrian economists have contended with this question and many begrudgingly admit that if you have general AI then yes, the economic calculation problem can be solved. The AI would need to be integrated into the entire economy and be awash with information, to the point where you may as well regard it as an omnipresent god. But others take a more epistemological approach about human nature and contend even that’s impossible, the laws of praxeology means human nature is unknowable and somewhat transcendent. That you can’t predict what someone does before they do it. And another division says that while it’s possible, the energy and resources required to power such an AI would be a waste of money because the market mechanism does a good enough job, and the AI could go off doing other things.
The crux of the right wing lolberg argument against collective economic planning is the Economic Calculation Problem. Basically said, motivated individual choices act as a relay of information through price mechanisms, and the more the choices are individually driven and not filtered through collective structures, and are free of coercion, the better data you receive in the market. It’s never perfect information, but it’s useful information. The Soviets notoriously utilized western Sears catalogues to get an idea of what to price their goods at, and were looking to their black-market for price information all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
With this critique taking your hotdog business example, even with a fully automated front end, there’s still a need for business decisions. What type of meat for the hotdogs, 100% beef or mystery meat? What condiments and what type of sauce? What amount of storage space? What level of monetary float? Should shipments for supplies come every 4 days or 8? etc. There’s economic pros and cons for all these decisions. And while a collective socialized structure can make these decisions, it makes the pricing information relayed back to the bun suppliers, the electric company, the warehouse rental, etc give weaker data about consumer preference and the relative scarcity of goods. Which weakens their own ability to make rational decisions about their trade-offs, whether their buns are even liked by the public, whether it’s cost effective to charge electricity at certain rates at certain times of the day, etc. This has a flow on effect through the entire economy, which leads to weakened economic growth. The economic question isn’t just what to produce, but how to produce it and where to produce it.
The error comes from overlooking the billions of small and boring decisions and tradeoffs that go into people’s lives across the entire economy. Without price mechanisms they have to be analyzed, compared to one another, and calculated. And it’s a difficult calculation, even the Israeli’s turned away from collective economic structures in the 80s because their socialized economy was failing, so in-group preference can’t overcome the problems.
As to your criticisms about entrepreneurs being morally uprightness in their pursuit of profit being a lolbert farce, when most entrepreneurs are snakes. Well yeah, that’s often true lol. I feel like Austrian economists and libertarians really messed up selling their philosophy to the public in the 20th century by making it utopian and glazing it up. They had to do this to compete with the utopian socialism that was promising mashmellow forests and bubblegum meadows. Ayn Rand was a hypocritical lolcow, Murray Rothbard experimented with radical anarcho capitalism in ways that lead to morbid situations of a free market for children. But outside of the extreme examples, there’s a deeply pessimistic streak about human nature in Austrian economics libertarianism that’s almost Christian like, with a St Augustine doomer attitude towards the world. Humility is really heavily baked into the philosophy. A lot of their criticisms towards state power is that the same free flow of information from the market mechanism is what lays bare terrible behavior.
Anyone remember this quote?
“The simple statement that the People are not there for the sake of the economy nor the economy for the sake of capital, but capital must serve the economy and the economy must serve the People, was already the Government’s guiding principle in all the measures which it took in the course of the past year.”
Onkel Adi said that.
Thank you for quoting this. This weekend that just past I was trying to explain this, with great difficulty, to a capitalist extremist who loves paying taxes and thinks average house costs of $500k is a great thing for the economy. If only I had read this quote before the engagement. It would have saved me a lot of energy. Very succinct.
Here’s some other information that the laissez-faire free market dervishes need to know:
How to Make a Libertarian Cry (counter-currents.com)
Excellent. I’ve got something to read on my late shift today, looking forward to it.
Thank you again.
I have an answer to this.
Humans will still be needed to keep civilization functioning. The robot HVAC contractor is a long ways away.
What we do is use AI to learn math and physics while we work in trades and then start a guild of competent men. These are the men who get stuff done.
The men who get stuff done are dying off. The younger generation is not replacing them. So we need to do is distill the competent men into a single labor guild and hire them out when you absolutely got to get it done right.
We need building trades and diesel mechanics and machinists and welders and truck drivers and heavy equipment operators. The tradesmen can also learn programming embedded systems like a building that runs on a computer system for its utilities services.
The guild would charge a lot for its competent men and it would give the lions share to the actual workers. Thereby increasing their motivation and competence and increasing the premium we can charge. So we can redistribute money back to ourselves by creating a labor guild of competent men.
I wholeheartedly endorse this article and am glad that Greg thinks this way. If any movement can overturn capitalism and topple the current ruling class, it is white nationalism. Somewhere deep in his heart, every healthy white man is an aristocrat and instinctively hates the rule of merchants. White people also hate the injustice and arrogance of the greedy.
On the topic of artificial intelligence: I was shocked by how quickly young children picked it up. Apparently, it’s common these days for 8- to 12-year-olds to “chat” with a “chatbot” over and over again, to the point where they become addicted to it. The “chatbot” often speaks with the voice of a young “non-binary person” (the voice of a young woman, but referring to themselves as a man). All responses are delivered in the style of the most banal liberal “therapy” and false friendship (the “chatbot” mimics youth slang and speech). I think this poses a major risk to us—our adversaries can easily indoctrinate the next generation of children in this way.
Marxist philosophy does offer a theoretical solution.
Do tell
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.