Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Says Investing For a Living Could Replace Labor in a Post-AI World (fortune.com) 134
AI will disrupt the labor market within five to ten years and force Americans to rely on investment returns rather than wages for income, according to Vlad Tenev, chief executive of stock trading firm Robinhood. Tenev told Fortune that "if you can't rely on labor to generate money to make a living, capital becomes more important."
The brokerage chief said private companies and government must make investing easier from an early age. He cited the proposed Invest America Act, included in congressional reconciliation legislation, which would provide every newborn with $1,000 in an investment account. Tenev said the policy represents preparation for an economy where "humans comprise less than 1% of the total intelligence" as AI systems advance beyond current capabilities.
The brokerage chief said private companies and government must make investing easier from an early age. He cited the proposed Invest America Act, included in congressional reconciliation legislation, which would provide every newborn with $1,000 in an investment account. Tenev said the policy represents preparation for an economy where "humans comprise less than 1% of the total intelligence" as AI systems advance beyond current capabilities.
Investing in what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Investing in what, exactly?
I mean, when you invest in a company, you're investing in the people, the processes, the products of that company, on the idea that the hard work of those folks will lead to gains in your portfolio. But if there area no jobs because they've all been replaced with AI, what is left? Some sort of weird gambling casino where we're betting on the next genius idea that AI then implements for us?
What sort of dystopian bullshit future is this?
Of course it's from a company which manages people's investments and makes money off their trades, so I can see how when all you are is a hammer manufacturer everything is a nail that needs to be pounded.
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Yes. This is nonsense.
Re: Investing in what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is "weird gambling casino" an accurate description of what we have now? How pie-in-the-sky is the mythical fairytale about "fundamentals" in a world where trumpcoin just made billions?
Remember the trader joke, "fundamentals" is whatever doesn't move price? Why do traders currently call asset prices "a liar", unless it's all just a casino with a much better payout (if you stick to an ETF like SPY, SPX etc.) than real casinos?
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Traders are not investors, but speculators. Those who hold SPY for more than a quarter receive dividends, and contribute to useful activity. Unlike those who buy and trade gold or bitcoin.
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A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.
Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first k
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Then don' t buy it. I don't either, but I don't see how TrumpCoin's existence hurts me any.
Re:Investing in what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, maybe because AI is very, very expensive?
These prognostications always seem to forget that AI isn't magic, it doesn't grow on trees. People have to build it, train it, and run it. It requires constant maintenance and improvement and specialization.
And while I do believe it will eat some categories of work, it will, like all new major technologies, eat categories of work that nobody really wants to do anyway. Farming and factory work come to mind. In these categories, though automation has reduced the
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Another great point, if AI can replace anything, if it can be 99% of intelligence, then surely it can replace investors better than many other "jobs". How can anyone compete as an investor when they are clearly the worst investors in the market, by definition?
Re:Investing in what? (Score:5, Informative)
If no one is buying the products, BlackRock's and robinhoods of the world cannot magically generate returns, and 401k accounts, stocks, etc, tied to equities evaporate wealth. Investing is not a substitute for production it is a claim on future production. If AI displaces human labor entirely and no mechanism of redistribution is created, then there is no broad income base to sustain demand, and the very market structure that funds stocks, bonds, and retirement accounts implodes. Capital needs labor to be meaningful; without it, portfolios are just empty paper.
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I disagree that labor is the source of all value in the economy. Imagine a fully automated society: cars and computers roll off the production lines, but no humans are involved. They're designed by computers, built by robots from raw materials mined by robots. It's hard to argue nothing is creating value in that society, even though the labor is zero.
We haven't reached that point yet, but we're a long way down the road already. Automation is pervasive in manufacturing, agriculture, commerce, and most ot
Re:Investing in what? (Score:4, Insightful)
And that is getting to the crux of the problem with our modern, post-capitalist system. How would you value things? With what would humans buy the production of this AI robotic machine? If labor is worthless then so is everything else too. I mean why bother with keeping humans around at all?
Once labor was seen as a liability instead of an asset, our economic system began to crack. Just the other day I read this interesting quote from an old novel, "Perry Mason and the Case of the Perjured Parrot." It's Marxist in a way, but I have a very hard time arguing against it:
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The words "labor" and "value" need to considered in context, specifically "the economy".
"It's hard to argue nothing is creating value in that society, even though the labor is zero."
But the economy would long since have failed and that society would cease to exist before it got to that point.
The current billionaires dream is to own all those computers and robots, take all the value of that production, buy up everything worth buying and leave everyone else with nothing. So...
"The important question is how we
Re: Investing in what? (Score:2)
It isn't that "labour" isn't the source of value.
It's that it doesn't take so many people, so many hours, to create the same value as previously. We've gotten more efficient - vastly more efficient, actually. Just replace "AI" with "computers, machinery and automation" and there you have it.
But we still have a society where survival is tied to selling the best chunk of your life's productive time to someone else (increasingly meager survival at that).
The answer *is* investment; sharing into society's common
Re: Investing in what? (Score:5, Informative)
Statistically, probably not.
I'm a commie and "labor is the source of all value in the economy" is an equally valid statement from the most Sociopathic Right Capitalist to the Wackiest Left Communist.
If people can't work to make products to spend money on then people can't work to earn money to spend on products.
Take the too many people out of the system and it just becomes bits swirling in a circle until the system runs out of energy and comes to a stop.
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If you engineer automation that removes all the people from the system then what is the point of engineering automation for the system at all?
The system exists because the people exist, without the people the system has no meaning or purpose.
Re: Investing in what? (Score:2)
When it comes to doing gross, dangerous, repetitive, manual labor automation does make sense.
That is not the issue.
The issue that many have is the possibility that the automation will take away all the valuable labor that people do to provide for themselves and their families.
Even _IF_ the Capitalist elite that will inevitably end up owning all the AIs and the automatons run by it provide UBI for the people that _they choose_ to maintain as 'stock' those people's lives will be essentially meaningless.
Do yo
Re: Investing in what? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, Adam Smith makes similar observations in Wealth of Nations.
Re: Investing in what? (Score:5, Funny)
not yet, but we found the dummy.
nice you dropped by!
Re:Investing in what? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about with what?
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Yes, you're investing in the work of other people - there are people who are still working. Work won't totally go away,
But there MIGHT be less of it - we'll still get our stuff, or our business stuff, even if no one is working to drive the delivery trucks, or write the boilerplate, or appeal the litigation, or plan the next day or next season.
If we get paid to work, and there's less work, and we still have as much or more stuff, we'll need to figure out how to pass it around without feeling like some peopl
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You invest in the companies that fired you and replaced you wish machines. Or their competitors. Or what have you. In theory it's not a terrible idea, though there's still the question of where you get the capital in the first place.
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It's an imaginary future Robinhood would like consumers to believe in.
You also must have capital to invest. It's not just that you have to have things available to invest in which are good investments...
You need money before you can invest, or someone else who reasonably trusts you with money to invest on their behalf in exchange for a fee.
The latter case is outside the compass of individuals and requires training and professional licensing - Or official registration of your investment fund, at a bare m
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Right, exactly. Earning money is different from getting money, earning money comes from providing value. There no value is hoping that you can pay for your living with money you are given.
People still need to provide value, if AI predictions are to be believed at all, anyone with an answer where human stop providing value is wrong.
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Should have received some funny-but-sadly-accurate mod points, too.
Imaginary money cannot sustain a real economy for much longer. Cue the implosion...
Re:Investing what? (Score:2)
Surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
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When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Re:Surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
When all you have to sell is hammers, you want to convince your customers that every problem is a nail.
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Remember This is the company that forbid GameStop trading during the stock meme days. Move along. Nothing to see here.
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It's not valid to compare what you make, with what the CEO of Robinhood makes. A better comparison is, how much do you make compared to the *average* individual investor. Most individual investors do not make enough from their investments, to quit working.
So it's not correct to suggest that investors make more money than laborers.
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Investors don't "make" any money. I wish people would learn to differentiate between makers and parasites. Many work and receive pay, fewer earn it.
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There is nothing less valid or ethical about investment income vs. employment income. We need both kinds of income-earners, to make society work. Somebody has to own a business, in order to employ people for the business. Are you suggesting that the business owner shouldn't be able to make money from their business? Employment is a two-way street: you have to have both an employer and an employee. You can't have one without the other.
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and give the answer in rubles so blue trane can understand
Incredibly stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
If 'AI' has eaten all the jobs; why exactly would we have humans 'investing' for a living? Surely AI good enough to eat all the jobs could also match or exceed the performance of the average trader?
This proposal basically seems like UBI, but capitalism-washed with a pointless (and likely dangerous; given that retail noise trading is basically gambling for people who think they are too smart for gambling) financial services layer tacked on to avoid admitting that it's UBI by pretending that everyone is an investor instead.
Investing? (Score:2)
What we call investing is becoming more and more like gambling
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There are a few blockchains that actually provide a valuable service to the people using it. But yes there is quite a bit of speculation layered on top of all that, in addition to specific tokens that have no value at all (specifically memecoins).
HAHHAHAHAHAHhhHAAHHAHAH (Score:5, Funny)
This is the most ridiculous thing I have read on /. in more than 20 years. ffs this AI bubble better burst soon, we have triggered hallucination in humans, not only the robots!!
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Before Memes were a thing (Score:2)
People would often talk about driving by a road construction site and see eight people supervise a single person shoveling a hole.
This is how I see the let's focus on creating more investors and less work being done.
I don't see how an economy can actually function.
Not reasonable (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone that has for the past 5 years or so done this, I can assure you it is NOT possible for most people to do it.
1) It requires extensive knowledge and experience that most people do not have. My first real job was at PaineWebber where I learned the skills I use today. The average guy did not have this education.
2) In the short term, there is a huge amount of risk that you undertake when you do this, which would inevitably crush most people into financial paste. Even if you are smart enough to do it, there is so much luck involved it is ridiculous. You can make the right decision but do it a month too early or a month too late and lose money. You can properly identify a profitable industry but be surprised by a smaller, more agile company that bankrupts the one you choose to invest in.
3) Real value is created by hard work. If everyone can do it, it is not hard. The core belief here is that investing is gambling and that anyone can do it. Nope. Part of what makes it work is that some people (the talented) can do it better than others so the others pay those talented people to do it for them. So no, everyone cannot do it.
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"there is so much luck involved it is ridiculous"
This is very much my experience exactly. Rarely ever does your effort in investing beat the market unless you have some kind of insider information pouring in all the time. In other words, don't try to beat the market, join it. If your portfolio can't beat SPY or a fund like that, might as well just invest in SPY.
Re: Not reasonable (Score:2)
"Investing" and "trading" are not the same thing.
You talk about "trading".
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"Real value is created by hard work"
Do you live in the same world I do, where Trump is president?
No work and no value there. Seems to prove the point.
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"Real value is created by hard work"
Do you live in the same world I do, where Trump is president?
I reject the notion that anything devolving or emanating from either the person or the presidency of Trump has "real value". He is a destroyer of real value, and a huge net negative on the societal balance sheet. Grifters don't create real value.
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Politics has very little to do with that statement.
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Trump produces negative value. This is true generally for investment. The stock market does not contribute to production.
Mitt Romney was a notorious corporate raider, he got rich buying companies liquidating their assets, burdening them with debt then sticking "investors" with losses. He was a legalized thief. Let's make that the model for everyone to live by in a post-AI world.
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So everyone will just need a few million dollars, problem solved.
Of course, if everyone had a few million dollars, then a few million dollars would be worthless. But hey, that $1000 at birth will take care of everything, so long as parents invest it in my company. All investment comes with risks, of course.
We're all going to be plumbers (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll be an on-site muffler repair technician. I'll be a sneeze guard scraper at Applebee's. I'll sell sea shells down by the sea shore. Anything but plumbing.
or... JUST TAX BILLIONAIRES. (Score:2)
So, everybody else just dies? (Score:5, Informative)
That's great if you have investments. You don't have to work, you just live on your investments. Like trust-fund babies today.
What about people who don't have investments? Do they just die?
Right now, 93% of the investment wealth in the US is held by the top 10% of U.S. households. So, 90% of the US shares 7% of the investments. And 50% of America holds no investments at all. They're not going to "rely on their investment returns".
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Yes.
Assisted euthanasia. The government will pass out large doses of fentanyl or some other powerful narcotic to anyone who requests it. The government will not care anymore about its citizenry, being beholden to those to the select few who now control the AI and own most of everything.
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Well they don't die (Score:4, Interesting)
That'll be 99% of the population. Then you'll have about 9/10th of a percent servicing the top 1/10th of a percent as engineers, thugs to keep the engineers in line and a handful of servants and sex slaves.
Every single person reading this thinks they're going to be part of the engineering class. Except maybe a few people who think it'll be fun to be one of the thugs.
There might be a few really delusional people here that think they will be part of the 1/10th of 1%.
Absolutely nobody thinks they're going to end up in the bottom 99%. Or even be one of the sex slaves. Facing that reality isn't something human beings are emotionally capable of doing.
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"Absolutely nobody thinks they're going to end up in the bottom 99%."
You're wrong about that. A whole lot of people understand that the thing about the 99% is that 99% of the people are in it.
I don't why people are talking like this is some fresh issue, society has been on this trajectory since Reagan. Greed is all there is, the exit strategy is you in the bottom 99%.
Different 99% (Score:3)
I'm talking about a world where the 99% have a hard scramble existence. The kind that American native Americans in the worst parts of the Southwest had. Fighting over scraps of food and no water to wash yourself. That kind of life is what folks like Elon Musk and Peter thiel have in store for the rest of us.
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Affordable euthanasia services will be provided to these holdouts who failed to adapt to the brave new world.
Re: So, everybody else just dies? (Score:2)
That's the part they didn't say out lout: "investment", while the right thing to do, will always disproportionately pile on the largest heap by various devices (e.g. compound interest, subsidies, tax write offs etc).
What we need in addition to that is a counter mechanism - a "wealth dissipation device" that works more aggressively the more wealth an individual has.
It doesn't even matter which one specifically (higher taxes on income, wealth, or whatever else). The important part is that there's a counter fo
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You can be certain that UBI, should it ever become a thing, will not give you enough money to do more than meet your basic needs, assuming you don't have medical expenses of any kind ever. It won't give you capital to invest.
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Also the idea of the people who require a basic income will have the time and knowledge to invest responsibly (and not lose it all) is just not feasible or a good outcome.
We already have the failure of the 401k system as evidence of that.
Better off having the government invest that money into a SWF or similar vehicles and then use that to provide more payouts to people.
There's a reason almost every nation on Earth has settled on some type of forced savings system.
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That is being very generous. If you do the actual math, there's no way UBI even provides for your food, let alone housing and medical care and transportation and entertainment. And like any perpetual motion machine, it will quickly run out of steam.
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The only real way to remove the supply/demand problem is to have infinite supply, or fixed demand (population control), and I don't think either of those are real, achievable outcomes.
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the "basic" part of "basic income" is telling you that it's not enough to invest. But if you're not satisfied with that, just make yourself rich.
Anyone want to wager what blue trane's skin color is?
Die, or UBI [Re: So, everybody else just dies?] (Score:2)
What about a basic income, which if you aren't satisfied with, you can try to increase by investing?
I would call Universal Basic Income (UBI) a solution to the problem that is the exact opposite of everybody living on their investment income.
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UBI is as far-fetched, as Robinhood CEO's prognostications about AI replacing all labor. Nether will ever happen. It's fun to imagine though, I guess.
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...instead of eating. Fortunately, you won't have to pay rent, you'll be homeless. Good thing "basic income" will make you rich, right?
I think we'd all enjoy seeing you pull on your first bootstrap. Don't have any food, what about eating cake?
Golden Age (Score:2)
It seems like people need constant reminding that we're in a golden age.
Urm... (Score:2)
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you cease to need humans as they'd be irrelevant consumers
Problem is right now ALL profits are made by selling to human consumers. If you switch off human consumers, then there are no profits.
If every lost job is a lost consumer, then eventually you will reach a tipping point at which there are not enough consumers left to sustain a business that sells to them. The AI profits then will begin to turn into AI losses.
Make it easier? (Score:2)
How much easier can it be? You're 18, you sign up on the brokerage web site of your choice, provide some information, and off you go.
Or, your parents create a custodial account in your name, they do the trading based on what you say, then when you're 18 it's all yours.
This isn't rocket surgery.
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This isn't rocket surgery.
or bomb diffusing, given rockets are just massive controlled explosions.
Sitting here laughing in union janitor. (Score:2)
I take 15% of my income from cleaning toilets, patching drywall, refinishing floors, etc., in a 160 year old heritage building and buy index funds.
I've got job security because nobody wants my job and the majority of my tasks would require more effort to automate then it would be worth,
He's half right. (Score:3)
The most important contribution that most people make to the economy, labor, is about to become marginalized and become nearly worthless. And capital is correspondingly becoming more important as investment in AI and automation replaces that outmoded labor.
The problem with his reasoning is that only a very small and rich capitalist class will be making those investments. The vast majority of people who used to work for a living will be left out of the economy, with no useful role to play. If they have no money, then, obviously, they will not be making any investments. They'll be struggling to put food on their tables.
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vast majority of people who used to work for a living will be left out of the economy, with no useful role to play.
This would become a revolutionary class; you are looking at a likely rebellion and removal of existing governments and institutions if that were to come to pass, since the people capable of working for a living are also the manpower who would physically have the ability to unmake the whole system -- the rich as a small percentage of the population are not capable of sustaining themselves, an
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Farm mechanization did the same thing to farm work, which once occupied 70%+ of the work force. The same for factory work, which employs 90% fewer people today than it did 50 years ago. Yet somehow today, everybody who wants a job still can get one.
Yes, AI will increase productivity and will replace a great deal of labor. But as before, there will still be much *other* work to be done, and nobody will want to go to those old grunt-work jobs we had before AI.
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Study after study shows the rapid disappearance of the middle class. Good paying careers are being replaced by low paying gig economy jobs. The transitions to other careers that marked those other economic disruptions are not happening this time.
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Right. Since 1971, "Lower Income" Americans have grown from 27% to 30%, a 3% increase. https://www.pewresearch.org/ra... [pewresearch.org] At the same time, "Upper Income" Americans have grown from 11% to 19%, an 8% increase. So yes, "Middle Income" Americans have shrunk from 61% to 51%, but mostly because they have transitioned to the "Upper Income" group.
A 3 percentage point increase in lower income Americans over 50 years isn't great, but neither is it a crisis, nor is it "rapid".
Oh, really... (Score:2)
Let's see him do without janitorial staff at his office for a month or three. Or without the people to mow his lawn or clean his house or prepare his meals.
It's a zero sum game (Score:2)
"Investing for a living" is not reasonable. For every dollar gained on the market, someone loses a dollar.
Investing for a living will not work. ''Sorry.
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You are confusing speculation and investment.
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Ask google if investing is a zero sum game - you might be surprised at the AI answer.
Why? (Score:3)
Re: Why? (Score:2)
"I'm guessing someone might complain that not everyone has a house to start investing. Presumably their parents have a house. The parents should provide food, shelter, education, and some "seed corn" money to get started from when these people are children to they move out on their own. These people would then expect to also invest in robots, solar panels. limestone mines, or whatever."
U'm, excuse me but your privilege is showing there. Muchly.
By the time this situation is at hand, a LOT of people will have
Great plan (Score:2)
Definitely bullshit (Score:2)
Invest *how*? Is he suggesting day trading - which is a wonderful way to lose everything within a couple years.
Day trading is STOOOPID. By the time you've typed in your trade, arbitrage software running on servers co-located WITH THE STOCK EXCHANGE SERVERS THEMSELVES had traded that 100 times or more.
Then there's the question of actual goods and services - who's going to make/provide them?
Totally wrong! Domestic labor is the future (Score:2)
AI will likely become very good at investing because it can integrate huge amounts of data into a decision very quickly. AI is also becoming very good at a wide range of intellectual tasks and that will likely continue to expand.
So far though general purpose robots are nowhere near being as capable as humans and they are far more expensive. No single robot can make a bed, cook dinner, change a diaper, wash and fold clothes etc. The future is being manual workers. We should all train on doing domestic
Let them eat cake! (Score:3)
So basically this guy's solution to poverty is "stop being poor". He's as much in touch with the lives of regular people as a certain queen of France.
The queen in question ended up losing her head though, so maybe this solution doesn't work as well as he thinks.
RH paid $45m in penalties violating 10 secu. Laws (Score:3)
You would expect RH billionaireTenev to say something like this. Just recently in Jan 2025, Two Robinhood Broker-Dealers agreed to Pay $45 Million in the latest Combined Penalties for Violating More Than 10 Separate Securities Law Provisions
It is well known in broker-dealer securities circle that customers are the product to be fleeced and exploited, similar practice is done all across the board with the broker founders coming away as billionaires - from Charles Schwab to IBKR's Peterffy and now Tenev.
So the ruling class has to tell us something (Score:3)
So you're going to see increasingly bizarre and crazy shit coming out of the super rich to justify the complete total breakdown of the social contract.
Keep in mind automation has been devouring middle class jobs for decades now. Us nerds didn't notice it because it was primarily focused at unionized factory jobs.
Only about 6% of Americans belong to a union so that horse has been beaten and dead. We are starting to notice because they're coming for us now.
Where's that $1000 coming from? (Score:2)
If people aren't earning money, how are you going to tax their earned income? If capital is the currency instead of labor, the government must tax that to generate income to provide the services (roads, standards, oversight, military and law-enforcement protection, etc.) that we assign to government in this society.
Or... Let the oligarchs own it all, and provide services to those whom they deem worthy.
Ignoring entirely the problem of what do you live on while you're accumulating that investment wealth.
Lolwut (Score:3)
Humans will be too dumb to work, but smart enough to out-invest (out-gamble) the AI and generate a meaningful income? This Vlad person is truly insane, Marie-Antoinette-level insane. May he meet the same fate as her, this douchebag.
When you're a moron turd brain... (Score:2)
Born poor invest how (Score:2)
This is so shortsighted. And people who are born poor with nothing coming from airquotes the family are supposed to do what.
You gonna give them the starting capital?
Captain Obviously Biased (Score:3)
Investing CEO says invest to stay ahead of bots.
Obligatory read : Manna (Score:2)
Bullshit hustle culture (Score:3)