Quote of the Day

So we’re looking at a world where we have levels of unemployment we’ve never seen before. Not talking about 10% unemployment, which is scary, but 99%.

Roman Yampolskiy
University of Louisville Computer Science Professor
September 29, 2025
AI Could Cause 99% of All Workers to Be Unemployed in the Next Five Years, Says Computer Science Professor

I have to wonder, what does this do to the price of goods and services? I can’t really wrap mind around what happens when essentially everything is automated. Does the price drop to zero? If the materials for the machines are mined, refined, and built by automated systems, energy from the materials needed to the endpoint delivery is all automated as well, then how does this work out?

Over the centuries labor-saving devices enabled the creation of greater wealth for the general population. But what if all labor is “saved”? Do individuals have zero money to purchase near infinite goods and services?

It may be a moot question. I just finished listening to If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. By the time the unemployment rate hits 50% we might have sealed our doom. The case presented, as I recall it:

• We really don’t understand how AI works. It is trained (sometimes the authors referred to it as “grown”) rather than engineered. It is far closer to an art form than an engineering science*.
• This training/growing process results in hidden and unknowable artifacts in the neural nets. These hidden components can and will manifest themselves in ways no one can predict.
• Many of these hidden artifacts will not be aligned with the best interests of biological life.
• As AI searches for solutions to problems and subproblems some of the artifacts will result in solutions that cause great harm. For example, energy production is bound, in part, by the ability to get rid of waste heat. Ultimately this needs to be radiated out into space. The rate of heat transfer increases as the temperature rises. There would be a temporary heat sink by boiling away the oceans, but ultimately raising the surface temperature of the planet something greater than what biological life as we know it can survive will be the obvious solution.
• The response time of AI to exploit a flaw in human efforts to constrain it will be far faster than humans can react.
• AI can defeat humans at chess and Go because it can examine far more future decision branches than human. It will solve “containment puzzles” far better than humans can create containment mechanism.
• It only has to succeed once. We will not get a second chance.

I would like to hear from people who have read this book to comment here or send me an email with their thoughts.

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* This is something I noticed in a recent class I took on machine learning. This is simplifying things some but, you just try different things and see what works best.