Logo

When AI takes all jobs how will the lowest class make money to survive?

Last Updated: 21.06.2025 10:14

When AI takes all jobs how will the lowest class make money to survive?

You might retort that the fact that food isn't harvested and waste isn't recycled because it's not profitable is economic efficiency in action, because it means we don't have the resources to collect them. This is patently ridiculous: we have no shortage of people who are unemployed and would love to be able to do this work but can't because it will not financially sustain them. The key point is the corruption that is inevitable under this system: it necessarily ruins the ideologically pure version of itself advocated by hard-core capitalists and undermines the benefits it claims to have.

A resource-based economy would use advanced AI to allocate resources vastly more efficiently than the capitalist system we have today. It is worth emphasising this point as many believe that money and markets have a special unassailable advantage when it comes to this task, but they are mistaken. Money results in enormous waste of resources: roughly a third of all food produced is wasted because it is not “profitable” to harvest it, and what supermarkets can't sell they dispose of in locked bins to protect themselves against litigation from people eating the potentially spoiled produce, and to disincentivise not buying said produce. We send enormous amounts of waste that could be recycled to landfills because it is not “profitable” to sort it out so it can be recycled. The system inevitably corrupts the political system to create subsidies and special treatment for its most successful companies so that they can continue to accrue more resources and undermine the very mechanisms that are meant to make the market efficient.

AI will turn labour from a scarce resource that must be trained over several decades into a commodity that can be produced and scaled up at will. Once we achieve AGI, anyone can have their own robot butler, chef, therapist, doctor, interior designer, personal trainer, and teacher all in one. It will be trivial for a robot economy to make billions of these. Since no-one will be earning money, there would be no logic to arbitrarily denying anyone access to these via a monetary mechanism, and it would be profoundly immoral to do so when such unfathomable abundance is possible.

How do you feel about Trump saying Ukraine 'should have never started war with Russia'?

This goes for any desire. Rather than having our desires artificially restricted by money, this economy can cater to our natural demand and adapt to our increasing demands as we become more and more satisfied.

AI will take all jobs and what few tasks we might prefer to be done by humans will not be enough to sustain a monetary economy. Rather than argue for UBI, I will in this answer be arguing for a resource-based economy.

This is simply a better system. No-one gets left behind because of the circumstances of their birth, and there are no perverse incentives corrupting the system. Everything is always and forever designed to serve human wellbeing. It is imperative we fight for this vision of the future instead of being cajoled or gaslit into accepting a UBI which artificially restricts our access to these abundant resources so that AI execs and shareholders can take it all for themselves. If we get this right, we can permanently end poverty and world hunger.

Eum et amet quam est autem adipisci distinctio.

If we do things right, we can have a resource-based economy that doesn't use money where people are provided their wants and needs freely and unconditionally.

An AI-led resource-based economy will suffer from none of these drawbacks. First, AI will be able to use its wealth of data and intelligence to anticipate demand and ship exactly the right type and quantity of products to where they are most needed. It will never leave food in the field, stock on the shelves, or recyclable waste in landfills, because it will have abundant labour and energy to collect it, and ample intelligence to develop new and more efficient methods for doing so. The system will primarily cater to our needs, and we will all have the same economic relations to the system, so unless the AI is misaligned or corrupt from the beginning, it will not reproduce the same corruption present in our current system.

Let's say you have an autistic child that loves a particular burger from their local cafe. They get this on a regular basis until one day the cafe shuts down and, despite everyone's best efforts to recreate that exact burger, no-one can do so, and the child becomes very upset. The AI economy would be able to serve this child indefinitely: not only would it keep a record of the exact ingredients and method of preparation of the burger so that even if the cafe that made it did close down, another robot would be able to make it flawlessly, or the child would have their own robot chef that could take any food made outside their house and reproduce the recipe exactly. Even if the child didn't have their own robot, which under this economy could only happen by the parents’ choice, their preferences could be stored in an AI system so that some kitchen somewhere in the economy could make it and deliver it to them.

Why are men obsessed with breasts and their size? I don't quite see women being obsessed with the penis - Why is this so?

Nevertheless, economic efficiency will not be the most important metric in this economy, serving people will. Efficiency will be important to a degree, as it is important that there is enough of everything to go around, but this system will be able to cater to edge cases that would be unacceptable under capitalism.