The market is partly a Ponzi scheme where more people buying inflates the price, regardless of the underlying value. The modern stock market is not focused on dividends (anything but), so there is no'real' return from the actual companies to the shareholders. (Buybacks could be considered similar to dividends).
There is still an element of real economic growth underlying the stock market, but passive investing, derivatives and market manipulation have largely decoupled the stock market from the actual economy.
At least that's my opinion.
I think the answer to your question would be yes IF:
* The world economy keeps growing
* There is a fair distribution of the return on the world economy (which there isn't)
I work in manufacturing and one of the driving forces here is the proposed cost of these humanoids. The target price range given by some companies is somewhere between 10k€ and 30k€, which would make them insanely competitive vs a human or a custom automation (which is easily over 100k€).
I work in a big corporation in Europe. Officially we're only allowed to use CoPilot, but a lot of people just have their own subscriptions. Management either turns a blind eye or is actively encouraging investigating other AI solutions.
Of course, people need to take care of confidentiality, data protection and all that, but a lot of work is just not affected by those concerns.
This is my feeling about both IT and AI. It enables companies to do a lot of things which don't really bring value.
One of the biggest use case for AI in the company I work for now is powerBI report generation. Fine, but a couple of years ago we didn't even have all these graphs and reports. I'm not sure they bring actual value, since I see decisions still being made mostly on intuition.
My company recently decided to move away from Power Automate after having trained lots of people on this 'no code' platform and then having to hire expensive consultants to support or flesh out the apps those users had actually written.
We were talking about TVs recently in the office and pretty much everyone agreed that even 4K is overkill for most TVs at a reasonable viewing distance.
I got a 65inch TV recently, and up close HD looks pretty bad, but at about 3m away it's fine.
This resonates with me, but I quit programming about a decade ago when we were moving from doing low level coding to frameworks. It became no longer about figuring out the actual problem, but figuring out how to get the framework to solve it and that just didn't work for me.
I do miss hard thinking, I haven't really found a good alternative in the meantime. I notice I get joy out of helping my kids with their, rather basic, math homework, so the part of me that likes to think and solve problems creatively is still there. But it's hard to nourish in today's world I guess, at least when you're also a 'builder' and care about efficiency and effectiveness.
Many years ago I read the classic 'How to win friends and influence people' and I was just hit with, according to that book, how little people actually care about other people and how fundamentally lonely our existence is.
I don't think that was the message the book was trying to give, but that's what I got out of it.
So yes, people will wonder, subconsciously or not, what's in it for them. If you can give status or if you are naturally entertaining, this might all seem a little less obvious.
Manufacturing, close to the floor, where you often need to react fast and start in the morning with no idea what you will be doing that day, yet will still have more work than hours.
Reddit has grown significantly the last few years, but it still has only about 50-60 million daily users, compared to Facebook's nearly 2 billion daily users.
Don't get me wrong, I like Reddit. Before it I used Usenet, which died and after Usenet I was active on forums (most of those also seem to be gone now). I really prefer those topic based social media to the other user-based social media. But I've seen enough of them die before.
I've seen UseNet die, so I'm not so sure. What Reddit does (and UseNet before it) is really niche. There aren't as many people on Reddit as there are on Facebook and Reddit isn't as entangled with people's 'real' life as much as social media is.
I think it's because of a critical mass of users. I can communicate with my parents and my entire circle of friends on WhatsApp, they weren't there 10 years ago.
See: most of Europe. Few of my friends and family under 40 are married here. Some are getting married now, but more as a celebration of their relationship than anything else.
There is still an element of real economic growth underlying the stock market, but passive investing, derivatives and market manipulation have largely decoupled the stock market from the actual economy. At least that's my opinion.
I think the answer to your question would be yes IF: * The world economy keeps growing * There is a fair distribution of the return on the world economy (which there isn't)