This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.

The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.

This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.

Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.

Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.

If we're just talking about the USA, then the ~200 million working people would get $150 each.

With how much got wasted on AI, that $500 might not be there anymore. Would you take $5?

Some of them won't even pay to replace broken office chairs for the employees they forced to RTO.

Wages or health insurance are a very known cost, with a known return. At some point the curve flattens and the return gets less and less for the money you put in. That means there is a sweet spot, but most companies don't even want to invest that much to get to that point.

AI however, is the next new thing. It's gonna be big, huge! There's no telling how much profit there is to be made!

Because nobody has calculated any profits yet. Services seem to run at a loss so far.

However, everybody and their grandmother is into it, so lots of companies feel the pressure to do something with it. They fear they will no longer be relevant if they don't.

And since nobody knows how much money there is to be made, every company is betting that it will be a lot. Where wages and insurance are a known cost/investment with a known return, AI is not, but companies are betting the return will be much bigger.

I'm curious how it will go. Either the bubble bursts or companies slowly start to realise what is happening and shift their focus to the next thing. In the latter case, we may eventually see some AI develop that is useful.

It's a game to them that doesn't take into consideration any human element.

It's like the sociopathic villains in Trading Places betting a dollar on whether or not Valentine would succeed. They don't really give a shit. It's all for the game that might result in throwing more money on their pile.

We’ll see the beginning of a crash in about a year and the crash probably won’t end for 7-10 years.

We’re looking at a full scale shift in the way large scale orgs are running their businesses; and it’s a shift a lot of them will need to pivot from once they realize it’s not working.

The AI bubble is going to be like the dot com bubble I think, but with the world being so heavily financialized it might spiral into something like 2008 or worse...

There are still employers bitching about how no one wants to work anymore. I doubt any lessons will be learned here.

it makes sense to someone like me who is not a dev but works with coding at times, I don't get the experience to be quick with it.

I charge them more than I would if I was just developing for them from scratch. I USED to actually build things, but now I'm making more money doing code reviews and telling them where they fucked up with the AI and then myself and my now small team fix it.

AI and Vibe coders have made me great money to the point where I've now hired 2 other developers who were unemployed for a long time due to being laid off from companies leveraging AI slop.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the bubble to burst (and it will VERY soon, if it hasn't already) and I know that after it does I can retire and hope that the two people I've brought on will quickly find better employment.

Computer science degrees being the most unemployed degree right now leads me to believe this will actually suppress wages for some time

I hardly post on any social media besides here and I still feel violated.