If AI agents take the jobs, who buys the stuff?

11 babua 7 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?

Comments (7)

PaulHoule · 3h ago

This Fred Pohl book

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.

babua · 3h ago

abundance without incomes stalls demand— what’s our real-world “robot consumer” to keep the loop running.

jaggs · 3h ago

Brilliant story and so clever. The despair at having to consume is excellent.

mikewarot · 3h ago

I've despaired at having consumed too much. It's commonly called hoarding, and it ruins your life.

Never pay to store your stuff somewhere else.

PaulHoule · 2h ago

The strangest thing is that a lot of the people I know who pay a lot for multiple storage lockers are poor and the content of the storage lockers is not valuable at all.

atmosx · 57m ago

You're reaching from another, very narrowly scoped angle, but that's a wider problem with technology and automation. The economists since mid-20th century are talking about the UBI (universal basic income) to fight this problem:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income (wikipedia link)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22eQ9iLBfY4 (Varoufakis explains the concept very well)

Of course, that's easier said than done a non-fully, air-gaped controlled economy.

symbolicAGI · 2h ago

Confiscated AI profits will be distributed to consumers. Prices plummet. Abundance for all except homes in very nice locations will be relatively scarce.