Will A.I. destroy my business?

What can I sell to the unemployed?

There’s a lot of discussions about the incredible wealth that A.I. will create for businesses, allowing them to eliminate “the tax of labor”, and the corollary negative implications for workers. Workers will experience somewhere between massive dystopian unemployment to massive utopian leisure time.

That picture tends to assume a zero sum between employers that will thrive at the expensive of workers. But its a picture that only examines the supply side (labor), what about the demand side (consumers)? What does a company produce that will generate massive wealth without consumers?

If everyone is unemployed, who’s buying tech devices, apps and subscriptions, traveling, dining out, attending events? How am I, as a business owner, going to get rich selling my product to the unemployed masses? Are my products recession proof? Are they great depression proof? Are they great destruction proof?

Do I sell products to others businesses used by a human workforce? What if those businesses no longer have a human workforce? Do I have a government contract? Can the government afford to buy my product when there is no tax base?

Are all these businesses racing towards their own destruction, aggressively adopting the seeds of their own demise? The one dimensional view of employers get rich, workers get poor in the A.I. economy seems too simplistic.