AI will kill capitalism
Basically, here’s the gist:
Capitalism needs workers and consumers to make money and generate profit.
The billionaires want to replace workers with AI agents, but are also eliminating consumers.
Plenty of leading global brands are reporting shrinking profits and sales, including Starbucks, HubSpot, Dropbox, and Nike.
This will continue to be the trend for the foreseeable future as companies still aim to fire more people to offset AI investments and reduce overhead costs.
Capitalism has finally invented the thing that will kill it. The billionaires and tech bros don’t know it yet.
Capitalism has two legs
A capitalist system needs a worker and a consumer.
The worker uses their skills, time, and effort with resources (tools, raw materials, infrastructure) to produce value. In exchange, they receive a wage or a salary. The value is either a product or a service that is sold to the consumer.
The consumer is the other part of the equation. They have a need or a problem that can be solved with a product or a service, which is the result of the value of a worker. They spend money to solve those problems.
The worker and consumer come in different shapes and sizes. They can be an individual or an organization. An individual can produce value for an organization and vice versa. Similarly, individuals can produce value for each other like organizations.
This process of value production and consumption keeps the capitalist engine running. Money gets made when resources are converted into products or services by workers. Money gets made again when consumers buy it to address their needs or solve their problems.
You can apply this paradigm to virtually anything that can be purchased or produced.
As you can imagine, the relationship between a worker and a consumer is pretty straightforward. Every worker is a consumer, and every consumer needs to be a worker.
The wet dream of AI billionaires and tech bros
The AI billionaires are chasing a delusion: replace all the workers with machines.
The goal is to minimize operating costs, which will maximize profits. Machines, AI, robots, and automation can work round the clock, improve themselves, follow instructions more consistently, and can scale up faster.
This will decrease the overall expenses of producing value, whether it is a product or a service. Even if you keep the selling price the same, your profits will still climb astronomically.
And that’s what all the narcissistic and pedantic tech bros and billionaires want.
For example, let’s say you are making soap. If you replace the assembly line workers with robots, you can produce more soap and make it cheaper.
Similarly, for a digital product, like a mobile app or computer software, downsizing a team of five coders and three designers to one of each with powerful AI agents will drastically decrease overhead costs.
While AI is being advertised as the thing that cures cancer and creates new opportunities for the have-nots, its actual purpose is to eliminate the working class or exploit them by underpaying them.
Did you really think the tech bros and billionaires are so benevolent?
None of them see the people working for them as an investment or a true resource; they see them as an expense they need to optimize. Nothing more than numbers on a balance sheet.
Greed creates a blind spot
The consumer market exists for two reasons: leisure and disposable income.
Unfortunately, due to the artificially engineered recession and layoffs to offset AI investments, a growing number of people lack both. When you are struggling to keep the lights on, you don’t have the time or money to indulge in anything.
When you replace workers with AI and other relevant technologies, you are technically eliminating consumers from the market. These are the people who buy clothes, go to restaurants, take vacations, purchase everyday household items, and splurge occasionally to enjoy the life they’ve built.
Without them, there is no one to sell anything to. It ranges from homes, cars, food, and other goods to everything you can imagine.
If food and rent costs take up the majority of your paycheck, and the paycheck itself is not stable because corporations can fire you at any moment, you will hold on to every dollar you possibly can.
You will very likely give up many things like eating out, travelling, taking cabs, buying expensive clothing, and drinking good liquor.
It also doesn’t look particularly good for organizations as well. If you are a company enduring losses, you will definitely look for areas to cut costs. I’ve seen many companies decrease software spending and minimize headcount. Some even move out of a physical office and adopt a fully remote structure.
This is the biggest blind spot that the AI dickriders are missing because they are blinded by their greed.
Once-famous brands are in peril
There are many global companies that are losing profits and sales. Here are some of them:
D2C: McDonald's, Starbucks, Nike, Yum! Brands, and P&G
Hospitality: Hotels and restaurants are experiencing a profit squeeze
B2B SaaS: Mailchimp, HubSpot, Dropbox, etc.
Fashion and beauty: Hugo Boss, LV, Gucci, H&M, etc.
Electronics: Dell, HP, etc.
The above brands are not particularly running at a loss, but are facing reduced profits, decreased demand for their products, and dwindling sales by the minute. And the trend will continue to head in that direction because we are expecting more job cuts and inflation.
The future is darker
Currently, the AI companies are far from turning a profit. They need more data centers and natural resources to reach the desired capacity where they can produce value at a scale where they can make the billions of dollars that have been poured into these dystopian projects.
As more and more workers get pay cuts and experience layoffs, more companies will lose sales. This will keep happening in a cyclical manner until something gives.
I guess we will see what the long-term effects are in the near and far future.
