ChatGPT currently has about 1 BILLION monthly active users, and 95% are not paying a dime, it's FREE. Of course they are also losing an absurd amount of money, so yea, not a sustainable business model.
Inflation is likely to trend toward worse until we have infinite free labor, and that isn't happening anytime soon. You are missing the point, everything will be far worse without AI & Robotics (we are "cooked" as the youngins say). It almost sounds like you are saying "since AI hasn't lowered the cost of anything yet, it never will"
This seems like a strange argument to me (short sighted). The efficiency gains are only now just starting, biggest impact has been on software development but software projects generally take years to really impact society in any significant way. The recent introduction of AI agents is also starting to have an impact but many companies don't trust the technology yet (for good reason) so impact is very limited.
The real gains as far as deflationary impact, will only come when we have very capable AI robots. There is no telling when that might become reality, it could be a decade or longer. I haven't been impressed with any of the early models out there (they are just remote controlled toys) but they are making progress. Abundant cheap and/or free is a LONG WAY OFF. Companies will try to maximize profit, but competition will also heat up, and that tends to drive prices down. The best thing we can do from a policy standpoint is to prevent monopolies (tough anti-trust enforcement) this will encourage competition and lower prices. If there was only one LLM out there, we'd already be seeing far more monetization (in the very least lots of ads on free versions), but because of the competition people are getting better and better tools that are free, even ad free for now and rapid development with better and better models practically every month.
As for the MurderBots you keep going back to, its definitely a serious threat. I imagine we will have a never ending back and forth between offenders and defenders (we see a version of this in the technologies being deployed in the Russia/Ukraine war, or from SciFi: Terminator). Various countries & individuals will always be interested in making new weapons and homicidal maniacs could do a lot of damage but I'm not sure what you are suggesting here, stopping AI development isn't going to happen, requiring some kind of ethics standards in base code is a nice idea but can it be enforced? I think prosperity is more likely than the doomsday scenario, and in a prosperous world with abundant cheap labor, maybe there will be fewer people out there feeling desperate or angry, there might end up being less violence than more.
I appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
Here is a potential problem with your economic analysis - we might be in an inflationary trap.
Useful robots that make everything will not be free. Someone has to purchase them, otherwise they will not be made. Somehow, they need to get into the marketplace. They could be purchased with debt or the government could prop the robotics companies up with debt/printed money. Both options are inflationary. As people lose their jobs, they will need support. In order to continue to have a prosperous life (a house, kids, good food, vehicles, entertainment), the government will need to hand out more than "pennies". Handing out big enough checks for people to be "prosperous" will be wildly inflationary. Look what happened during the COVID panic! Inflation ran out of control. Maybe the government could tax the AI/robotics companies to death in order to pay for the "abundance" for everyone else, but the companies are already in debt up to their eyeballs and not turning a profit.
I would welcome radical deflation, as long as I have a steady income or ample savings/hard assets. Most people have neither.
