companies have been trying to cut down on workers for as long as those workers have demanded pay and benefits. Whether it's downsizing, outsourcing, streamlining, understaffing, or automating, if there is something a business can do to get rid of workers and their salaries, you better believe they are going to do it. But this time does feel a little bit different. Recent AI advances have been mocked for not quite living up to the bold claims of their tech bro founders, but even in their current imperfect form, LLMs, general use robots, and generative models are already replacing jobs, and they are getting better every day. So that's bad for workers, but if you're a senior corporate executive or company owner, maybe you should be asking yourself, if we automate everybody's job, who is going to buy all of your [__]? A new study out today predicting almost half of all global jobs could be affected by artificial intelligence, that 40% of all jobs around the

world will be impacted by AI and found AI could 
replace 300 million full-time jobs, including positions in the legal and engineering fields. So 
far, there are nine robots here doing the work of more than 250 humans. I have some good news and 
some bad news for your theoretical company. The good news is that labor reduction systems of 
all varieties have already cut out millions of man-hours in America alone and made the 
workers who are left more efficient at their jobs. Artificial intelligence is just another tool 
that your company can use to get more work out of fewer staff or replace teams entirely. Even here at 
Little Works Media Group, we used to have someone working part-time whose job it was to cut out 
images on Photoshop to use in our goofy little animations. Now, Adobe Suite has inbuilt AI features 
which can automatically remove backgrounds from any image with absolutely no human time or skill 
involved. Now we love our editors, so we gave him

more work editing our history videos, but there are a lot of companies that now don't need to or don't want to employ people for these simple jobs. According to a survey of 697 companies conducted by Metro GA, a research and strategic advisory firm, whatever that means, companies who did not use AI in calendar 2023 hired 89% more agents than those who did use AI in their contact centers. For existing employees, it was even worse when AI was added to a contact center. 36.8% of companies laid off an average of 26.1% of their employees. These alarming numbers were within just one year and just within call centers, which have already been hit by outsourcing, understaffing, and automation harder than most other professional services. For now, congratulations, your business now has reduced headcount and significantly reduced expenses. But here comes the bad news. In 1914, Henry Ford doubled the salary of his factory workers to $5 per day. The story goes he did this because he

wanted all of his employees to be able to afford a Ford Model tea of Their Own, boosting company revenue. Now, this is basically complete nonsense. In reality, Ford just wanted to reduce that turnover and deny talent to up-and-coming car companies like Dodge to maintain his monopoly over the growing automobile industry. But as with every good fairy tale, there is negative truth in there. If the employment rate suddenly drops as hard as it did in the call centers from the study in every company around the world, then companies will undeniably struggle with reduced revenue, as people without jobs don't have the buying power they once did. And even people with jobs will cut back out of fear that they might be next. But there is a business plan that you, as a hypothetical titan of industry, might want to consider so that this isn't a problem. And that's just making stuff exclusively for other wealthy business owners while diverting resources away from people who have nothing to

offer you that can't be done more efficiently by 
a machine or a cheaper worker on the other side of the world. Now, if you think that sounds a bit 
crazy, you should know that it's already kind of happening, and the best place to see it is in video 
games. Yes, those occasionally fun distractions from real life are the perfect example of the 
shift happening in the real world right now. So, let me cook. According to Grand View research, the 
video game industry is now bigger than the movie, music, and television Industries combined, and it is 
honed in its most profitable strategy. Free-to-play games are, ironically, some of the most profitable 
games on the market because they have perfected a business strategy called freemium pricing. Most 
people will play their games for free, but a select few, affectionately known in the industry 
as Wales, will spend thousands, sometimes even millions of dollars on a single game to unlock 
in-game perks that would be almost impossible.

to obtain as a free user, it's important that these 
games still have free users. Though, because without   them, the whales would have nobody to show off to 
or pwn with their paid-for advantages. In a world   where people are looking for budget-friendly forms 
of entertainment, the game industry has realized   that the best way to turn a profit is to cater to 
those who have the financial means, or at the very   least, the credit limit, to spend ridiculous amounts 
of money on a video game. The people who have the   most financial means don't work for their money 
they own income-producing assets. And if automation   does replace jobs on an even more widespread scale, 
that will make your ability to work less valuable,   and simultaneously, income-producing assets more 
valuable. The rate of change in AI and automation   makes the future impossible to predict, but if the 
people investing in these technologies want to   see a financial return on that investment, they are 
going to learn what the game industry already has.

there is more money to be made by catering to other rich people, and everybody else can be kept around as entertainment. Now, if you think that sounds a bit depressing, well, welcome to this channel. But also, I should tell you that market trends already say this is happening. AI isn't going to change your world; it's just going to continue a trend that's already been happening for years now. So, it's time to learn how money works, to find out how companies are adapting to a world where nobody can afford anything anymore. This week's lesson is sponsored by Brilliant. Brilliant is an educational platform designed for comprehending what you learn. It focuses on a bottom-up learning strategy, starting with the fundamentals, using interactive problem-solving activities. Learning and retaining knowledge this way is shown to be six times more effective than traditional video lectures. The courses available on Brilliance are carefully crafted by world-class educators, scholars, and professionals from leading organizations and institutions such as MIT, Caltech.

Duke, Microsoft, Google, and more brilliant's growing number of programming courses are a great way to build foundations and learn real-world applications. I recently took their course on Creative coding, which builds your computational problem-solving skills by writing programs that produce complex outputs with brilliant learning. It is accessible from anywhere using a computer, smartphone, or tablet. Brilliant provides opportunities to acquire real knowledge in just a few minutes each day with its captivating and enjoyable lessons seamlessly integrating into your schedule whenever you have time to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30. Visit brilliant.org many works or click the link in the description. You'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. In the 1992 movie Glen Gary Glenn Ross, the iconic always be closing scene has Alec Baldwin's character bragging to another salesman about driving an $80,000 BMW. Adjusted for $1 1992 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that would be the

equivalent of just under $182,000 today. That is a very expensive automobile, to be sure, but these days if you drive around a major city, you're likely to see dozens of cars that cost that much or more, and they probably wouldn't even stand out that much. According to company sales data and historic records, Lamborghini has sold more cars in the last 10 years alone than it did in all the rest of the company's history combined because there is simply a bigger market for $300,000 cars than ever before. The same general trend is true for other extreme luxury brands like Bentley, Ferrari, Paddock Philipe, luxury groceries at Arroan, gym memberships that cost more than rent, hotels that make Hilton look like a Holiday Inn, and to top it off, private jets are all now way more popular than they ever have been. One thing that often gets lost in discussions of wealth inequality is that yes, billionaires are getting richer, but there are also far more rich people around than ever before.

it's because the value of an hour of human labor 
has stayed more or less stagnant, while the value of an asset and the availability of credit has 
skyrocketed. People who held on to an even modest portfolio over the last 4 years now have enormous 
fortunes. Certain individuals got incredibly lucky with good investments, and other people accessed 
easy credit to get absolutely jacked to the tits on leverage and ride the longest asset bull run in 
history. Very few people have made modern fortunes through work alone, and you might have even noticed 
how investing went from something that you should do to secure your retirement to something you need 
to do to have any quality of life at all. If robots really do take over, then it will just continue 
to push the value of an hour of human work down, because it could be done by a machine instead, and 
it will rally the value of assets because business owners and investors will benefit from the free 
labor substitute. This is where people point to.

policy fixes like a universal basic income. If 
you haven't heard about this idea by now, that's   impressive, but it's basically a government payment 
made to everybody regardless of personal financial   conditions. That should be enough to cover basic 
living expenses. It's been proposed as a solution   to keep the whole system going if people can't 
earn an income for themselves because their   labor has been outsourced or automated, but that 
is still not a desirable outcome for anybody. If   comprehensive automation of human labor gets as 
far as needing this, then you will fall into one   of two defined classes of people. You will either 
be getting by based on a government lifeline, or   you will be in the class of people that own the 
businesses complaining about all the taxes they   need to pay to fund that lifeline. I find it a 
little bit easier to sympathize with one of those   groups, but there are still no winners. Just last 
week, the result of one of the most comprehensive

Universal basic income experiments were published. The research gave 1,000 people living in Texas and Illinois $1,000 a month with no conditions attached. To qualify for this study, their 2019 household income had to be less than 300% of the federal poverty line or $37,400 for an individual. There was also an unlucky control group of 2,000 people who were only given $50 a month. This is because when your personal finances are being studied, you are more likely to be careful about your spending decisions, and the researchers wanted to control for these changes. The study itself was funded by an organization called Open Research, which is not technically affiliated with Open AI, but they are both managed by Sam Alman, who has been very vocal about how this technology could displace billions of jobs. Now, if you ever find yourself running an AI startup that burns millions of dollars a day, then one of the best ways to ensure that you keep that investor money

coming is to pretend to be really scared about 
how your technology is going to replace workers, because well replacing workers is really exciting 
to investors. So realistically, this study was probably little more than marketing stunt conducted 
by one of the best funded organizations in the space, but that doesn't mean that the results 
aren't still interesting. The key results related to employment was that the group that received 
the $1,000 payment ended up earning significantly less for themselves than the control group after 
the payment was accounted for. They still earned more, but $122,000 a loan is not enough to live 
anywhere in America without other forms of support. All households ended up earning more, but that was 
largely because this experiment started right at the beginning of Co when employment, particularly 
in low-wage professions, was hurt by lockdowns. The reason the researchers gave as to why households 
receiving the subsidy ended up earning less money for themselves was because many people took it 
as an opportunity to cut down on how much they

were working and commit more time to leisure in looking after their family. This fits the optimistic idea of an AI future where we can have machines do everything for us while we just relax and collect Universal basic income. But the finding still told a story of people who were financially struggling. Mental health improved because people were less stressed, but those improvements faded by the end of the first year. Food security also increased, but again only in the first year, as even people with additional income fell victim to rising living expenses. And that was when they could work to earn additional money when compared to being plunged into poverty. It's an okay compromise, but this isn't going to happen overnight. Outsourcing turned entire cities in America into ghost towns, but it happened so slowly that big changes like this never got addressed. The endgame for people investing in automation is to build that automated utopian future. The endgame for everyone else is to make sure that they aren't excluded from it. Now if you want to get

these videos a day early and get articles that 
can never be made into YouTube videos then be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter Linked 
In the video description. Now, while everybody is worried about not getting enough work, there is one 
country that has decided the solution is getting people to work 6 days a week. So, go and watch 
this video to keep on learning how money works.

If AI Takes All Of Our Jobs... Who's Going To Buy Everything?

Subscribe to learn about business, careers, and everything else about How Money Works.

If AI Takes All Of Our Jobs... Who's Going To Buy Everything?

If AI Takes All Of Our Jobs... Who's Going To Buy Everything?

Scripts