They are BILLIONAIRES, on the way to TRILLIONAIRES, and most of us live on a few tens of thousands a year. To them, we are as poor as poor gets. We have NOTHING. They don't understand how we even survive.

And they understand that they have already strapped us for life, the outcome of a long-term strategy. Many of us come out of college with a literal lifetime of student loan debt, because we were told by people we love and respect that the degree would pay for itself, only to find out that things change. Then housing and transportation costs skyrocket, and nobody has any excess disposable income, but just in case they do...here's this exciting new gambling app that will hit all your dopamine receptors, whether you win or lose. So who cares if you lose, as long as you had fun?

And then they just bide their time for the period in your life that you, or someone you love more than yourself, gets sick, and they can extract whatever might be left.

And if you somehow manage to navigate all those other traps, they know you'll never get past the last one, because none of us gets out of the game alive. We will get sick, and we will die, and it will be expensive, and they'll get whatever you thought you might leave to your heirs.

It's the Big Financial Extraction Machine, and it is being supercharged by AI, and they will be tracking down every cent we have.

So we're broke, by design. They know this, and in the future they will focus their sales and marketing efforts on the wealthy, who love to spend their money. They may be a smaller market, but they have ALL the money, with more coming in, since they operate the Big Financial Extraction Machine. So the new corporate attitude will be: Don't bother with the Paupers, we got Billionaire ass to kiss.

I'm not a billionaire and I don't study that species or it's habitat closely, but from my limited knowledge they don't really make their money off the consumer anymore. It's more that they invest in the stock market which seems to be mostly disconnected from the larger economy. They also seem to get a lot of money via the Governments of the world.

So why would they care if most of the peons lose their job? Even if the unwashed masses revolt they have bunkers and the ability to move anywhere quickly. They don't give a fuck. But I do think they need a few slaves workers to support them and their needs, but beyond that .....

By leaving 70% of the population out of the economy, based on the strength of the AI surveillance to keep them from being uppity.

Larry Ellison: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on."

Note that "their" best behavior, not even "our" best behavior. Explicitly this is something he sees as needed to be inflicted on others in order to have the future he imagines.

So with enough surveillance and enforcement, the rabble is kept out and maybe they can fend for themselves if they feel like it, away from the owner class reaping the benefits of what they have done.

In theory of course, I suspect ultimately this round of AI will fall short of their dreams of eliminating dependency on the labor class.

We already have a world where most of the people cannot afford the goods and services that represent most of the world's economic output. A subsistence farmer in the global south is already shut out from most of the global economy. This will simply be an extension of that. The end result of the dreams of AI bros is Earth turning into Solaria.

The top 10% of the US is already responsible for the majority of the US's consumer spending. The consumer spending of the bottom 50% represents a small fraction of overall consumer spending. This will simply continue to get worse until the economy is 99% just rich people who own hoards of robots trading goods and services with other rich people that own hoards of robots. The rest of the population will just be dead or be kept alive and placid through a meager feed of bread and circuses.

The wealthy already view everyone else as robots, tools for them to exploit. They'll just replace metaphorical robots with literal robots.

They're gonna kill that 70% of the population and say that they got uploaded to data center heaven.

True facts.

If we are just numbers on a screen, they are treating it as such. When companies look at ways to save money, they look at the numbers and try and reduce their costs. If it means using an unhealthy alternative to the food they sell, they do that, we will still buy it. Now they are replacing the worker, another number they can reduce. The problem there is that the same number is whats paying you for the product. If only a few companies do this, then its fine, the worker will find another job and use their money to buy things. But we know that most, if not all, companies will jump on replacing the worker with AI, thinking the same thing, the worker will find a job elsewhere. Very easy to take this direction when you're treating all your problems as numbers on the screen. I do believe that this will fail, but there is still the fact that a lot of people are not workers and make an egregious amount of money(legally or illegally). These companies will just sell to whoever can afford that lifestyle.