I've watched a fair few videos about this on youtube lately and they all seem to completely miss several key points. For a start, they all seem to think the 'humans' will just roll over and let this happen. I don't believe this will be the case at all. Humans will react, badly. And rightly so.
Also, it won't even need to get that bad for Governments to react. They are talking about huge shifts in employment levels, but it won't even need to be that bad to cause major problems.
Current UK unemployment is 1.6m, if the nerds are to be believed we will easily be at three million by the end of 2026 and at that point reality will start to hit home. If everyone 'fears' for their job the impact on the economy will be dramatic. No one will want to commit to buying houses, cars or anything much at all.
I wonder how Elon will feel about it all when no one is buying his stupid Teslas?
Even the jobs that are supposedly 'safe' from AI in the shorter term, say kitchen fitters, for example will be affected... if no one feels secure then who will be committing to spending £25,000 on a kitchen and having someone fit it?
These tech people don't seem to be able to think beyond their own little worlds, that society as a whole is all very interdependent. Ultimately everything has a customer, but the companies who are going to be buying the 'AI Agents' won't be buying anything if they are going out of business left right and centre.
There could also be boycotts, I mean say Tesco lays off 80% of their staff and employs teams of robots to stack the shelves. Will humans just boycott Tesco and go elsewhere?
And what of the companies, they are putting all their trust in tech companies providing all this, but what happens when they put all their eggs into this basket? The tech companies will start raising the prices and how easy will it be to reverse? How easy would it be to change tech supplier when all your systems are interwoven? It seems to me you are just asking to be held ransom by your tech supplier.
And then there's UBI, all we hear is UBI. Where is the money going to come from for that? People seem to think UBI is going to be £25,000 a year or something... but why would it be? If anything it would be something like what benefits is now. Just enough to get by.
The tech companies seem to think everyone will have all this disposable income to spend on their products but I can't see it. And where would that money come from anyway? People say the Govt would have to tax the tech companies (yeah right) and the companies that replace people with AI.
Interesting idea, but given that Govt is pretty much the puppet of business I don't think so.
Then there's the question of population. For decades Govt has encouraged us to have children so that we can work and pay taxes to fund the pensions of older people, but surely the Govt will want to dissuade us from having children? If there are no jobs it would be much better to have a smaller population, less mouths to feed. So the first thing to go would be child benefits surely?
What is quite disturbing is that the Govt doesn't even seem to be awake to all this, they just seem to be telling us how great AI is and how it puts us at the forefront of everything.
On the other hand, I've asked Chat GPT three questions this last week and it got all three of them wrong. So I wonder if AI is actually as smart as they say it is?