We’ve seen a lot of these rich families get very sick with preventable diseases.  I don’t think they could maintain any less likelihood of catching a highly virulent virus.  If it spreads a lot it’s going to mutate quickly as well.  

People don’t tend to like being cloistered away for 2+ years during such an event.  It also means a collapse of society and far less fun stuff.  Especially when some of the elites eventually get the job of moving the corpses for places they plan to reclaim.

Gain of function and a ready made vaccine. Also, I said there is no collapse of society when the have full automation. There is no loss for them. 

I don't see it. People riot for far less, especially US citizens. We started a war with the largest, most mighty empire in the history of the world and won... because of the taxes. I don't think we'd tolerate the nightmare discussed here. We wouldn't even let it begin.

Imo, this is straight up science-fiction. Nothing more than flat-earth material.

Is AI a threat?

Yes.

But not this.

This is just... no.

Something that virulent would mutate.  Can’t ignore the risk of it spreading to other animals like cats, pigs and birds.  You can’t vaccinate against the mutated version until it comes back to you in the wild, and they wouldn’t have the resources left to identify it to refresh the vaccine.

A bunch of robots that you don’t have much control over due to lacking the resources and skills doesn’t seem as fun as having humans to rule over.

It would be killing access to a lot of resources they like.

They’d need to centralise a lot of their resources to close to home, and lose a lot of variety and agricultural knowledge.

There’s a bit of parallel to asking the mega millionaires to go live on a farmstead with only what could be grown locally by the farmhands.

The AI can’t scale globally to maintain the same trade of comforts in this situation.

The problem with "A.I." and automation in general is that it's owned and controlled by the capitalist class. And every corporate board pats themselves on the back when they find new ways to cut overhead. They view every employee as a drain on the bottom line, and are always trying to axe as many jobs as they can. Layoffs are a favorite cost-cutting measure to pad margins for the fiscal period. The only reason they hire humans at all is because they have to, but now they've discovered something they think can make human workers obsolete. The best employee will always be a literal machine. It works tirelessly and ceaselessly. It doesn't need a paycheck or benefits. It won't call out of work because of the flu or a death in the family or whatever. It won't question orders. It doesn't need bathroom breaks. It won't go on strike because of low pay and shitty working conditions because it's less than capable of caring about such things. It doesn't get pissed off, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, and it doesn't laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs. All it needs is occasional maintenance. That's why so many businesses are excited about "A.I." That's why there's startups that have already prototyped fully-automated restaurants and retail establishments. All they see is an opportunity to slash most of their payroll.

The problem is, if everyone is fired and replaced with machines, the economy will collapse. There will be nobody left to buy most goods & services. Billionaires can't support an economy by themselves. Despite their great wealth, they aren't the primary drivers of consumer spending. These billionaires need us to buy their food and electronics and cars. But if nobody has a job, how are they going to buy anything? Establish a universal basic income? Okay. Who's going to pay for it? The people that used to pay most of the taxes aren't taxpayers anymore, so the tax burden for everything in general will have to fall almost entirely on the ultra-wealthy now, and they've been fighting tooth and nail for decades to get out of paying any taxes at all.

That's the problem with capitalism. It's built upon a series of contradictions that cannot be reconciled easily, especially if it's driven by the mentality that constant growth is necessary to satisfy their supposed "fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders." Nothing can grow forever in a finite world. Something has to give at some point. There are capitalist enterprises than manage just fine without shareholders and without the need for infinite growth. Local independent businesses are a good example, like that one restaurant or hardware store that has maybe one or a couple of locations that have been serving the same local community for decades. But publicly-traded corporations have for decades been driven by a "growth at any cost" mentality, similar to that of cancer cells. But even cancer stops growing at some point, either by killing the patient or by going into remission. We can only hope corporate capitalism goes into a remission of sorts instead of killing us all through short-sighted greed.

Also, "A.I." isn't A.I. in the first place. LLMs and text-to-image/video models are just glorified plagiarism software. That's why I always place it in quotes (and I use periods to avoid confusing it with people named Al).

You’re right that owners will automate whenver it raises margins, and that 'perfect employee' machines don’t buy groceries. That's the demand side problem economists have flagged for a century. Youre also right that public companies optimize for growth and quarterly optics in ways a family hardware store does not.

However, automation has been eating jobs for 200 years. Weavers, elevator operators, bank tellers, travel agents. Employment and living standards still rose because new work appeared (software, healthcare, logistics, content, maintenance of the machines). AI may be faster and broader. That is a real risk, not proof the pattern must break.

Replacement is rarely total. Most deployments so far are partial. We have draft, search, code assist, scheduling. Headcount often stays while output rises, or shifts to oversight, exception handling, sales, and care work machines still do poorly. Fully automated restaurants exist as prototypes, most fail on taste, edge cases, and customers who still want a human.

UBI is one option. Others are shorter workweeks, wage subsidies, robot taxes, broader equity ownership, and antitrust that stops a handful of firms from capturing the whole surplus. Tax incidence can change as it has before. The ultra wealthy fighting taxes is politics, not a law of physics.

Infinite growth on a finite planet is a genuine tension. So is the fact that most people still want more energy, medicine, and housing, etc... which historically came from productivity growth. Local firms without shareholders are a useful counter-model as they don’t scale the same way and don’t fund most R&D.

On the last point: LLMs are not minds and they are trained on other people’s work. Calling them 'plagiarism software' is half true as rhetoric and incomplete as description. They compress patterns and generate novel combinations. It doesn’t make the ownership and labor questions disappear.

The contradiction is real. The collapse story is not automatic. Policy and who captures the gains decide which way it goes.

We're actually seeing a major increase in small businesses being created since ChatGPT (2022 or so) helped pave the way for AI.

- Shorter work weeks is the obvious first step to counteract increasing automation including by AI. This should be implemented gradually and carefully, but it’s bizarre that there isn’t even a real discussion about it yet.

- AI will make everything cheaper. As long as there is competition, there won’t be some rich guy pocketing 90% of the revenue if that’s what some of you think.