#massunemployment — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #massunemployment, aggregated by home.social.
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"The frenzy around OpenClaw in China — dubbed “raising a lobster,” referring to the AI agent’s red logo — captured a deeper fear among workers: Tools meant to boost productivity could soon replace them. For many, mastering OpenClaw has been less about curiosity than survival in a workplace where AI adoption is accelerating rapidly.
You can get eliminated anytime. How can you not be anxious?”
“It feels like playing Squid Game,” Shanghai-based Lambert Li, who was among the early users of OpenClaw, told Rest of World, referring to the Netflix drama where contestants compete in brutal elimination games. “You can get eliminated anytime. How can you not be anxious?” Li’s employer laid off 30% of its workforce in 2025, cutting employees who were unable to adapt quickly enough to AI.
The growth of AI has triggered global anxiety about job loss — and it is most palpable in China, where the government is pouring enormous resources into artificial intelligence, and betting on it to drive the country’s future economic growth. China has one of the world’s largest AI user bases. The massive push has caused a constant fear of redundancy among workers, coupled with the social stigma of job loss. Experts believe this could have larger economic and social implications for the country."
https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-anxiety-openclaw-jobs-redundancy/
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"There are no objective tests for whether financial analysis or advertising copy is “good.” Undeterred, AI companies set out to make such tests, collectively paying billions of dollars to professionals of all types to write exacting and comprehensive criteria for a job well done. Mercor, the company Katya stumbled upon, was founded in 2023 by three then-19-year-olds from the Bay Area, Brendan Foody, Adarsh Hiremath, and Surya Midha, as a jobs platform that used AI interviews to match overseas engineers with tech companies. The company received so many inquiries from AI developers seeking professionals to produce training data that it decided to adapt. Last year, Mercor was valued at $10 billion, making its trio of founders the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. OpenAI has been a client; so has Anthropic.
Each of these data companies touts its stable of pedigreed experts. Mercor says around 30,000 professionals work on its platform each week, while Scale AI claims to have more than 700,000 “M.A.’s, Ph.D.’s, and college graduates.” Surge AI advertises its Supreme Court litigators, McKinsey principals, and platinum recording artists. These companies are hiring people with experience in law, finance, and coding, all areas where AI is making rapid inroads. But they’re also hiring people to produce data for practically any job you can imagine. Job listings seek chefs, management consultants, wildlife-conservation scientists, archivists, private investigators, police sergeants, reporters, teachers, and rental-counter clerks. One recent job ad called for experts in “North American early to mid-teen humor” who can, among other requirements, “explain humor using clear, logical language, including references to North American slang, trends, and social norms.” It is, as one industry veteran put it, the largest harvesting of human expertise ever attempted."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/white-collar-workers-training-ai.html
#AI #GenerativeAI #Mercor #OpenAI #Anthropic #AITraining #Automation #MassUnemployment
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"So are those cracks the first signs of an A.I. jobs apocalypse? It’s too soon to say, but the employment picture has darkened. The economy added only 181,000 jobs in 2025, a shockingly low figure in a year that saw gross domestic product grow by a modest but respectable 2.2 percent. According to Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University, what we are experiencing now — a sustained period of “slow job growth and gradually rising unemployment without a real recession” — is virtually unprecedented.
Another anomaly: White-collar workers have been disproportionately affected. Blue-collar and service workers are usually hit hardest when the job market turns, while white-collar occupations enjoy a degree of insulation because they are concentrated in “safer, less cyclically sensitive sectors,” says Mr. Katz. Now, however, knowledge workers are the ones struggling.
Editors’ PicksTo be sure, this is not the first time the future of white-collar employment has been called into doubt. In the 2000s, some economists predicted that globalization would eviscerate office work much as it had manufacturing. But while a lot of jobs were sent overseas, others were simply transferred to less expensive parts of the country, and the anticipated white-collar collapse never materialized. It is very possible that the current slowdown is nothing more than a necessary correction after a period of overhiring.
But in a recent Substack post, the economist Gad Levanon of the Burning Glass Institute offered an alternative hypothesis. He noted that hiring has come to a virtual standstill in finance, insurance, accounting, consulting and tech, which are pillars of the “knowledge” economy. Mr. Levanon pointed out that companies in these areas have generally performed well of late while either trimming their head counts or keeping them largely unchanged..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/opinion/ai-jobs-white-collar-apocalpyse.html
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #MassUnemployment
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"In September, payments firm Block Inc. XYZ 1.18%increase; green up pointing triangle gathered 8,000 of its employees from around the globe to California for an extravaganza celebrating the company’s 16th birthday.
The three-day affair took place at the Oakland Coliseum and Arena and had the air of a music festival rather than a corporate event, with a nighttime DJ set by Anderson .Paak.
Among the highlights: Block founder Jack Dorsey, clad in a black T-shirt with a chain necklace, held a chat on stage with hip-hop superstar Jay-Z, a Block board member. The event cost the company over $60 million.
Six months later, Dorsey announced plans to slash 40% of the workforce at the company, which owns Square and Cash App. More than 4,000 people were soon notified that they would be let go.
Dorsey, 49, cited rapidly improving artificial-intelligence models as the primary reason, fueling anxieties the technology was on the verge of wiping out white-collar jobs and devastating the economy. Just days earlier, a report that imagined such a future had sparked a market rout.
“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey said on a call
(...)
Not everyone is buying it. Rather than leading American corporations into a brave new future, some Wall Street analysts say, he is capitalizing on a chance to slash costs at a company with excessive staffing.What began as a company focused on card-payment systems expanded into buy-now, pay-later loans, Jay-Z’s music-streaming platform and bitcoin investments. The company has improved the profitability of its core businesses, but some of its ventures are weighing on its balance sheet.
(...)
“The vast majority of these cuts were probably not due to AI,” said Dan Dolev of Mizuho Americas, noting the “significant amount of bloating” in recent years.""#AI #GenerativeaI #Block #MassUnemployment #Automation #SiliconValley
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"So there are two sources of job growth. One is what we call an income effect. As people’s incomes go up, they raise the level of aggregate demand, which calls forth new jobs and new occupations, oftentimes in the service sector but also in manufacturing.
The other is what’s called a price effect: if the technological change is in the machine goods sector, then sectors that use the cheaper machinery can expand faster, which sucks in more employment as well.
This goes back to what we said about Marx’s model. Two things are happening simultaneously.
Technical change is throwing people into what he called the reserve army of labor. And the people in the reserve army of labor are being sucked up into new jobs because technological change increases aggregate income. Now, we don’t know whose income is being increased. It might be the capitalist’s income. It might be the worker’s income, but the economy doesn’t care about that. It’s aggregate income that’s being increased.
The other thing technical change does is that it lowers the price of inputs, which means that people using those inputs can expand their production at a faster rate.
The aggregate result is that jobs are being lost in one sector, but overall employment in the economy is not declining. And that means the overall tempo, not just of economic growth, but of employment and employment absorption, is going up."
https://jacobin.com/2026/02/ai-technology-productivity-growth-job-loss
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #JobMarket #MassUnemployment #Capitalism #Marx
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"The MIT economist has spent decades studying the origins of economic and political decay, specializing in how institutions foster inclusive growth—or succumb to extractive systems. In the 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Acemoglu and co-writer James A. Robinson argue that nations proper because of their political institutions. In 2024, Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics, alongside Robinson and Simon Johnson, for demonstrating how political and economic institutions shape prosperity.
Acemoglu argued that while Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are weakening the country’s institutions, the president is not the root cause of the broader structural problems. He warned the country is headed down a grim path and outlined two shifts relative to AI development he sees as critical to avoiding deeper decline: cracking down on economic inequality and tempering job destruction. “If we go down this path of destroying jobs [and] creating more inequality, U.S. democracy is not going to survive,” he told Fortune.
According to Acemoglu, AI-driven job displacement could be catastrophic and further entrench inequality. He notes the U.S. is currently seeing unprecedented levels of wealth inequality, and traditional policy has failed to close the gap. “We may need wealth taxes because anything else we do today is still going to lead to this huge wealth gap that exists in this country.”
#USA #Trump #Democracy #Authoritarianism #Inequality #MassUnemployment #AI
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"How any AI system behaves depends on how it is programmed and prompted and what data it possesses. Anthropic set Claude a goal, then blocked all ethical ways of achieving it, leaving “blackmail” the only option. As its own report acknowledged, “We deliberately… presented models with no other way to achieve their goals”. Researchers determined a particular outcome from the start and then acted surprised when the machine “chose” that outcome.
A critical paper from the UK AI Security Institute compared such research to early investigations into the linguistic capacities of chimpanzees, researchers in both cases imputing “beliefs and desires to non-human agents… when they act in ways that superficially resemble people”. It chided Anthropic researchers for having “conveniently encouraged the model to produce the unethical behaviour”.
The idea of AI as an existential menace to humanity is not simply overblown, it also hides the real threat AI poses, not in the future but in the present – the result of actions not of machines but of humans."
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"How any AI system behaves depends on how it is programmed and prompted and what data it possesses. Anthropic set Claude a goal, then blocked all ethical ways of achieving it, leaving “blackmail” the only option. As its own report acknowledged, “We deliberately… presented models with no other way to achieve their goals”. Researchers determined a particular outcome from the start and then acted surprised when the machine “chose” that outcome.
A critical paper from the UK AI Security Institute compared such research to early investigations into the linguistic capacities of chimpanzees, researchers in both cases imputing “beliefs and desires to non-human agents… when they act in ways that superficially resemble people”. It chided Anthropic researchers for having “conveniently encouraged the model to produce the unethical behaviour”.
The idea of AI as an existential menace to humanity is not simply overblown, it also hides the real threat AI poses, not in the future but in the present – the result of actions not of machines but of humans."
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"How any AI system behaves depends on how it is programmed and prompted and what data it possesses. Anthropic set Claude a goal, then blocked all ethical ways of achieving it, leaving “blackmail” the only option. As its own report acknowledged, “We deliberately… presented models with no other way to achieve their goals”. Researchers determined a particular outcome from the start and then acted surprised when the machine “chose” that outcome.
A critical paper from the UK AI Security Institute compared such research to early investigations into the linguistic capacities of chimpanzees, researchers in both cases imputing “beliefs and desires to non-human agents… when they act in ways that superficially resemble people”. It chided Anthropic researchers for having “conveniently encouraged the model to produce the unethical behaviour”.
The idea of AI as an existential menace to humanity is not simply overblown, it also hides the real threat AI poses, not in the future but in the present – the result of actions not of machines but of humans."
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"How any AI system behaves depends on how it is programmed and prompted and what data it possesses. Anthropic set Claude a goal, then blocked all ethical ways of achieving it, leaving “blackmail” the only option. As its own report acknowledged, “We deliberately… presented models with no other way to achieve their goals”. Researchers determined a particular outcome from the start and then acted surprised when the machine “chose” that outcome.
A critical paper from the UK AI Security Institute compared such research to early investigations into the linguistic capacities of chimpanzees, researchers in both cases imputing “beliefs and desires to non-human agents… when they act in ways that superficially resemble people”. It chided Anthropic researchers for having “conveniently encouraged the model to produce the unethical behaviour”.
The idea of AI as an existential menace to humanity is not simply overblown, it also hides the real threat AI poses, not in the future but in the present – the result of actions not of machines but of humans."
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"How any AI system behaves depends on how it is programmed and prompted and what data it possesses. Anthropic set Claude a goal, then blocked all ethical ways of achieving it, leaving “blackmail” the only option. As its own report acknowledged, “We deliberately… presented models with no other way to achieve their goals”. Researchers determined a particular outcome from the start and then acted surprised when the machine “chose” that outcome.
A critical paper from the UK AI Security Institute compared such research to early investigations into the linguistic capacities of chimpanzees, researchers in both cases imputing “beliefs and desires to non-human agents… when they act in ways that superficially resemble people”. It chided Anthropic researchers for having “conveniently encouraged the model to produce the unethical behaviour”.
The idea of AI as an existential menace to humanity is not simply overblown, it also hides the real threat AI poses, not in the future but in the present – the result of actions not of machines but of humans."
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"Silicon Valley leaders are enamored of one policy Hail Mary: the establishment of a universal basic income, in which the government would provide all adults with $1,500 a month or so, no strings attached and in perpetuity. It’s not as crazy an idea as it sounds; think of it as Social Security for everyone, or an extension of the earned-income tax credit to families without any earned income. The cash would ensure that every family kept its head above water, and redistribute the wealth generated by rising productivity. “People will be freed up to spend more time with people they care about, care for people, appreciate art and nature, or work toward social good,” Sam Altman of OpenAI has argued.
But UBI is a dystopian outcome, not a utopian one. For families to thrive in this new post-work paradigm, the government would need to redistribute a lot more than $1,500 per person per month, necessitating confiscatory taxes on corporations—taxes they would fight tooth and nail. The bigger problem would be that Americans would hate a world without work, where the jobless rate floats at 30 percent instead of 4 percent."
#AI #GenerativeAI #WhiteCollarWork #MassUnemployment #UBI #SiliconValley
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"Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester, says the fears that shook the stock market are based on sentiment and not evidence: no one has had time to evaluate the performance of an Opus 4.6-powered wealth manager.
“It’s a kneejerk reaction,” he said. “How true is it? Look, there’s plenty of leaders out there who thought, I can replace people with AI at the beginning. And a lot of people acted on that. And I think one of the things that’s being found out is that for a lot of cases, no, it hasn’t panned out.”
Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at venture capital firm Radical Ventures, – whose investments include leading AI firm Cohere – and former head of strategy and operations at Google’s AI unit DeepMind, says the impact of AI is being underestimated in the long term but adoption of groundbreaking models will not be uniform.
“History shows a repeated pattern of there being a significant lag between a technology working in a lab and it permeating the wider economy, as well as a chasm between early adopters and the majority of users,” he says."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Stocks #StockExchange #AIBubble #MassUnemployment
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"Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester, says the fears that shook the stock market are based on sentiment and not evidence: no one has had time to evaluate the performance of an Opus 4.6-powered wealth manager.
“It’s a kneejerk reaction,” he said. “How true is it? Look, there’s plenty of leaders out there who thought, I can replace people with AI at the beginning. And a lot of people acted on that. And I think one of the things that’s being found out is that for a lot of cases, no, it hasn’t panned out.”
Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at venture capital firm Radical Ventures, – whose investments include leading AI firm Cohere – and former head of strategy and operations at Google’s AI unit DeepMind, says the impact of AI is being underestimated in the long term but adoption of groundbreaking models will not be uniform.
“History shows a repeated pattern of there being a significant lag between a technology working in a lab and it permeating the wider economy, as well as a chasm between early adopters and the majority of users,” he says."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Stocks #StockExchange #AIBubble #MassUnemployment
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"Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester, says the fears that shook the stock market are based on sentiment and not evidence: no one has had time to evaluate the performance of an Opus 4.6-powered wealth manager.
“It’s a kneejerk reaction,” he said. “How true is it? Look, there’s plenty of leaders out there who thought, I can replace people with AI at the beginning. And a lot of people acted on that. And I think one of the things that’s being found out is that for a lot of cases, no, it hasn’t panned out.”
Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at venture capital firm Radical Ventures, – whose investments include leading AI firm Cohere – and former head of strategy and operations at Google’s AI unit DeepMind, says the impact of AI is being underestimated in the long term but adoption of groundbreaking models will not be uniform.
“History shows a repeated pattern of there being a significant lag between a technology working in a lab and it permeating the wider economy, as well as a chasm between early adopters and the majority of users,” he says."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Stocks #StockExchange #AIBubble #MassUnemployment
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"Alvin Nguyen, an analyst at Forrester, says the fears that shook the stock market are based on sentiment and not evidence: no one has had time to evaluate the performance of an Opus 4.6-powered wealth manager.
“It’s a kneejerk reaction,” he said. “How true is it? Look, there’s plenty of leaders out there who thought, I can replace people with AI at the beginning. And a lot of people acted on that. And I think one of the things that’s being found out is that for a lot of cases, no, it hasn’t panned out.”
Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at venture capital firm Radical Ventures, – whose investments include leading AI firm Cohere – and former head of strategy and operations at Google’s AI unit DeepMind, says the impact of AI is being underestimated in the long term but adoption of groundbreaking models will not be uniform.
“History shows a repeated pattern of there being a significant lag between a technology working in a lab and it permeating the wider economy, as well as a chasm between early adopters and the majority of users,” he says."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Stocks #StockExchange #AIBubble #MassUnemployment
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"Data released this week offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth.
My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7 per cent for 2025. This is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4 per cent annual average that characterised the past decade.
This shift aligns with the productivity “J-curve” that my colleagues and I have explored in earlier research. General-purpose technologies, from the steam engine to the computer, do not deliver immediate gains. Instead, they require a period of massive, often unmeasured investment in intangible capital — reorganising business processes, retraining the workforce and developing new business models. During this phase, measured productivity is suppressed as resources are diverted to investments. The updated 2025 US data suggests we are now transitioning out of this investment phase into a harvest phase where those earlier efforts begin to manifest as measurable output."
https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419dc5
#AI #GenerativeAI #Productivity #Automation #MassUnemployment #Economy
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"An exponential process is in motion — one that will inevitably shake the world to its core — and upend our economy, politics, and social lives. Yet most people are still going about their business, oblivious as dinosaurs in the shadow of a descending asteroid.
This is what many in and around the AI industry believe, anyway.
Except, in this telling, the invisible force that’s about to change our world isn’t a virus that will rip through the population and then ebb. Rather, it is an information technology that will irreversibly transform (if not extinguish) white-collar labor, accelerate scientific progress, destabilize political systems, and, perhaps, get us all killed.
Of course, such apocalyptic chatter has always hummed in the background of the AI discourse. But it’s grown much louder in recent weeks.
This week, Matt Shumer, the CEO of HyperWrite, an AI productivity company, published a viral essay arguing that we’re on the cusp of “something much, much bigger than COVID.” Over the past year, Shumer wrote, tech workers had watched AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do” — and that “is the experience everyone else is about to have.”"
https://www.vox.com/politics/478794/ai-economy-claude-code-jobs-openai-anthropic
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #WhitecollarJobs #Productivity #MassUnemployment
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"Goolsbee pointed out that general-purpose technologies such as electricity and computing can create lasting productivity gains, the kind that make whole societies wealthier.
Whether AI is one of those technologies will only become clear over time. How long before we’ll know? “Years,” Goolsbee said.
In the meantime, there’s another complication. The immediate risk to employment may not be AI itself, but the way companies, seduced by its promise, overinvest before they understand what it can actually do. Goolsbee reached back to the internet bubble, when companies spent wildly on laying fiber cables and building capacity. “In 2001, when we found out that the growth rate of the internet is not going to be 25 percent a year, but merely 10 percent—which is still a pretty great growth rate—it meant we had way too much fiber, and there was a collapse of business investment,” Goolsbee said. “And a bunch of people were thrown out of work the old-fashioned way.”
A similar crash in AI investment, if it comes, would likely look familiar: painful, destabilizing, and accompanied by surges of CNBC rants and recriminations. But it would amount to a financial reset, not a technological reversal—the kind of outcome economists are especially good at recognizing, because it resembles a thing that’s happened before.
This is the paradox of economics. To understand how fast the present is hurtling us into the future, you need a fixed point, and the fixed points are all in the past. It’s like driving while looking only at the rearview mirror—plenty dangerous if the road stays straight, catastrophic if it doesn’t."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/ai-economy-labor-market-transformation/685731/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Productivity #AIBubble #Economy #Automation #Economics #MassUnemployment
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"AI is expected to reshape society and labor markets, yet experts remain divided on whether AI will primarily displace human labor or generate new employment opportunities. Despite the importance of this debate, little is known about how the public perceives AI’s labor market impact—and how these perceptions affect democratic attitudes and behaviors. Large-scale survey data (N = 37,079; 38 European countries) indicate that the public tends to view AI as labor-replacing rather than labor-creating. Controlling for technology-related, political, and sociodemographic factors, these data further show that perceiving AI as labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) is associated with lower satisfaction with democracy and political engagement with technology. Two preregistered, nationally representative experiments (N = 1,202, United Kingdom; replication study N = 1,200, United States) provide causal evidence for this relationship. Participants exposed to a labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) AI frame report greater erosion of trust in democracy and lower willingness to politically engage with future AI developments. Together, our findings suggest that perceptions about AI’s labor market consequences—regardless of actual outcomes—may decrease democratic legitimacy and public engagement in shaping the future of AI."
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #MassUnemployment #Democracy #PoliticalParticipation
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Dario Amodei (Anthropic's CEO) "Second, the AI industry needs a healthier relationship with government—one based on substantive policy engagement rather than political alignment. Our choice to engage on policy substance rather than politics is sometimes read as a tactical error or failure to “read the room” rather than a principled decision, and that framing concerns me. In a healthy democracy, companies should be able to advocate for good policy for its own sake. Related to this, a public backlash against AI is brewing: this could be a corrective, but it’s currently unfocused. Much of it targets issues that aren’t actually problems (like datacenter water usage) and proposes solutions (like datacenter bans or poorly designed wealth taxes) that wouldn’t address the real concerns. The underlying issue that deserves attention is ensuring that AI development remains accountable to the public interest, not captured by any particular political or commercial alliance, and it seems important to focus the public discussion there.
Third, the macroeconomic interventions I described earlier in this section, as well as a resurgence of private philanthropy, can help to balance the economic scales, addressing both the job displacement and concentration of economic power problems at once. We should look to the history of our country here: even in the Gilded Age, industrialists such as Rockefeller and Carnegie felt a strong obligation to society at large, a feeling that society had contributed enormously to their success and they needed to give back. That spirit seems to be increasingly missing today, and I think it is a large part of the way out of this economic dilemma. Those who are at the forefront of AI’s economic boom should be willing to give away both their wealth and their power."
https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
#AI #AGI #AIBubble #MassUnemployment #Automation #Productivity #AISafety #AIRegulation
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"I get the logic of Patel and Trammell’s argument, but I — perhaps, once again, over-optimistically — am skeptical about this being a problem, particularly one that needs to be addressed right here right now before the AI takeoff occurs, especially given the acute need for more capital investment at this moment in time.
First, the world Patel and Trammell envisions sounds like it would be pretty incredible for everyone. If AI can do everything, then it follows that everyone can have everything, from food and clothing to every service you can imagine (remember, the AI is so good that there are zero jobs for humans, which implies that all of the jobs can be done by robots for everyone). Does it matter if you don’t personally own the robots if every material desire is already met?
Second, on the flipside, this world also sounds implausible. It seems odd that AI would acquire such fantastic capabilities and yet still be controlled by humans and governed by property laws as commonly understood in 2025. I find the AI doomsday scenario — where this uber-capable AI is no longer controllable by humans — to be more realistic; on the flipside, if we start moving down this path of abundance, I would expect our collective understanding of property rights to shift considerably."
https://stratechery.com/2026/ai-and-the-human-condition/
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #AGI #Productivity #MassUnemployment
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"I like to think of myself as an optimist, but at night, kept awake by the throbbing in my arm, I sometimes wondered: What new skill should I spend months — maybe years — learning? And how long before A.I. could do that, too?
My arm still hasn’t healed. And last week while tearing out roots, I badly injured my back. A neighbor offered me prescription painkillers to help me get through the work. And I’m writing this, at least in part, to resist taking more of them. Even when I recover, I’m not sure how long this solution will last. I hope I’ll be able to get back to cutting trees for longer hours. But I suspect I’ll soon face increasing competition, as many people — especially recent college graduates — look for ways to make money that A.I. can’t yet replace.
In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder. Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what’s been lost. Maybe it will. But given A.I.’s rapacity, it seems far more likely that it won’t. If our leaders fail to prepare, the silence that once followed the closing of factory doors will spread through office parks and home offices — and the grief long borne by the working class may soon be borne by us all."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/opinion/artificial-intelligence-jobs.html
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"Anyone driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco in the past year has likely noticed the surge of AI-themed billboards lining the highway. Among the many provocative ads—some with slogans like “Stop hiring humans”—a new series of even more extreme billboards appeared earlier this year.
The ads, from a company calling itself Replacement AI, feature dark, dystopian taglines.
One reads: “AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her. Don’t worry. It’s totally legal.” Visitors to the Replacement AI website are greeted with a banner declaring, “Humans are no longer necessary.”
Other messaging includes insults like “stupid, smelly, squishy,” alongside the ominous statement: “It’s time for a human solution.” While the tone seems satirical, the site also includes a quote from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.”
KRON4 contacted Replacement AI and spoke with someone claiming to be the startup’s “humble unpaid intern,” Chase Hardin. Coincidentally, Hardin shares a name with the communications director for the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI safety. Are they the same person? Possibly—but for this story, we’ll play along.
When asked if Replacement AI is real, Hardin insisted it is.
“Yeah, absolutely we’re a real AI company,” he said. “We’ve got a website, we’ve got a CEO, we’ve got an HR director. It’s all there in black and white.”"
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"How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and AI adoption mania? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, to their chagrin who have been forced to use AI.
Readers of this series will recognize some recurring themes: The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.
As for Jacques, he’s relocated to Mexico, where the cost of living is cheaper, while he looks for new work. He’s not optimistic. As he put it, “It’s getting dark out there, man.”
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-until-the?r=n1p8t
#AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #LLMs #MassUnemployment #Writing #Copywriting
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Over 200 #experts, including #Nobellaureates and #AIdevelopers, call for #internationalagreements to establish #redlines for #AIdevelopment by 2026. The statement, coinciding with the #UNGeneralAssembly, highlights risks like #engineeredpandemics and #massunemployment, urging for enforceable regulations. However, #USopposition poses a challenge. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/nobel-laureates-ai-developers-red-lines-un-general-assembly?eicker.news #tech #media #news
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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1966: #Children imagine life in the year 2000 - #TomorrowsWorld - #Retro #Futurology - #BBCArchive
Pupils from Marlborough college, Roedean and Chippenham schools predict what life will be like for them in the year 2000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS8xX3usi4c&ab_channel=BBCArchive
#Future #NuclearArmageddon #Overpopulation #Automation #BatteryFarming #MassUnemployment #Unemploymnt #BBC #Archive #BBCTVArchive #BBCTV #BBCTelevision #PeterPurves
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Over 200 #experts, including #Nobellaureates and #AIdevelopers, call for #internationalagreements to establish #redlines for #AIdevelopment by 2026. The statement, coinciding with the #UNGeneralAssembly, highlights risks like #engineeredpandemics and #massunemployment, urging for enforceable regulations. However, #USopposition poses a challenge. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/nobel-laureates-ai-developers-red-lines-un-general-assembly?eicker.news #tech #media #news
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Over 200 #experts, including #Nobellaureates and #AIdevelopers, call for #internationalagreements to establish #redlines for #AIdevelopment by 2026. The statement, coinciding with the #UNGeneralAssembly, highlights risks like #engineeredpandemics and #massunemployment, urging for enforceable regulations. However, #USopposition poses a challenge. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/nobel-laureates-ai-developers-red-lines-un-general-assembly?eicker.news #tech #media #news
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Over 200 #experts, including #Nobellaureates and #AIdevelopers, call for #internationalagreements to establish #redlines for #AIdevelopment by 2026. The statement, coinciding with the #UNGeneralAssembly, highlights risks like #engineeredpandemics and #massunemployment, urging for enforceable regulations. However, #USopposition poses a challenge. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/nobel-laureates-ai-developers-red-lines-un-general-assembly?eicker.news #tech #media #news
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Over 200 #experts, including #Nobellaureates and #AIdevelopers, call for #internationalagreements to establish #redlines for #AIdevelopment by 2026. The statement, coinciding with the #UNGeneralAssembly, highlights risks like #engineeredpandemics and #massunemployment, urging for enforceable regulations. However, #USopposition poses a challenge. https://www.transformernews.ai/p/nobel-laureates-ai-developers-red-lines-un-general-assembly?eicker.news #tech #media #news
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"Just because AI could replace humans doesn’t mean it will. Few of the companies announcing layoffs actually cite AI as the reason. Relative to the investments of AI companies, actual corporate adoption has been modest, feeding suspicions of a bubble.
So does it matter that people don’t love AI? It might. Nuclear power once offered the sort of potential that AI promises today. But the public never got comfortable with a technology that could also wipe out humanity, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. From 1978 to 1990, polls showed overwhelming opposition to new reactors, and deployment ground to halt. Only now is it coming back to life—ironically, to power AI.
Today, AI has the political wind at its back. One of President Trump’s first acts was to rescind former President Joe Biden’s AI safety guidelines. He now gives priority to dismantling regulatory barriers to AI and competing with China.
But those winds can shift. A poll of roughly 2,000 people by Narrative Strategies, a communications and public relations firm, found just 40% said the AI industry could be “trusted to do the right thing,” well below the 62% to 63% who said that about finance, energy or healthcare. Asked about government regulation, 57% said tech and AI needed more, well above other industries.
AI evangelists believe its sheer economic and computational force make it unstoppable. They better hope so, because it certainly isn’t going to succeed on its popularity."
#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #USA #NeoLuddism #MassUnemployment
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"Just because AI could replace humans doesn’t mean it will. Few of the companies announcing layoffs actually cite AI as the reason. Relative to the investments of AI companies, actual corporate adoption has been modest, feeding suspicions of a bubble.
So does it matter that people don’t love AI? It might. Nuclear power once offered the sort of potential that AI promises today. But the public never got comfortable with a technology that could also wipe out humanity, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. From 1978 to 1990, polls showed overwhelming opposition to new reactors, and deployment ground to halt. Only now is it coming back to life—ironically, to power AI.
Today, AI has the political wind at its back. One of President Trump’s first acts was to rescind former President Joe Biden’s AI safety guidelines. He now gives priority to dismantling regulatory barriers to AI and competing with China.
But those winds can shift. A poll of roughly 2,000 people by Narrative Strategies, a communications and public relations firm, found just 40% said the AI industry could be “trusted to do the right thing,” well below the 62% to 63% who said that about finance, energy or healthcare. Asked about government regulation, 57% said tech and AI needed more, well above other industries.
AI evangelists believe its sheer economic and computational force make it unstoppable. They better hope so, because it certainly isn’t going to succeed on its popularity."
#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #USA #NeoLuddism #MassUnemployment
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"Just because AI could replace humans doesn’t mean it will. Few of the companies announcing layoffs actually cite AI as the reason. Relative to the investments of AI companies, actual corporate adoption has been modest, feeding suspicions of a bubble.
So does it matter that people don’t love AI? It might. Nuclear power once offered the sort of potential that AI promises today. But the public never got comfortable with a technology that could also wipe out humanity, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. From 1978 to 1990, polls showed overwhelming opposition to new reactors, and deployment ground to halt. Only now is it coming back to life—ironically, to power AI.
Today, AI has the political wind at its back. One of President Trump’s first acts was to rescind former President Joe Biden’s AI safety guidelines. He now gives priority to dismantling regulatory barriers to AI and competing with China.
But those winds can shift. A poll of roughly 2,000 people by Narrative Strategies, a communications and public relations firm, found just 40% said the AI industry could be “trusted to do the right thing,” well below the 62% to 63% who said that about finance, energy or healthcare. Asked about government regulation, 57% said tech and AI needed more, well above other industries.
AI evangelists believe its sheer economic and computational force make it unstoppable. They better hope so, because it certainly isn’t going to succeed on its popularity."
#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #USA #NeoLuddism #MassUnemployment
-
"Just because AI could replace humans doesn’t mean it will. Few of the companies announcing layoffs actually cite AI as the reason. Relative to the investments of AI companies, actual corporate adoption has been modest, feeding suspicions of a bubble.
So does it matter that people don’t love AI? It might. Nuclear power once offered the sort of potential that AI promises today. But the public never got comfortable with a technology that could also wipe out humanity, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. From 1978 to 1990, polls showed overwhelming opposition to new reactors, and deployment ground to halt. Only now is it coming back to life—ironically, to power AI.
Today, AI has the political wind at its back. One of President Trump’s first acts was to rescind former President Joe Biden’s AI safety guidelines. He now gives priority to dismantling regulatory barriers to AI and competing with China.
But those winds can shift. A poll of roughly 2,000 people by Narrative Strategies, a communications and public relations firm, found just 40% said the AI industry could be “trusted to do the right thing,” well below the 62% to 63% who said that about finance, energy or healthcare. Asked about government regulation, 57% said tech and AI needed more, well above other industries.
AI evangelists believe its sheer economic and computational force make it unstoppable. They better hope so, because it certainly isn’t going to succeed on its popularity."
#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #USA #NeoLuddism #MassUnemployment
-
"Just because AI could replace humans doesn’t mean it will. Few of the companies announcing layoffs actually cite AI as the reason. Relative to the investments of AI companies, actual corporate adoption has been modest, feeding suspicions of a bubble.
So does it matter that people don’t love AI? It might. Nuclear power once offered the sort of potential that AI promises today. But the public never got comfortable with a technology that could also wipe out humanity, especially after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. From 1978 to 1990, polls showed overwhelming opposition to new reactors, and deployment ground to halt. Only now is it coming back to life—ironically, to power AI.
Today, AI has the political wind at its back. One of President Trump’s first acts was to rescind former President Joe Biden’s AI safety guidelines. He now gives priority to dismantling regulatory barriers to AI and competing with China.
But those winds can shift. A poll of roughly 2,000 people by Narrative Strategies, a communications and public relations firm, found just 40% said the AI industry could be “trusted to do the right thing,” well below the 62% to 63% who said that about finance, energy or healthcare. Asked about government regulation, 57% said tech and AI needed more, well above other industries.
AI evangelists believe its sheer economic and computational force make it unstoppable. They better hope so, because it certainly isn’t going to succeed on its popularity."
#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #USA #NeoLuddism #MassUnemployment
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"Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI, and almost without exception, they are senior, experienced coders, who get to decide how they will use these tools. For example, you might ask the AI to generate a set of CSS files to faithfully render a web-page across multiple versions of multiple browsers. This is a notoriously fiddly thing to do, and it's pretty easy to verify if the code works – just eyeball it in a bunch of browsers. Or maybe the coder has a single data file they need to import and they don't want to write a whole utility to convert it.
Tasks like these can genuinely make coders more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about their AI plans for coders, it's clear they're not looking to make some centaurs.
They want to fire a lot of tech workers – 500,000 over the past three years – and make the rest pick up their work with coding, which is only possible if you let the AI do all the gnarly, creative problem solving, and then you do the most boring, soul-crushing part of the job: reviewing the AIs' code.
And because AI is just a word guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are literally statistically indistinguishable from working code (except that they're bugs)."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Productivity #MassUnemployment #AIBubble
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"About 40 per cent of American jobs could be replaced by artificial intelligence, according to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute.
The American consultancy’s analysis found that robots and AI agents could automate more than half of US work hours, both manual and cognitive, using technology that is available today, if companies redesigned how they did things.
Most of the roles at risk involve the kinds of drafting, processing information and routine reasoning that AI agents can do. Hiring is slowing in some such jobs, such as among paralegals, administrative and office support workers and programmers, the research found.
Similarly, dangerous, physical jobs, in warehouses or operating machines, are most likely to be replaced by robots, McKinsey said.
Conversely, a third of US jobs would be difficult to replace with AI because they have uniquely human attributes, such as nursing, the analysis found. Some 70 per cent of the tasks performed by carers and other healthcare workers require the kind of physical presence, empathy, care and dexterity that machines cannot replicate.
Building maintenance and repair work which demands flexibility, judgment and thinking on the job, often in unpredictable environments, is similarly unlikely to be automated."
#AI #GenerativeAI #MassUnemployment #USA #Productivity #Automation
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"Among anxious laptop workers, these trends have fed half-ironic chatter about the coming of a “permanent underclass”: Once AI renders virtually all human labor commercially useless, most people will be condemned to eternal subjugation and precarity. No company will pay you for work that a robot can do better. And no market economy will let you climb the income ladder if your labor has no value. In Silicon Valley, such reasoning has generated a peculiarly dystopian variant of hustle culture: Make your fortune in the next five years, and you’ll claim a place in the perpetual aristocracy of AI owners — fail, and you’ll forever be at their mercy.
All these claims are wildly speculative. It’s not certain that today’s AI labs have functioning business models, much less the wherewithal to develop omnicompetent robots. Yet of all the nightmare scenarios spun by fatalistic futurists, AGI-induced neofeudalism strikes me as among the most plausible.
AGI may or may not decide to liquidate the human race. But it will tank the value of human labor, more or less by definition. We don’t know how ordinary people will fare in a world where the wealthy can do without their talents and exertions. But it is reasonable to worry that the answer is “not too well.” After all, there are already societies in which workers enjoy relatively little economic leverage over elites. And they typically aren’t nice places to be an ordinary person.
It’s therefore worth examining precisely how AI could generate an immutable oligarchy —and what can be done to prevent that from happening."
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/466025/ai-jobs-chatgpt-agi
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"A vast number of jobs advertised on LinkedIn are positions to teach AI models. What happens when the models no longer need the humans and can teach themselves? What happens when these models are then applied across a variety of industries? Other than in niche media, what happens to us, the poor saps put out of work by AI isn’t a topic of political or social conversation.
Every single person I know working in a white collar job is now using AI to do at least a part of their job, an increase which has happened entirely in the last couple of years. Companies are buying it, they are telling the workers to use it, and everyone’s just going “yep, cool, plug me into that machine baby.” It seems inevitable that a level of joblessness that would make the 1920s feel proud is fast coming down the track. And a zombified white collar workforce, unable to shed its liberal politics and rally an ounce of scepticism in the face of digital deindustrialisation, is ushering it in.
That is, unless the AI money bubble pops first.
By some counts the AI bubble is seventeen times larger than the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Ten AI start-ups that haven’t made a dollar in profit between them have grown to a near $1 trillion market value in the past year. Other calculations says that at a $5 trillion market cap AI chip maker Nvidia is now worth one-third of all US GDP. And now the AI worshippers and venture capitalists behind the bubble are just shrugging and saying, of course it’s a bubble, but bubbles are good dontcha know."
https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-ai-machine-men-snatching-our
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #AIBubble #Productivity #MassUnemployment
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"As U.S. corporate profits rise and the stock market hits new highs, investors are reaping the rewards. Yet beneath the surge, companies have cut nearly 1 million jobs this year — the most since 2020, when the pandemic slammed the economy.
The disconnect between soaring company earnings and mounting layoffs amounts to what Chen Zhao, chief global strategist at investment research firm Alpine Macro, calls a "jobless boom." Typically, layoffs accelerate when companies are struggling with declining profitability and need to pare costs.
"This is something that is completely different from a historical playbook," Zhao told CBS News. "It's kind of odd to see Amazon laying off 30,000 people even though the profit is doing really, really well."
At the heart of the issue, Zhao said, is the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, which is boosting business productivity across multiple industries and the economy at large, while also suppressing demand for workers. Although that trend has initially taken root in the technology sector, it is spreading to other industries as businesses adopt AI as a way to boost productivity and lower costs, he noted.
"You have a labor demand that basically has come down to probably 0% in terms of growth, maybe even a mild contraction, even though the economy is doing fine — profits are doing great," he said. "We've never seen anything like that.""
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobless-boom-ai-economy-labor-market-corporate-profits-layoffs/
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"According to Drago and Laine, AGI could fuel an even more extreme version of this dynamic. With the aid of superintelligent robots, the theory goes, capitalists won’t need to curry favor with pesky workers in order to turn a profit. And states won’t rely on ordinary people for tax revenue. To the contrary, as machines condemn most workers to perpetual unemployment, governments will have few funding sources beyond the windfall profits of corporations. The typical person’s economic leverage over public and private powers will be kaput. And states and businesses will have little material incentive to invest in their education or well-being.
In autocratic petrostates, ordinary people can still exert some influence over elites through the tacit threat of revolt. According to some political scientists, fears of inciting a popular rebellion constrain the abuses of kleptocracies, compelling some to fund substantial social benefits.
But Drago and Laine argue that, after AGI, mass publics are liable to lose even this timeless check on oppression. In a world of super-intelligent drones and AI-powered surveillance, they worry, governments will need the consent of trivially few humans to maintain an effective monopoly on violence.
Perhaps, the sheer force of enlightenment ideals or humanitarian fellow feeling will lead the powerful to share the wealth in such a society, anyway. But the behavior of many American tech billionaires and public officials today — when they still depend on ordinary workers for their keep — doesn’t inspire much confidence."
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/466025/ai-jobs-chatgpt-agi
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #AGI #Productivity #MassUnemployment #Capitalism #Inequality
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"Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.
Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.
At facilities designed for superfast deliveries, Amazon is trying to create warehouses that employ few humans at all. And documents show that Amazon’s robotics team has an ultimate goal to automate 75 percent of its operations.
Amazon is so convinced this automated future is around the corner that it has started developing plans to mitigate the fallout in communities that may lose jobs. Documents show the company has considered building an image as a “good corporate citizen” through greater participation in community events such as parades and Toys for Tots."
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"Harris started looking for his first real job months before his graduation from UC Davis this spring. He had a solid résumé, he thought: a paid internship at a civic-consulting firm, years of volunteering at environmental-defense organizations, experience working on farms and in parks as well as in offices, a close-to-perfect GPA, strong letters of recommendation. He would move anywhere on the West Coast, living out of his car if he had to. He would accept a temporary, part-time, or seasonal gig, not just a full-time position. He would do anything—filing paperwork, digging trenches—to build his dream career protecting California’s wildlife and public lands.
He applied to 200 jobs. He got rejected 200 times. Actually, he clarified, he “didn’t get rejected 200 times.” A lot of businesses never responded.
Right now, millions of would-be workers find themselves in a similar position. Corporate profits are strong, the jobless rate is 4.3 percent, and wages are climbing in turn. But payrolls have been essentially frozen for the past four months. The hiring rate has declined to its lowest point since the jobless recovery following the Great Recession. Four years ago, employers were adding four or five workers for every 100 they had on the books, month in and month out. Now they are adding three.
At the same time, the process of getting a job has become a late-capitalist nightmare."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/job-market-hell/684133/
#Capitalism #Unemployment #AI #MassUnemployment #JobMarket #HR
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"For the sake of argument, let’s say that AGI is imminent and, once here, will take everyone’s jobs.1 That means the entire workforce will become economically irrelevant, which means in turn that folks like Musk, who control the AGIs, will have no economic incentive to care about us.
Some researchers have likened the resulting predicament to the “resource curse” (or “poverty paradox”), which describes how countries with rich natural resources are more likely to be impoverished, authoritarian, and corrupt (think of Venezuela, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, etc.). Simplifying things a bit: countries that don’t have natural resources rely mostly on taxes to fund the government. This gives the government an economic incentive to invest in goods like education and infrastructure, because a well-off citizenry will generate more taxable wealth. But if a country can get its wealth directly from natural resources, the incentive to invest in the demos diminishes — hence the plight of many resource-rich countries.
Similarly, if oligarchs like Musk generate all of their wealth through AGI because AGI has made everyone jobless, they’ll have no economic incentive to ensure that the general population is well-off. We should thus expect outcomes similarly atrocious to what you find in resource-rich countries: mass poverty, concentration of power, widespread corruption, etc. On this analogy, AGI is better thought of as a “resource” than a “technology” or “tool.”
Musk, in fact, is already taking steps to create a new company called “Macrohard” that’s run entirely by AI systems."
https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/empty-promises-and-endless-greed-85f
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"4. You don’t need mass unemployment to inspire mass fear—merely its shadow is enough. In the Hollywood and port strikes last year, the vague prospect of automation was enough to spur workers to organize. In both cases, a critical worldwide industry was brought to a halt.
5. What if the same thing happened with teachers? Drivers? Doctors? More?
6. Then again, most American industries aren’t organized as ports.
7. Covid was a natural experiment in what happens when everyone’s sent home with a check and nothing to do. Weed, sports gambling, riots, conspiracy. Our culture has been built on the structure and meaning of work. It’ll take more than UBI to cure this kind of rot.
8. I don’t think policymakers would tolerate job loss past 15%. At that point, they’d step in to start slowing shit down.
9. If there’s anything American voters care about, it’s keeping their jobs. We’ve already seen the backlash against immigrant and offshored labor. If non-white people are intolerably alien, what about getting outcompeted by machines?
10. Most AI backlash is economic anxiety coated in a veneer of social justice. Alfalfa farming consumes 19 times the water that data centers do; there’s no sound environmental reason to boycott Claude but not GPS. When people say “AI is a moral stain,” they really mean: I am scared that I won’t be able to pay my bills."