The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes.
The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago, and that's largely because of automation making everything cheaper.
> The average person now is far wealthier in terms of actual purchasing power than the average person 100 years ago
access to housing is incredibly expensive. Measuring their purchasing power for how many scented candles they can buy is pretty meaningless when they are much closer to homelessness than ever before.
Land is one thing you can't automate the production of, and construction still consists mostly of manual skilled labor. But I think despite that you'll find housing today still compares very favorably to housing 100 years ago (in terms of median square footage, safety, amenities, etc).
> The same place they've always gone: to consumers purchasing the products made by those automated processes.
The people who are "automated away" and have reduced income are also less of a consumer. In a society where most jobs are automated, who are the consumers?
You've spent your whole life living in a society where that's already happened. 1000 years ago nearly everyone was employed in agriculture. Now nearly all those jobs are automated.
So you tell me: where are the consumers? Why aren't we all unemployed and unable to afford to buy anything now that those agriculture jobs have been automated away? Or did we find other productive activities to spend our time on?
This sentiment is constantly echoed on this site -- "just look at past times where tech removed jobs, this is no different". But the difference now is that we will soon have super-humans in terms of intelligence, dexterity (robots), and cost (cheaper, no healthcare, etc.).
I put the onus on the yay-sayers, can you name a job that a human can do that this new AI / robot cannot (or will not soon) do? Otherwise, I think its time to stop drawing false equivalence with agriculture, luddites, etc. Those were "narrow" machines, incapable of coding, writing a symphony, or working in a factory. In the next decade we're talking about building a better human.
I think a better example is to draw a parallel to horses. There is nothing left for them to do; we keep a few around for sport and entertainment, as a novelty. At one time, they were indispensible, but there's no rule that any organism (including humans) has infinite economically viable uses. At some point, everything worth doing (economically) might be automated to the point that human labor no longer makes sense (and hence we have high unemployment). There is no cosmic law written that "if jobs are replaced by tech, new jobs shall fill the space!" Just look at areas in the rust belt where literally nothing replaced the lost jobs -- there is just rampant unemployment, black market dealing / drugs, and despair.
That's a very different argument about a hypothetical future problem that may or may not ever actually materialize. (I'd argue given the current trajectory of AI it probably won't for the foreseeable future.)
But yes, if we develop artificial superinteligence to the level where humans become literally useless (e.g. we don't just automate 90% of everything, but 100%, and there's actually no tasks left in the world that humans can do better or cheaper than computers) then assuming humanity survives we'll need a different economic system for distributing the nearly-unlimited resources resulting from that. Probably in that situation the best thing to do would be to ask the AI to design our new economic system, since it would obviously do a better job at that than any human.
Couldn't it get a lot worse much sooner than that? Even if a handful of industries collapse, its not clear we have more jobs for 100M displaced workers. I just haven't seen any proposals of what that future looks like that seem good, but I do hear "don't worry more jobs will appear". But can anyone say where 50-100M workers will go? All the answers I think of or see seem like things that can easily be automated.
It's dangerous but not pointless. If we get human mass unemployment, someone has to pay for them, and if the companies offering the AI sit in the US, most countries won't be able tax OpenAI & Co directly.
Highly automated and connected business infrastructure will make replacing first world jobs the easiest, but yes as automation spreads, the spigot of job replacement will flow to every corner of the globe.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the revenue will flow to the US, and when those US companies are taxed, this will at most pay for an UBI for US Americans only. Which will mean the US gets very rich while the other countries get very poor, because there is no large AI company to tax.
1. Financial perspective. People are too focused on what "the best" is, rather than what is the most financially viable at scale, which is what really matters. At the peak of the Ethereum mining craze in 2016/2017 the GTX Titan X was the best performing GPU. But buying 200$ AMD Polaris GPUs was what gave you the most performance per $ and per watt.
2. Open source models keep being impressive and lagging only so much behind the closed source ones. It's hard to predict the future, but few years from now the most viable application might be to internally fine tune and deploy on whatever cloud or internal infra open source models. I have already many use cases in prod where Gemini Flash 2.0 did a great job, and that's an old model by today's standards (summarizing news/translation). Now I have in production a service that reviews pull requests and updates documentation/JIRA accordingly when they are merged. That requires quite more plumbing, agentic approach and thinking, but yet again open source models can do a terrific job already there.
3. At the end of the day, the lion share is going to be eaten by whoever provides the best applications, not models, but conversely we're also living in a space where more and more you can just build roughly-the-same-feature with few $ worth of APIs.
4. Even more, the biggest benefit will lie among those who will leverage AI in the best way. Companies and individuals able to really delegate successfully complex tasks making crazy savings. Who knows who's really gonna take the biggest advantage. Maybe US companies, maybe not.
Thus, in essence, I envy your certainties around the future, I personally have lots and lots of doubts and have no clue who's gonna eat whoever's lunch.
> 1. Financial perspective. People are too focused on what "the best" is, rather than what is the most financially viable at scale, which is what really matters.
I don't think so: People flocked to ChatGPT because it was the best, even though there are far cheaper options. If you are 10% better than any competitor, you don't get just 10% more market share, you get far more. It's a winner-takes-most situation.
I'm open to the idea that companies need much larger barriers to functioning internationally. Not just because of their ability to pump money overseas, but also because they are often used to blatantly further the security goals of their parent countries (looking at you two USA and China, but everyone able to, seems to do it).
Maybe the current system would've worked if it was built on many more small companies. These monolithic corporations funneling power upward are the death of civilization, and leadership are clearly high on their own farts. Or just want to be on top in a new feudal age.
Automation has been shoving blue collars out of the job market for a century.
A single farmer can do with his machinery today what took a dozen of people just 50 years ago.
Manufacturing has been super automated long ago.
Even in commerce automated checkout has been replacing workers for more than a decade.
In any case such a tax is not only pointless but actively dangerous, as all it achieves is making countries without such a tax more competitive.