Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

But...there is a lot of existential dread in a lot of folks now, because of the change in manufacturing. The Average American (whomever that may be) has been extremely worried about the economy--and their place in it--for quite some time now. AI is just making that worse.

Which is why I don't buy the UBI fallback in this (or any) scenario.  My stepson likes to talk about UBI.....I've heard Cincy reference it a few times. 

A UBI assumes there's still a revolving economy with money in movement.  If nobody's working, there is no economy.  The government can't give a UBI to anybody because it will be taking in no money in taxes.  Nobody has a job to tax.  The full implications of a truly stalled economy are not grasped by many, I don't think. 

Maybe it could tax the hell out of the AI businesses and the products made.  But I doubt it. 

I think we're looking at the guaranteed current income model.  Maybe we'll all be poets.

Or dead.

That's my point. There is VERY little good poetry out there

But you see... That's the problem.

If I lose my job, how will I buy homebrewing ingredients? I won't have the money.

I mean, I could pivot my career and start a brewery. But if all the white-collar workers who go to breweries lose their jobs, and all the service industry workers who do things for those white-collar workers now don't have jobs... Who is going to be able to afford to come to my brewery and drink my beer?

Ultimately it's humans who create--and then spend--wealth. If the humans aren't creating the wealth, then they're not getting paid to create the wealth, and then they don't have money to participate in the economy. And the economy as we know it grinds to a halt.

It's really a question of scarcity versus abundance.

In a truly AI-optimized world with viable robotic replacement, in its end state, there should be an abundance of food, an abundance of clean energy, an abundance of anything humans could possibly need.  So there will be no need for money, no need for economic systems at all.  There's plenty of SciFi written along these lines, and also a decent amount of Sci-Non-Fi exploring the possibilities.

The problem, of course, 

That's my point. There is VERY little good poetry out there, and VERY few poets talented enough to produce it.

The romantic view is that if we all stop doing our dreary day jobs, we'll be able to achieve the artistic heights we simply don't have time to explore today.

But it glosses over a major problem. Most of "the masses" don't have the talent to produce anything worthwhile.

So if we all try to become poets, all that means is that we'll be a bunch of shitty poets who can't make money selling their poetry because nobody wants to read it.