→ The real AI problem no one is talking about

The other day, YouTube’s algorithm struck again. It suggested a video podcast episode from a creator with a still small channel, Josh Allan Dykstra. The title, while sounding moderately clickbait‑y, still made me curious to check out the video:

The Real A.I. Problem No One Is Talking About (Who Buys Your Stuff, Robots?)

I’m always interested in intelligent analysis debate around ‘AI’ topics, and Dykstra isn’t someone who’s profiting from ‘AI’, so his analysis doesn’t look biased to me.

Conveniently, Dykstra also provides transcripts of his podcast episodes on his site. Here’s the one for this video.

He poses the question right at the start:

Today, let’s start with the wrong question.

Everyone keeps asking: “Will A.I. take our jobs?”

I get it. That question is terrifying because it’s personal. But it’s also incomplete.

There’s a better question than if A.I. will take jobs — because, spoiler: it will, and it’s already happening (you’re noticing the hiring slowdown, right? [in the US] 2025 was the worst year for hiring since 2009, with the exception of COVID year 2020).

I don’t want to minimize the impact of A.I. taking jobs (it’s just beginning and it’s going to be enormously disruptive) AND there’s actually a bigger question lurking in the background, namely: What kind of economic system tries to eliminate human labor without replacing income… and still expects the world to keep functioning as-is?

I’m not hearing this talked about enough, so we’re going to talk about it today.

Here’s the crux of it: if A.I. works the way capital hopes it will, capitalism won’t break because A.I. fails. It’ll break because A.I. succeeds.

Why?

Because if you’re running a business, you can’t fire your customers and then expect them to buy your stuff.

There’s a simple loop that runs the modern economy: Labor → wages → income → consumption → revenue… and then back around again.

A company pays labor (that’s you) in wages which become your income. You have some left over so you buy things (consumption) which is another company’s revenue, which they use to pay their labor. Feels familiar, right?

In the way that modern life currently works, this loop is NOT optional. It’s what we might call “load-bearing” — it’s holding up the house. We break or pull out one part of the loop and things will NOT function the way they do now. Period.

[…]

Losing our jobs wouldn’t be so scary, of course, if we had another way to get income. The problem is most of us don’t. Our labor is what we trade to get to income. […]

As in all technological disruptions, capital is going to use A.I. to eliminate labor because labor is… inconvenient.

I get it — we humans are dreadfully biological — but without labor people don’t have income which means they can’t participate in consumption… which means Capital is also automating itself out of relevance. Because this time, the goal of the technology is quite literally to do everything a human can do (this is probably the most generally accepted definition of AGI).

We all see the problem, right? If no one has any money, who actually buys the stuff your robots make, Capital?

The strange irony here is that this happening wouldn’t actually be capitalism failing, it’d more be like capitalism completing its own logic — like the snake that kills itself by eating its own tail.

I’ve tried to summarise Dykstra’s argument the best I could, but I suggest you watch the whole podcast episode (it’s just 20 minutes long) or read the whole transcript. The question he poses is something I’ve been pondering myself ever since this ‘AI’ craze began to propagate.

I’m still not sure whether the doom-and-gloom scenario of ‘AI’ is coming for our jobs is really going to materialise in full-dystopian mode, bringing that high level of disruption Dykstra talks about. But even if we talk in hypotheticals, this is a problem worth considering. If entire categories of workers lose their job, they stop gaining money. If they stop gaining money, they stop spending money, and that means that other people or companies will stop earning revenue. That whole loop Labour → Wages → Income → Consumption → Revenue → Labour, etc. is going to fall apart.

I can’t wait to hear the ‘solution’ from some sociopath techbro.