SELL THEIR PRODUCTS TO WHO, BEN? FUCKING CYBORG?
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2026
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Absolutely, but that's not something you fix at company level.
Am I the only one old enough to remember when we still had homemade products competing with chinese cheap products on the shelves? Consumers picked the Chinese version over and over, until the local plant shut down (or was delocalized in China…).
You could have had exactly the same speech about CEOs at the time: if your market is western consumers (at the time, China was not yet rich enough to have a significant local demand), who are you going to sell to when everyone has lost their job because of delocalization?
Answer is indeed: that's not my problem to solve. It's a systematic issue, it should be addressed through regulation.
CEO's job is not to address that, it's too maximize values for shareholders. If laying off everyone and use AI does that, then executing is just them doing their job right. If regulation bans or adds a high enough penalty on such a move, they won't do it.
This is something I think people forget too often. When you build and tune a system to incentivise anti-social behaviour, don't be surprised when you get anti-social people doing anti-social things. We currently legally demand that management always maximise shareholder value, so that's what they do, and that's the sort of person who makes it to higher levels of management. If we changed that goal, the outcome would change too. Unfortunately the lawmakers who would have to make those changes are too invested in the current system for it to happen easily.
I've been making ~~the opposite~~ a similar point to my friends about growth from the opposite side of the spectrum, that it's hard to imagine every person in the world a CEO.
The possible answers to this question keep me up at night
When the rich no longer need us to operate the machinery, they will hunt us for sport.
Puts us out of our misery, frees up more water for datacenters. Win-win.
Musk made a comment when cornered on this subject a few weeks back, he didn't have an answer because he's an idiot, but he did mention a book. I think that's the book they've all read, that presents what they expect to happen. And, I expect is hand-waving bullshit.
I can't find the post. Does anyone remember what book he referenced?
EDIT: Maybe this was it:
On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “Read this book and give it to all your friends.
“Survival of civilization depends on it!”
The book in question is titled Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad.
The explanation on Amazon reads: “What happens when a society elevates victimhood to a virtue and decides that punishment is cruel? You get the disease Dr. Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. And the West may be terminally infected… The results are everywhere: from coddling violent criminals to protecting rapists to branding self-defense as toxic behavior. We are witnessing a civilization in rapid decline.
“Lunatic policies are instituted because we prioritize the feelings of ostensibly marginalized groups over The Truth, criminals over victims, and squatters over homeowners. This is not humane; it’s an active dismantling of the pillars that keep us safe and free.”
Sounds like an Ayn Rand tribute act. The right is always looking for an intellectual justification for being selfish juvenile assholes.
Other people do nice things and it makes me soooo uncomfortable
The rich and GOP would read that as coddling minorities and immigrants, since they are automatically criminals in their eyes.
When in reality the book is talking about the rich and GOP who are literally criminals and rapists.
Even Gad Saad recognizes that protecting the children rapist Epstein class is leading to the end of the civilization! Let's bring out the guillotines!!
Public corps are incapable of macro action. They can't see past their next few sets of financial statements.
Their incentives are all fucked up for one thing, the way they do comp. But it's not just that. It's the tragedy of the commons on a more massive scale.
If the answer is a mass die-back of the bulk of the population who constituted the now economically unnecessary labour class, where will the genetic diversity come from to prevent the handful of owning families (and the retinues of explosive-collared servants they retained for tasks that can’t be automated) from speedrunning Habsburg Syndrome? They’d need some kind of biodiversity preserve in which sufficiently large numbers of people are kept alive to provide suitable candidates for outbreeding, and some means of ensuring that this captive population never poses a threat.
"Technology will solve that, too." ~Techbros, probably.
I mean, they're fully expecting functional immortality to save them from death. Them specifically, not us.
Singularity is technopian bullshit. These guys have their head so far up, whose ass? idk. But no, you can't transfer your self to a computer. It's preposterous on several levels, the first being, the brain is not binary. It's vastly more sophisticated. Then if you copied it, you would not be that copy. And so forth.
But the rich will never stop chasing after the fountain of youth.
I actually don't think that would be an issue, considering the rich are already into eugenics via IVF.
oh god this sounds like one of those books that's gonna get really popular and then end up predicting the future (looking at you, 1984)
They don't care about selling to people who don't have money. They are only focused on those who have money, or spend it as if they have money. The demographic that has money is shrinking, but they also have more money than ever, so let's get some.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
The tragedy of the commons is the idea that when a resource is shared and can benefit the individual at a cost to the community, it is rational for the individual to overuse the resource, even though this collectively leads to the depletion of the resource for everyone
Except it's not rational.
Countries with socialized health care systems do have abusers, but they are a tiny minority of the population, because most people don't want to spend their life in hospitals.
Roads are socialized everywhere but you don't see many people just driving around to make sure they get their "fair share" of road using/wearing out of their taxes.
Depending what we talk about, overusing resources does not translate in increased comfort or quality of life.
I’m pretty sure unemployment percentage, much before 90, causes revolts and rebellions.
Maximization of profit is all fine and dandy until you realize that the wages you've been suppressing was the lubricant keeping the economy's gears turning.
If you siphon off too much, the machine screeches to a halt.
Easy: no one, while the other 90% of people make stuff people actually want!
B2B is already a massive segment of the economy.
They’ll sell to other businesses until there’s only one left.
That wouldn’t even be an economy at that point.
It’s like dreaming of finding a mountain of gold. Instead of riches you would end up devaluing gold into worthlessness.