If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?
8 babua 4 9/5/2025, 5:01:26 PM
AI agents are getting rolled into everything. Companies will use them because they’re fast and cheap. But if agents replace a lot of paid work, people lose income. Less income → less spending → businesses push even harder on automation. Feels like a loop.
Cheaper prices help, sure, but not if folks don’t have paychecks. New jobs might show up, but I’m not convinced the timing works. Also, if most gains go to a few owners, their extra spending won’t replace everyone else’s demand.
So what actually keeps demand up? Profit-sharing so workers own a piece? Some kind of income floor from “automation dividends”? Totally new markets that soak up all this output? Or maybe real-world limits (energy, compute, regulation) slow things down. I might be missing something—what’s the concrete mechanism here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
has a short story The Midas Plague in it where the problem is that post the development of cheap fusion resources are so abundant and production so efficient that keeping the economy working requires that people stay on a treadmill of consumption. This is such a burden that lower-class people are forced to consume more than upper-class people. The protagonist of the story gets his robots to consume his good and fears that he'll get in trouble for this but instead he gets a medal. The original version of the short story as it appeared in the April 1954 Galaxy magazine is linked from the Wikipedia article.
Never pay to store your stuff somewhere else.