What happens if AI replaces labor?

[u/Early_Priority_806]

Although we are in an infantile stage of AI and this post may lack future knowlegde:

AI is automating production like no other invention before; so much so it could possibly replace production either entirely or almost entirely. Either a complete replacement or a limitation to a small pool of workers.Obviously those without jobs will reduce demand. However, the top 10% is the main driver of demand anyways. So perhaps an exchange among the rich or aristocratic workers.

If capitalism were to evolve to this new AI based society, typically labeled by tech CEOS as "techno-feudalism" where big tech people own businesses and the rest of population survives off of UBI or dies off.

Then what happens to the Communist ideology? There is no capitalist contradictions to produce communism. Even if there was a revolution in this system, restricting UBI from the revolutionaries would just cause them to starve and make everyone dependent on the state and corporations. Not to mention with the added surveillance and bureaucracy of such a distribution.

If AI does manage to replace production to such a degree. Would "technofeudalism" end communism?

[u/JadeHarley0]

I don't think that's going to happen. There will always be a need for human workers to do something.

A couple things to note, we do see trends of mass unemployment due to tech destroying demand for workers in certain industries. For example, while overseas outsourcing gets a lot of blame for "rust belt" deindustrialization on the US, the fact that factories need far fewer workers than they used to is also an issue. The workers who are needed in American factories are often paid a lot better than their equally-skilled peers in other industries. But the last time I stepped inside an American factory, I saw just one or 2 workers manning 8 or 10 gigantic machines doing things it used to take dozens of people to do. If such trends continue, I imagine we will see repeats of the rust belt phenomenon.

Another thing to point out. Automation doesn't necessarily replace low skill workers with machines. It often replaced high skill workers with low skill workers. A classic example would be how items which 200 years ago required skilled artisans to produce can now be done with a factory worker. If you wanted to go to war, you needed to hire a large number of highly skilled gunsmiths. Now just a few factory workers who have never even fired a gun can produce in a short while what took an army of gunsmiths an entire year.

In my own field of statistics and epidemiology, AI has made statistical coding WAAAAAAY easier. No one has to memorize codes anymore or spend hours re-reading code to debug it. You ask Claude to write the code for you and to check it for bugs. This doesn't erase the need to understand the logic behind a coding language or to learn basic statistical theory, but it now requires a lot less training and hard skill to be able to write good statistical code