This picture doesn't make sense. If most don't have any money to buy products, just invent some other money and start paying one of the other people who doesn't have any money to start making the products for you.
In reality, if there really is mass unemployment, AI driven automation will make consumables so cheap that anyone will be able to buy it.
> If most don't have any money to buy products, just invent some other money and start paying one of the other people who doesn't have any money to start making the products for you.
This isn't possible if you want to pay sales taxes - those are what keep transactions being done in the official currency. Of course in a world of 99% unemployment presumably we don't care about this.
But yes, this world of 99% unemployment isn't possible, eg because as soon as you have two people and they trade things, they're employed again.
> This picture doesn't make sense. If most don't have any money to buy products, just invent some other money and start paying one of the other people who doesn't have any money to start making the products for you.
Ultimately, it all comes down to raw materials and similar resources, and all those will be claimed by people with lots of real money. Your "invented ... other money" will be useless to buy that fundamental stuff. At best, it will be useful for trading scrap and other junk among the unemployed.
> In reality, if there really is mass unemployment, AI driven automation will make consumables so cheap that anyone will be able to buy it.
No. Why would the people who own that automation want to waste their resources producing consumer goods for people with nothing to give them in return?
"Raw resources" aren't that valuable economically because they aren't where most of the value is added in production. That's why having a lot of them tends to make your country poorer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse).
Today educated humans are more valuable than anything else on earth, but AGI changes that. With cheap AGI raw resources and infrastructure will be the only two valuable things left.
> This picture doesn't make sense. If most don't have any money to buy products, just invent some other money and start paying one of the other people who doesn't have any money to start making the products for you.
Uh, this picture doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone value this randomly invented money?
> Why would anyone value this randomly invented money?
Because they can use it to pay for goods?
Your notion is that almost everyone is going to be out of a job and thus have nothing. Okay, so I'm one of those people and I need this house built. But I'm not making any money because of AI or whatever. Maybe someone else needs someone to drive their aging relative around and they're a good builder.
If
1. neither of those people have jobs or income because of AI
2. AI isn't provisioning services for basically free,
then it makes sense for them to do an exchange of labor - even with AI (if that AI is not providing services to everyone). The original reason for having money and exchanging it still exists.
You seem to be arguing that large unemployment rates are logically impossible, so we shouldn't worry about unemployment.
The fact unemployment was 25% during the great depression would seem to suggest that at a minimum, a 25% unemployment rate is possible during a disruptive event.
The unemployment rate in a modern economy is basically whatever the central bank wants it to be. The Great Depression was caused by bad monetary policy - I don't see a reason why having AI would cause that.
Didn't money basically only emerge to deal with with difficulty of “double coincidence of wants”. Money simply solved the problem of making all forms of value interchangeable and transportable across time AND circumstance? A dollar can do with with or without AI existing no?
In reality, if there really is mass unemployment, AI driven automation will make consumables so cheap that anyone will be able to buy it.