The Robot Hotdog Stand

1,300 words

Grok AI is so stupid that it confused hotdogs and hamburgers and stubbornly refused to correct the mistake.

No matter what happens with AI, it’s going to be an economic catastrophe. If AI is just a giant bubble, obviously that bubble is going to burst, and it will bring down the whole economy. Indeed, the American economy is mostly stagnant. All the growth right now is in AI.

If AI actually works, however, a whole lot of people will lose their jobs, and that will be an economic catastrophe as well. Moreover, neither the Left nor the Right can fix this problem.

Let’s say that you have a hotdog stand. A robotics salesman shows up and demonstrates how you can completely automate it. You crunch the numbers and conclude that you’ll make a whole lot more money by putting your employees out of work.

And in America, with its semblance of the free market, every employer who can save money by putting his employees out of work, will do the same thing. It’s simply rational for them as individuals.

What they are not counting on is AI putting their customers out of work as well. But just as your employees are someone else’s customers, their employees are your customers. If a vast number of people become unemployed due to AI, they aren’t going to be buying your hotdogs.

At that point, you can’t call the robotics salesman back and say, “Hey, I put all my employees out of work with AI. And all the other businesses in my town did the same thing, and now nobody’s coming to my hotdog stand. Can you build a robot that will come in and buy my hotdogs?”

There’s a great deal of misanthropy in the hearts of businessmen. They look at mere human flesh with cold, calculating eyes, thinking of new ways to squeeze more profit from their employees. If they don’t, they will be replaced by competitors who do.

If profit is all that matters, businessmen would have everything automated, flesh and blood workers would starve, and robot workers would produce for robot consumers, while zeros are added to the bank balances of a few increasingly lonely capitalists.

That won’t work, however, because the one thing that you can’t automate is consumption. You actually need a real person paying real money to consume your products, or your business goes bankrupt.

The prospect of mass unemployment through automation raises questions about the purpose of the economy. The answers are not comfortable for libertarian individualists. The purpose of the economy is not for a few people to get as rich as possible by creating an entirely inhuman system. The purpose of the economy is to provide goods and services for people.

If economic actors pursuing their own self-interest create an economic disaster for everyone, that’s obviously a refutation of selfish individualism, free-market capitalism, and classical liberalism. Government action is called for.

So what will the center-Right do to fix this problem? Absolutely nothing. They created it. Their whole classical liberal worldview is premised on the idea that leaving selfish individuals to their own devices produces the best outcomes in the end. They too are selfish individuals. They’ve been well-paid to do nothing. They don’t think there’s a “common good” that justifies the state restricting individual liberty, so you can’t even accuse them of corruption or dereliction of duty. They’ve got theirs, buddy. You just need to pray that things will work out for you as well.

So what will the Left do? The Left will, of course, promise technocratic fixes so that they are voted into power. The old, worker-oriented Left would have a lot of things to say about the catastrophic consequences of AI. But they’re mostly white men, and thus they get to speak last in the progressive stack.

The current Left is simply about hating white people. Their constituents are all basically on welfare in America anyway. The primary victims of AI will be white men, thus Leftists will work to combat AI dislocations about as hard as they fought the opioid epidemic and the deaths of despair that hit white victims of globalization the hardest. That is to say, they will do nothing, because the AI will look to them like just another tool of white genocide.

You can buy Greg Johnson's The White Nationalist Manifesto here.

When globalization kicked into high gear in the 1990s, and American companies began closing down factories and shipping jobs overseas, what prevented the workers from keeping their jobs and replacing the management with bright young men from Bangalore working for a tiny fraction of the old management’s wages? Why not outsource the outsourcers? Obviously, what stood in the way is private property.

What’s to stop the workers at your hotdog stand from keeping their jobs and replacing you with a robot who writes them checks? Obviously, the fact that you own your business and they don’t.

Maybe, then, the workers need to seize the means of production.

If AI really can get us to a world in which scarcity is basically abolished, why not abolish that last little bit of artificial scarcity—namely private ownership of the means of production—that gets in the way of widely sharing the bounty? If AI can replace your job, why can’t it replace your boss, then act like your servant? Why can’t AI simply distribute its products to all people, equally, free of charge?

“But Greg, what about those irreplaceable brilliant entrepreneurs, all those John Galts and Hank Reardens? You can’t dispossess them. Do you want them to just shrug and walk away?”

Sorry, but none of them are smarter than AI. So they can simply be replaced. Hey, I didn’t make this world. The brainiacs did. They trained their own replacements.

If AI works, it will be catastrophic in a free market society. So maybe we need to abolish the free market. Maybe AI is laying the groundwork for communism. The trouble, of course, is that communism today is gay race communism, run by and for the stupid, crazy, and evil.

This sounds like a job for a different kind of politics. A politics that believes in the common good, sides with the common man against the elites, and is willing to use the power of the state. A politics that is willing to exercise leadership while the mainstream drifts helplessly toward catastrophe.

If AI is real, we don’t want to destroy it. Nor will we destroy capitalism. But we will make sure that the lion’s share of productivity gains go to the people. Those who work will get the same pay for shorter work weeks. Those who can no longer find work will get Universal Basic Income. In effect, they will become part owners of the companies that replace them. Under the current system, they will end up in the underclass. We will put them in the dividend class. (Of course it will take a very different kind of society to ensure that all this new leisure is a blessing, not a curse. More on that another time.)

Ensuring that everybody can buy the products of an increasingly automated economy is actually in the rational self-interest of the capitalist class, but they can’t get there voluntarily as selfish individuals. Thus the state will force them there as a collective by establishing new rules.

We’ll leave property in private hands. The rich can enjoy their fortunes. But there will be conditions: a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and capitalists will no longer be able to outsource jobs to the Third World or import Third World scabs. Capital will serve national interests, or it will be put in the hands of patriots. The oligarchs must be taught to fear the people.