I mean, if we're just down to the capital class, there simply will not be enough of them to buy from each other to sustain an economy. Those payroll and hr people also happen to buy people's products, which AI never will. If there is no IRS and no tax filers, there goes a lot of purchasing power.
You can't create or compete if no one is there to buy them.
Skipping over the same argument that comes up every time an industry gets threatened. Farmers, Textile workers, Miners, Machine Operators. It boils down to an inability to see what comes next and a fear for ones own quarter in the year the argument gets made.
But why can't AI buy products? What makes a purchase more legitimate by the click of a human finger over the automated confirmation by a piece of software? Hierarchy of needs? Why can't automated systems that have energy, networking, AWS Bill's etc. not also have needs?
And then there's a simple fact of there is a finite number of moths to feed. In the billions, but finite. Why can't an industry of trillions of digital actors, that scales far faster than biological ones, not be an even bigger economy in it's own right?
we could automate the purchasing? Remember the stories about self-driving taxis which would purchase their own maintenance out of their earnings? I think it was supposed to use blockchain.
Our current economy seems to rely on "the modern consumer", as per your point-- and we are told that our main role is to "consume". Seems to me this would be extremely easy to automate. Then we don't need people any more, the robots can consume themselves!
I mean, if we're just down to the capital class, there simply will not be enough of them to buy from each other to sustain an economy. Those payroll and hr people also happen to buy people's products, which AI never will. If there is no IRS and no tax filers, there goes a lot of purchasing power.
You can't create or compete if no one is there to buy them.