How will Consumers live in a jobless economy?

Short answer: BAMM! Sellers cannot exist without buyers. Corporations will invest in us as buyers, recognizing that:

Consumers provide valuable services before they buy.

Most of these services are unpaid today. That will change with BAMM!

Your Piece of the Marketing Pie

In the AI future, the most important app on your phone will track BILLABLE ATTENTION TO MARKETING MINUTES (BAMM!).

Your BAMM! will notice and record every billboard, every commercial on the radio, and every square inch of commercial signage as you drive by. Every noodle-balloon dancing outside the car wash, falafel stand, or tax-preparation service will be noticed and invoiced.

Noticing, choosing, giving feedback about your customer experience… It’s all data, worth money. In the AI economy, you will become a supplier, a vendor, a valued business partner in the business of selling things to you.

Today a Consumer, tomorrow a consultant.

Not All Jobs Will Disappear

No doubt there will be a universal basic income with Medicare for all and various educational and other benefits, like free smartphones, free gaming, and payouts from class-action lawsuits against Meta, X, and their ilk.

The AI economy will provide just about everyone with almost enough income to live frugally in one of the outer suburbs. (Anything more would be Socialism.)

Skilled Specialists will continue to work and get paid in fields such as:

• Violin repair
• Legacy plumbing analysis and work-arounds
• Seeing the elephant in the room
• Making up jokes that are really funny
• Mothering infants and young children

Most of us will continue as Consumers, pursuing happiness in the ways people do when they don’t have to show up for work. There will be a lot of television , rewarded with a lot of billable marketing minutes. The rewards may be payable in quatloos.

Quatloos are the unit of currency in a prescient episode of Star Trek, “The Gamesters of Triskelion” (season 2, episode 16), about a future in which audiences get excited about life by betting on sports.

In the big picture, our real job in life is to forward DNA to the future. The future looks bleak right now, as it always does to the older generation. Fortunately or not, we  don’t have much say in what uses our DNA will be put to. Do you think Queen Victoria would have borne four princes and five princesses if she could have foreseen the Roaring Twenties? Or a knighthood for Mick Jagger?

From the incalculably many lives in the future, there will come a few — a Gutenberg, a Luther, a Thomas Jefferson, a Susan B. Anthony, a Martin Luther King Jr. — to continue the unrolling of the potential in our humanity.

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