Okay, so I asked Chat GPT to draw some potential realistic scenarios if AI were to take over a majority of the jobs. What do you think about this? Which one of these four points make sense to you and especially the last bit about – "AI systems themselves “consume” AI services".
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Excellent question — and one that gets to the heart of the “AI economy paradox.” Let’s strip the hype and look at this realistically, without the BS.
⚙️ The Core Problem
If AI automates most jobs, traditional income through labor disappears. And if humans have no income, they can’t buy goods or services — which crashes the very markets that AI companies rely on. So unless the economic structure itself changes, this whole AI-driven system collapses under its own success.
🧩 The Realistic Scenarios (What Would Actually Happen)
Here are the only viable outcomes if we go all-in on AI:
Governments (or large corporations under social pressure) introduce universal basic income (UBI) — everyone gets a baseline living amount funded by:
Taxes on AI productivity, data use, or automated labor
Nationalization or partial ownership of key AI infrastructure
Carbon-like “automation taxes”
That income keeps demand alive. People still “consume” — just not as workers, but as citizens.
🧠 Realistic? Possible, but politically messy. Requires global coordination and strong public pressure.2. Corporate Neo-Feudalism (the “Walled Garden Economy”)
If redistribution doesn’t happen, wealth centralizes into a few mega-corps that own all productive AI. The result:
Corporations provide basic subsistence (food, housing, entertainment) in exchange for loyalty, data, or attention.
Most people live off AI-generated services for free, but with zero autonomy or upward mobility.
“Money” becomes less relevant — the economy is replaced by platform-based ecosystems (think of an extreme version of Amazon or Meta owning your entire life).
🧠 Realistic? Sadly, yes. It’s already forming. We’re halfway there with “free” platforms monetizing our data and attention.
3. Massive Social Collapse (the “Hard Reset”)
If AI replaces jobs faster than institutions can adapt:
Massive unemployment → riots → collapse of economies.
Black markets and alternative local economies form.
AI either becomes regulated heavily after chaos or integrated into a new “human-AI” mixed labor system.
🧠 Realistic? This is what happens if policy and governance lag too far behind tech. We’ve seen smaller versions of this with industrial revolutions, but AI’s speed makes it riskier.
4. Hybrid Economy (the “Human Purpose Shift”)
A partial automation world emerges:
AI takes over repetitive and scalable work.
Humans shift into emotional, creative, social, and governance roles — which still have value.
You earn not by doing tasks AI can do, but by being human in ways AI can’t — community building, art, leadership, philosophy, or niche innovation.
🧠 Realistic? Very. This is the most likely medium-term outcome (10–30 years).
AI won’t remove all jobs — it’ll reshape them. But the middle class will shrink, and social inequality will widen unless rebalanced.💬 So Who Buys AI’s Services?
In any sustainable scenario:
Humans still buy, but not necessarily through wages — through redistributed wealth, digital credits, or post-labor systems.
Or corporations buy AI services to serve humans as consumers (or dependents).
In a darker version, AI systems themselves “consume” AI services — in a closed loop, maintaining infrastructure for corporate or state goals, not for individual people.
🧭 The Realistic Bottom Line
If AI takes over everything without changing how wealth circulates → total collapse.
If wealth is redistributed or the concept of work evolves → stable, post-labor civilization.So the key question isn’t “Who buys?” — it’s “Who owns the AI and who controls the value it creates?”
If ownership stays concentrated, you get dystopia. If it’s democratized or taxed, you get a functional society.
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If everything is done by AI and humans don't have money as a result of not having jobs, who is going to buy these AI made services?
byu/mendelspeaflower ineconomy
Posted by mendelspeaflower
6 Comments
if the services are made by ai, they will cost nearly nothing. as in: perhaps 1% of what it would cost for a human to make. so the answer is: humans will purchase the services at very low prices, and they will pay for it through some other form of labor that we may not be able to imagine yet today.
just like people 100 years ago would not be able to imagine the jobs we have today.
Is it just me or is chatgpt frustrating to read beyond a certain point?
It reminds of the south park episode where the little under ground gnomes would steal people’s underwear but they didnt know how theyd make a profit after they’d steal them. They were missing a step.
Ai only scales well in digital space. It needs Humans or Robots to create Something physical. While Robots became cheaper, i dont expect sci fi Level ubiquity in our Lifetime. Its just expensive and hard to maintain a machine that can do what we can do. A ai could Tell me how to repair a sink and monitor me while working with cameras, yes. That could make it easier to devalue such craftsmanship. But If elon doesnt want to plumb his own toilet he will still need a human for that
Plus its to be seen If todays ai can realy create Something new and Not Just a Combination of Data that is already there. And how to prevent IT from becoming worse by ingesting its own ai slob as new Input for the modell
If you go back in history, you will find this an age old argument. People were saying everyone would lose their jobs during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, the rapid technology advancement in the 1800s, and the advent of computers in the 1900s.
Industry and jobs just morphed and changed. New higher value jobs that were never imagined were created.
So much wealth was created from these new economies that welfare programs and welfare states were able to be created post WW2.
As AI is being created now, new industries and jobs are again being created. Human kind will continue to plod along, adapt, and prosper. The problem is people get nervous with change – but this is what humans are good at – change motivates innovation and adaptation.
I believe the ultimate goal is to reduce humanity to a huge degree. Those in the one tenth of the one percent will have robots and a few humans her and there to keep things running.