Eat The Rich!

I think this is really kinda the thing. The exponential degree to which AI has advanced is wild and I really don’t think anyone understands the consequences

Corporations are beholden to the bottom line and will replace anyone and everyone possible regardless of the social good of keeping that job for a human. The extent to which the average job is rendered obsolete is truly understated once we get to not even close to the final form of what AI can be

Even in the near term jobs are so high because so many people are leaning into gig economy and Uber/lyft/doordash/etc are basically in a race to who can automate the process without the driver

But ya sure, corporations and the rich are looking out for us and we should let them pay as little as possible. Neato gang

7 years ago or so when bill gross still ran PIMCO he put out an essay to shareholders warning people the advancements of AI and advancements yet to come not only would eliminate blue collar work in its entirety with no possible replacement but that we’d get advanced enough that some/a lot of white collar jobs would be made redundant as well. I see no reason to believe as predictions are starting to hit reality that we aren’t barreling towards that reality

Oh puh lease. It's always guys that sit in front of a computer all day long staring at a computer screen saying this crap.

I convert commercial office buildings to residential and have done millions in renovations in the last few years. I'm small league mini developer but I still know what I am talking about.

I'd be surprised in the next 10 years if 1 job gets replaced with AI in my industry. 1.

- Buying the office building is a bunch of white collar workers. But I am still going to be hiring: human engineer, human architect, human evaluator, human environmental specialist, human accountant, human lawyer, human bank director, human energy efficiency expert, human property inspector / human real estate broker.

- Blue collar work: Every single damn trade from -> Demo / roughing / electrical / plumber / interior systems / flooring / kitchens / painting / cleaners / bricklayers / roofers, will all be done by human hands.

The day an iROBOT from Will Smith's 2004 iRobot comes into production, then you guys can talk. Until then. Give a it a break. Some humans will be replaced. The rest will be more productive. We will be fine.

Well if you say so

You guys 1000% overrate the consequences down the line, which leads you to false assumptions about the future, which leads you to false ideas about what should be done today.

"We will all lose our jobs in 2 years to rich company AI so let's tax the rich 1000% today!"

I do cut the checks to the contractor that hires all these workers, so yeah, I do get a say who works on my job sites.

We are no where close to having Grok Plumbing AI bot coming to my buildings, climbing stairs, and changing toilets.

Ok

Social media has successfully peddled the doomsday scenario in every area of life for the last 15 years - mostly as a money grab, and it really ****ed up a lot of people's mental health.

The next gens kids will have the better understanding on why the current keyboard warriors have completely lost their minds in fear of the world ending from several fronts from full fledged horseshit feed when their lives could have been great if only they haden't of fret over the stupidest ****.

I work in an industry that has had mass layoffs for a 100+bln company in an active hiring freeze that has already gotten the ball rolling on high 5 figure jobs being fully automated and are experimenting on the low 6 figure jobs being automatable

I’m not fretting, I have no choice but to adapt in any scenario, but let’s not sit here pretending this is an overstated fear. The only reason it hasn’t happened in totality is because technology hasn’t caught up with corporate desire, but let’s not sit here and pretend if your average company could press a button and replace a human job with an advanced iteration of chatgpt they wouldn’t. It’s naive, wreckless, and downright ignorant to pretend that wouldn’t happen

The economy needs the bottom 95% of folks to be able to eat, sleep, and buy products from the companies that make them. Your experiences could certainly be different but we currently have an unemployment rate of 3.9%.

It's a different conversation, but in a perfect world, which im sure it won't be executed as efficiently, one of the goals of AI is to give the opportunity for the average person to sit on their ass and be able to pay that person a form of UBI through the added revenue increase that these businesses make from firing those people. But people are still working at a high rate rn.

I absolutely agree with this but the problem is this is incumbent on corporations en masse recognizing this and acting accordingly. Given the amount of resources being used faster than they can be renewed it’s clear ‘greater good’ isn’t the focus so I can’t sit here operating on the assumption that companies will focus on marginal losses for sustainability

We’re basically paving the road while walking on it and nobody will have a solution. The gross piece I referenced was basically a ‘we need UBI and here’s why’ and while I don’t think we’re there yet it’s not out of the realm of possibility to think we’re going to be there sooner than later. Nvidia’s meteoric rise is pretty much evidence AI expansion is the forefront

More doom and gloom.

Corporate America went to the assembly line the moment they could 100 years ago and that was supposed to make workers irrelevant in the car factories.

100 years later, there are thousands of machines in these factories pumping out cars by the thousands a day and somehow these manufacturers still employ hundreds of thousands of employees.

Mass layoffs and hiring freeze in company? Pump the breaks, its over for humans.

Listen man I obviously hope im wrong, but you’re being hilariously naive

I’m actually in the same situation - very large company, huge job eliminations, many many jobs being replaced my automation. I don’t believe it’s a bad thing, but it would be silly to pretend it isn’t happening.

They are the safest types of job by far.

Not sure there's enoiugh of them to support much of a capitalist economy.

People are still in denial. They grasp on to the fact that in past new jobs have replaced automated tasks. What they miss is that we're now entering the stage of replicating human skills rather than automating jobs.

It does seem though that this idea of “just tax the rich” is far too simplistic. I doubt that billionaires have much, if any, income to actually tax. So really you are talking about taxing corporations and capital gains, which is much more complicated than taxing income in practice.

Tax their wealth. They are rich. They don’t work. They don’t have income. They don’t make wages.

This is an interesting point. When I was growing up I had elderly relatives who feared "the end times" and all sorts of menacing catastrophes, and it was understood that they were confused and out of touch. But in the current generation it is people aged 25-45 talking and behaving this way. Very bizarre.

Some or many of those blue collar jobs will be safe, at least for the time being, but lawyers and accountants are at risk of AI doing it at least as well and far cheaper, and you’ll have to use those or become uncompetitive.

Jobs get destroyed all the time, but the claim was they they were getting destroyed in aggregate and that's simply not happening

If jobs are made obsolete en masse that frees up time for humans to do other things. Presuming the companies that enact the automation continue to pay taxes, the productivity benefits can still flow through to the rest of society via public spending and redistribution. Most office jobs are terrible and soul-crushing to begin with, and their being done by automation is presumably as good a thing as crushing manual labor being done by machines instead of humans. Humans should look towards work that doesn't require them to be pseudo-computers; work that has a human touch that is not readily replaceable by software.

One employer that has mostly been immune to job cuts due to automation gains is the government, who will presumably continue to hire more and more people for various admin roles, despite the abundance of productivity tools that should theoretically have made most of these jobs obsolete.

yes, same thing happened when desk computers arrived.

Pretty much. Mainly at first (I worked with them in the 80s) they replaced typewriters in the secretaries pool because of easy edits, then databases on a LAN replaced manual purchasing and invoicing systems etc.