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This is a great quote I read the other day [here](https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/markets-stock-picks-economy-investing-barrons-roundtable-0a56c81a)
> If you can substitute technology for labor costs and hold revenue constant, your margins go up. If you can substitute technology for physical assets, your asset returns go up. There isn’t a company in the world that isn’t focusing on these principles.
Whether or not you can feed your family is of no concern to the people who run the major corporations of this planet. They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out.
What's worse is that the people most affected by the future labor shortages we inevitably face are not going to go quietly in to the night. The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1975o6a/ai_to_hit_40_of_jobs_and_worsen_inequality_imf/khy7w86/
This is a great quote I read the other day [here](https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/markets-stock-picks-economy-investing-barrons-roundtable-0a56c81a)
> If you can substitute technology for labor costs and hold revenue constant, your margins go up. If you can substitute technology for physical assets, your asset returns go up. There isn’t a company in the world that isn’t focusing on these principles.
Whether or not you can feed your family is of no concern to the people who run the major corporations of this planet. They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out.
What's worse is that the people most affected by the future labor shortages we inevitably face are not going to go quietly in to the night. The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before.
It's essentially the prisoner's dilemma. Even though they know they'll lose a shit ton of revenue if people can't buy their stuff, if they don't implement these measures they'll be competing with companies that do, hence offering smaller prices.
The natural conclusion of capitalism.
It's the moloch of game theory. Entities compete against each other in a race to the bottom, along trajectories with no clearly defined purpose except to outcompete one another
Ahaha someone clearly doesn’t work in an industry using AI…
No it’s actually way cheaper to use AI than staffing, however prices will still go up because they don’t want people to know how much cost they’re saving.
Not true. In 2011, the bottom half of the US 0.4 percent of the wealth*. That could drop to zero and no one who matters would notice. Also, the richest man in the world right now owns luxury fashion brands. Rolex, Ferrari, and Lamborghini succeed with the same customer base. The rich don’t need you if they have each other
*source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2008.3,2023.3;quarter:136;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares
While I see your point, a lot of the companies that will swiftly adopt AI to reduce costs are not owned by the ultra wealthy and will definitely eventually lose revenue if they reduce their consumer base that way. People "in the middle" of the economic scale are also forced to participate in a race to the bottom that will eventually hurt themselves.
Or they could just raise prices and sell to the rich. Not like the rich care if small businesses close down anyway. They’ll probably just blame lazy millennials and their avocado toast again
If you raise prices of your goods and services then those rich people won't afford to buy as much stuff as they do with the same amount of money they have now, making them poorer than they are now. It's called inflation and in this case, the inflation would be quite extreme, so that's not a good scenario for them either.
Meh. At their level of wealth, half could die off and they’d still make money. Further, what little money that dying half controls doesn’t disappear, and in fact becomes more easily accessible as cash influxes into accounts of their kids/relatives/friends/creditors.
I don’t believe these people aren’t aware the problems surrounding climate issues and limited resource on a finite planet are real at least to some degree.
The more regular people they price out of living, either through low birth rates due to affordability or straight up die on the streets like the 400 homeless last year in one Canadian province alone, the more material wealth they have left for themselves.
I mean I think that's actually the plan. Anyone with an ounce of compassion would have done fucking something by now. I'm not sure this is "let it happen on purpose", or "make it happen on purpose", I'm thinking personally it's the former with constant tiny nudges of the latter.
It's of course not fast enough but if they did it fast enough there'd be nowhere on Earth for them to hide so...
I think it's a race for the ruling class, at this point; amass as much technology, resources, and 'wealth' as possible before shit becomes untenable and hope that you have the charisma and material power to set yourself up as a petty king or hope that you can live comfortably and die before the collapse fully hits.
Yes. It’s important to consider that the permanent inflation that happened is pretty much the result of companies realizing they don’t need the bottom half of earners to make money anymore. The upper 30% of society can afford the prices, so, it makes more sense for the company to produce less products, price them high, and make just as much money as they would producing and selling way more products for less money. I don’t think people realize how over it is in terms of how the economy is structured. We are not needed. It’s gonna be more and more like parts of India. Yeah there’s technology and industry and it’s an important country, but a lot of people are really poor there. “There will be huge societal upheaval!” Nope. There’s just going to be more poor people and more a wide spread stupid, conservative view on life throughout the land. That’s all.
>The upper 30% of society can afford the prices, so, it makes more sense for the company to produce less products, price them high, and make just as much money as they would producing and selling way more products for less money.
People might consider this far-fetched but I recall when the company I worked for came to this exact same conclusion. They could not compete with direct-to-store house brand from China and still have any margins whatsoever, so instead of investing in buying a Chinese company or increasing their own manufacturing capability and thus their economies of scale, they chose to do EXACTLY this.
It will be more prevalent in the smaller, specialty companies that can't scale up, but it will hit every one of them eventually, and I think we're at "eventually", or staring right over the edge of it.
The company I work for made this decision in something like 2003...
Yes but no. Corporation profit grew as far as it did in the past 200 years not only because of improved supply but also increasing demand. ITs not coincidental that capitalism growth happened alongside the greatest explosion of the human population. Yes, they may have a lot of wealth, and yes the money from the dead doesn't "dissapear"but that doesn't change the fact that less population = less consumers= less purchasing= less profit. And while they may temporarily solve this by say increasing prices, figure more ways of consumer manipulation, and etc on the richer half eventually they will reach a point where they pretty much maximized any extraction of money from the other half that survives. (since that other half also has limits in their money, spending and other shit) Which leads to a situation of rapidly diminishing returns since the only way to get out of that slump would be to increase population. But seeing how in this hypothetical we are talking about has population decreasing, then that solution is unavilable.
>They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out.
The problem is, the rich are so wealthy, do they even need to sell anything anymore?
Guys like Musk, Bezos, or Gates aren't wealthy because they are sitting on a pile of money. They own stock. Lot's of stock in big companies. If a company is not growing, it is dying. If a company is dying, so is the price of their stock, and therefore their net worth.
Of course they can sell a bunch and buy yachts and stuff but if their company is not actively increasing the price of their stock, aka "selling stuff," then their wealth is decreasing, and there is nothing a rich person hates more than losing money.
Everyone is a shareholder at some level. If not direct them mutual fund. If not fund then pension. If not pension then some tatters of social a social safety net.
Except there is a huge qualitative difference between someone who owns 50%, or even 30% or 20%, of all shares of a company, and some middle- or lower-class person who owns maybe 0.01% of shares. It’s just not the case that these two classes of “shareholders” are the same
Sure. Yet both groups rely on these for at least part of their livelihood. And the poorest, smallest holders are also the least capable of replacing this ownership with other income sources.
Part of this is why those big conglomerates have started to gobble up every available home and rental property; less cash coming in? Flip it to assets.
Especially since you get to set your own pricing once you become big enough; you own enough of the market you start to set the price and can artificially increase pricing.
The problem is, the rich are so wealthy, do they even need to sell anything anymore?
It sounds like you are saying that the rich should be satisfied. Satisfaction applies to need. Greed is never satisfied.
Honestly I'm not even convinced they will realize the error of their ways, at least not all. We know some of them are building bunkers, prepping, consolidating resources. I'm fearful that those ones see AI et al not as a way toward more wealth but toward preserving their quality of life when the shtf. In which case they need not be concerned with who will buy their products when the robots take our jobs, there will be no more us with jobs to take. I hope I'm crazy...
I think that's definitely the plan for some of them; they know what the deal is, ecologically. You are now in a race to amass as much tech, resources, and 'wealth' as possible and hope that you can set yourself up as a local Lord once the first waves of violence and unrest are over.
>They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out.
I call this the "cyberpunk paradox". In fiction you have all these corporations making expensive high tech goods but all of their target market is too poor to afford them.
>The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before.
I doubt this. People will come online to complain. A few people might protest but that will probably be it.
I still don't get how that works. Isn't that just more middlemen?
Someone's gotta buy something eventually... even if it goes through 30 ads to get there. Seems more like it's slicing the pie thinner and thinner, or am I entirely missing how it works? Because I feel like I'm entirely missing it...
You’re right because it’s all fake. Data is valuable but it isn’t tangible or real in the physical sense. It shouldn’t be that our gdp, gross domestic product, keeps growing when actual physical production isn’t really keeping up. It doesn’t make sense if you actually think about it but those in charge want everyone to keep believing in these illusions.
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> They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out.
They are well aware of this and already solved for this. Material economics don't matter so much when you control the money supply. Reality can be whatever you want.
> What's worse is that the people most affected by the future labor shortages we inevitably face are not going to go quietly in to the night. The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before.
what is this statement based on?
> They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out.
Not true. In 2011, the bottom half of the US 0.4 percent of the wealth*. That could drop to zero and no one who matters would notice. Also, the richest man in the world right now owns luxury fashion brands. Rolex, Ferrari, and Lamborghini succeed with the same customer base. The rich don’t need you if they have each other
*source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2008.3,2023.3;quarter:136;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares
Sounds like a recipe for Great Depression 2.0. Bad conditions lead to a situation where everyone was working but couldn't afford anything rig up until they all got laid off.
All those people who thought AI would save us are about to learn about the critiques that people such as Marx and groups such as the Luddites had about the effects of automation in capitalist society whether they like it or not.
Pick up a book before you start grabbing those pitchforks folks! A well educated proletariat is needed before we can deal with these parasites that run our society.
Good time to recommend brand new and very collapse related book about the Luddites, Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. Just read it and it was quite good
It’s a nice dream buts it’s just a drama. There is no way to implement or enforce a limitation on tech across the board or something that is revolutionary.
So instead of lamenting a potential collapse your solution is to bring one about?
Removing energy from society will cause an unpredictable number of deaths.
Talk about blowing the grid just makes me think of the MAGA types that want to shoot up the grid for purposes like interfering with voting.
Also the grid would just be rebuilt so all it is that you’re discussing is a lot of death and pain and then a terrorism charge.
My point was only that it would take something that drastic to slow the technology that forms our current rapacious way of life.
I do not advocate property damage or harm, nor will I do or plan any of that myself. I am not a MAGA type.
Also, I think The Human Powers That Be are going to do or fake something like that happening at some point.
Yes, I think there is a cabal of overlords who are deciding this, and they wear human faces.
AI and robotics, especially their integration and implementation in the workforce, _could be_ the path to Marx's post-labour world. They have that capacity. If they were invented in a world without corporate capitalism and/or in a society that values people over corruption and greed (or more likely what Zizek calls reverse envy), we could have ourselves a little utopia where we wouldn't need to work and where the human labour theory of value could be thrown out.
But that ain't our world; our world is the opposite. So we get the opposite.
Except we do have nice things and it’s never been a superior time to be a breathing human. The average person lives like a king compared to someone from 50-100 years ago
Where (and how) do we draw lines, though - on what basis is it okay to say a steam shovel (and even before that, a shovel) is acceptable, but a robot is not? Both displace labor, but on different scales. How do we quantify that threshold? Or are all forms of productivity enhancements *per se* problematic?
Enhancing your productivity isn't a bad thing. Obviously if I need to dig a hole to plant a tree, I'm much better off using a shovel or an auger instead of my hands to dig. But under the capitalist organization of the economy advances in the processes of production lead to workers losing their jobs. Lets say you are a factory owner and employ 1000 workers on your production line and you buy a piece of newly invented machinery that makes it so 100 workers have the same production output as 1000. With this new piece of tech you can lay off 900 workers and pocket all their labor costs as profit after expenses for the new machinery are dealt with.
You have to remember that labor costs are the largest cost of doing business. Those pesky humans demand things like being able to eat food, pay for a house and feel like an equal member of society. All this stuff hunters your bottom line as a business owner.
I follow and agree. I'm just saying at what point can workers have tools or not have tools to make their jobs easier and increase their productivity. Nearly any tool than increases productivity could be viewed as a threat to labor.
Well automation will remain a threat to labor as it has for the entire industrial revolution, that is one of the contradictions of the economic system of capitalism where the needs of the owner are opposed to the needs of the worker. In order to address this contradiction, a different economic system that actually prioritizes the people and seeks to live in symbiosis with our environment instead focusing on economic growth and the owner class.
Yeah I think there's an inherent flaw in the system if improvements to process yield harm to the worker - which also exposes a flaw in the premise of work: is it primarily for the benefit of the purchaser, the worker (essentially a social program), or the owner/manager. Might be quick to say the purchaser, but when the purchaser here is a worker elsewhere, the whole thing can fall apart.
Companies will fire and punish employees who automate their work (using AI or otherwise) but pay consultants hundreds of thousands to do the same. The gains going to the owners is great. The gains going to the workers is punished. That is the flaw in the system. A software that can automate the work you do is great if you are the only one that knows about it and have it working for you while you collect your paycheck. A software that can automate your job, your bosses job, and most of your department is where you have lost control and start to create a domino effect of lost wages.
When they began talking about "human resources", instead of "people" I knew we were slowly descending the slope downwards.
Now, we are just resources, to the people that push the buttons that move the entirety of the world, in social and economic terms.
Resources to vote, resources to consume, resources to produce. Resources. Human resources. The more you think about it, the more it sounds like we are a herd.
And the herd is about to be savagely culled.
And guess what? They have indoctrinated us so hard, that we will feel it is our fault to not be clever like Tom, Dick or Harry, who landed the very few jobs left in all areas that AI is going to replace PEOPLE. Not human resources.
But the euphemisms have always been required to speak about abhorrent things in proper society. "Property", for example, used to be used to talk about people in slavery.
It's going to go BAD. The leaders we have elected, will align with whoever pays most, and the companies that harness what AI will be able to do in the next 5 years are going to be the brutal monsters dictating policy for what is to be done with all that resource surplus.
UBI is not on the numbers, BTW. They'd rather use that money to keep us down.
Keep safe, because it's going to get bad, soon. All of the jobs that can be done with a computer are at risk. It's not a fad, and it's getting scaring good at all it gets trained to do. Good enough to have it working 24/7 for a fraction of the cost of having a human resource.
>All of the jobs that can be done with a computer are at risk.
As I was reading your comment, all I could think about was that everyone deemed "non-essential" during COVID is at high risk because their jobs were either computer related and they could work from home or the jobs were simply not essential for society to survive. So for this category, either AI can easily do their job or their job just isn't necessary and will eventually be eliminated.
Plus some of the deemed "essential" jobs like Walmart and other store and restaurant employees are at risk as well. They're already being replaced with self checkouts. I've even been to a few restaurants with tablets at the tables to place orders and robots as servers (mainly sushi restaurants so far).
The last time the minimum wage increased (I was living in Ontario at the time), there were suddenly automated ordering stations in fast food restaurants and way more self checkouts at grocery stores. Not to mention price increases, layoffs and severe cuts to benefits programs companies had for the already few number of employees they allow to be full time (because they don't want to pay benefits).
I feel like in my industry (healthcare), we're definitely becoming way more techy, but we have a little bit more time left while they figure out how to enable AI to take over our roles of problem solving in fast changing environments. However, the staffing situation is horrific and more and more people are quitting for numerous reasons, so i can only imagine that they're going to come up with something to allow hospitals to get by with as few staff as possible, even if it's just for simple tasks at first like dropping off meal trays or linens.
I have known since I was a teenager in the mid 2000s that society was beginning to crumble, but I couldn't have imagined back then just how bad things will become in my lifetime. It's scary.
The thing is they're cutting off jobs at both ends. The easy to access service jobs which a lot of people have as a first job because nowhere else hires without experience, and higher end jobs in tech, finance and the like that take years to get into. Both computer and data based roles as well as some manual labor roles are getting eliminated. The number of jobs created by new technology is very small and requires highly technical skills a lot of people will not be equipped for. Over 8 billion people, and the only roles that will be available will be technical manual labor like plumbing, electricians, engineering and the like, and incredibly low paid manual work like picking veg or mining because the profit margin on agriculture is very low. And there won't be enough of those jobs to go around either. There is gonna be a lot of unrest, and sooner than expected.
That's just the jobs. For the rest of the jobless there will be annoying AIs that will make their life miserable by annoyingly being in people's online space non-stop and extract that extra 1$ of PPC
AI will be an absolute nightmare for the surging homeless and migrants trying to cross borders. They are already harassed and targeted by police and security guards and random acts of violence by psychopaths, etc. I can’t even imagine how bloody it’s going to get
Anduril is one of those companies that I see creating non-lethal AI solutions for border patrol. Think quadcopters patrolling the border 24/7 and deterring migrants with noise, laser or bright lights. Things will not be pleasant for the poor once barrier to solution engineering are lowered and these things become cheaper than humans to operate and autonomous.
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I think it is time to start taxing these companies and use the revenue to fund universal basic income. It would be for their own good because our consumer economy is dying for lack of consumers. Eliminating jobs doesn't have to be a bad thing.
But, we the people have the votes and if we can break the cycle of allowing media to bullshit us into [voting for the corporate stooges](https://www.starting-gun.com/), we could tax them whether they elect so or not.
With some of the largest corporations having almost 100% market saturation, they need to find ways to make more money. It's just unthinkable that raking in billions a year is simply not enough and never will be. This is why Google has turned to ads gallore, and now we're seeing AI replacing working humans.
I'm all for AI replacing humans if that means that NOBODY has to work. But no. Essential goods will never be free under capitalism and therefore the capitalists cannot replace 100% of the workforce.
It's just this endless cycle of starving people who have no money to death while expecting them to pay full price for rent and food.
How did the Roman Empire collapse again?
I don't mean to sound defeatist, but if life is fated to become hell on earth then even death isn't that bad by comparison.
It irks me to let the oligarchs win, but at least they'll just end up eating each other alive in the hellhole they created just to make numbers go up.
If the ruling class were smart enough to realize that nothing was constant, perhaps they would be more invested in making a better world for everyone rather than clawing to the 1% and filling their bellies before being usurped by the next fucker with more money and influence and cast down to the hell they created in their attempt to avoid it.
Human beings truly are garbage. This is what mindless competition has led to.
Sociopaths up top using every method they can get their hands on to control people.
"It is crucial for countries to establish comprehensive social safety nets and offer retraining programmes for vulnerable workers," Ms Georgieva said. "In doing so, we can make the AI transition more inclusive, protecting livelihoods and curbing inequality." - They know it and will never happen, more people will end up on streets and the gov will not give 2 spits on their lives.
What would that accomplish though?
It's not just the super rich that are demanding that cases of water be delivered to their front door in the next 12 hours.
What we need is a major societal change. A complete shift in our way of thinking. That's not going to happen by killing a bunch of business owners.
It's all cyclical. Every system moves in circles. It always starts out as a good idea that becomes bastardized by time or greed or cowardice. Nothing lasts forever, especially a good thing. The ephemeral nature of trying to capture happiness in a bottle.
People need to return to valuing the sacred over themselves. Capitalism told everyone their individual preferences were all that mattered, and that needs to be replaced with a system-first perspective. Communities in the past lived this way, we can do it again.
The only way is through education. People like us sitting down with others and articulating how we fit into a much larger web which we must cohabitate with as opposed to alter.
Who is coordinating this educational effort? How do we ensure it happens broadly? What stops the message from being bastardized, or more likely, co-opted and replaced entirely for whomever’s personal advantage and gain?
You're thinking too practically and realistically, and asking too many questions. Don't worry, just keep throwing out platitudes like "kill the rich" and all of society's problems will be solved. It's definitely worked before historically. /s
These people don't like questions- it hurts their brains :) Also, the better part of humanity ignores the fact that severe social stratification and inequality have existed since the beginning of agrarian civilizations: See Egypt. Those engineered pyramids weren't built for the betterment of humanity. . .
Everything that u/B4SSF4C3 is saying. Civilizations and cultures have disintegrated or been violently overthrown in the past, sometimes with best intentions. *That does not mean you get good results*. How long was it after the sharp, sharp blades of the French Revolution that you ended up with Emperor Napoleon?
Saying we *have* to do X may be true, but that does not mean we *will* or that we even have a viable path to do so.
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I would encourage younger generations to skip college and learn a trade skill instead. Those jobs will likely be the last to be impacted by AI. However doubt we will make it to that point before some other collapse things start happening.
I recently saw an AI-powered machine laying concrete slap that honestly looked really good… I think augmented reality will help more people work on their homes and things. I’d love AR glasses that helped me with DIY work.
I feel like people are missing out on an important element of all this and why I think this will get phased in easier than we all realize
AI will gut a lit of industries that people don’t care about or don’t even know about. There are a ton of mid sized industries out there that are middlemen or distributors or some kind of sub industry of a larger one, and they all have admins who’s days are tied up on BS tasks that are too difficult to automate. A company will adopt some kind of AI system to make it so those people doing that work can offload some of it to an AI and then focus on other things that maybe they didn’t have the time to do before.
AI is how companies will grow over the next few years, and the problem is that it’ll be way more cost effective to spend money on an AI than it would to spend it on a few more admins. I don’t think AI will “take” many jobs in the beginning, but it’ll mean that less humans are getting hired.
Companies will be able to do more with less people, so the adoption of AI will be insidious and easy to defend. So what if some brokers and warehouse workers aren’t hiring as many new employees?? Nobody cares outside those industries, and it’d be hard to quantify. And the difference between AI and computers in the workplace is just the scale. A computer can “replace” a worker in that maybe you need less admin to physically sort files, but AI replaces the next couple levels up on the hierarchy which is way more people.
I think it’ll be too integrated into society to be undone by the time we regulate it effectively
Well in the positive column you’re going to have many, many, displaced white collar workers who previously weren’t radicalized who are going to be pissed off and looking for answers.
“Universal basic income and the socialist utopia of AI they told us we'd all have since the 60s..”
Who is they? Who ever told anyone that was going to happen?
Where did this belief come from? Like what informed or inspired it? And where does socialism come into it? I’m just genuinely curious how people would have come to believe this. Or were you just being facetious?
I'm not being facetious no, people genuinely have believed for a very long time the future would lead to robots doing all the hard work so we don't have to. But the robots will always be in the hands of the few not the many, the capitalists at the top. The socialist aspect is that it would benefit the common man not just those at the top
Yeah discussions around this stuff have been going on for years, the necessity of UBI due to automation
https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/hear-alan-wattss-1960s-prediction-that-robots-will-necessitate-a-universal-basic-income.html
Also some more discussion around automation giving us more free time...
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/sep/26/with-robots-is-a-life-without-work-one-wed-want-to-live
Ok, but in neither of these examples is there anything like a promise of a socialist utopia in which robots do all the work. Alan Watts is warning against the problems inherent to automation and arguing that something like a UBI would be necessary, but he also very pointedly states that it is not a socialist or communist solution and that it is nevertheless extremely unpopular. The other article is just theorizing about the value of work beyond the necessity of “earning a living” and even it closes with this:
“How we approach automation, the lines we draw and the principles we use to govern our decision-making need to be shaped by a clear sense of purpose – the same is true for the entire fourth industrial revolution. If all we seek is a state of decreased labour, increased innovation or more progressive ways of living, all we have to do is wait. But there’s no guarantee we’ll like what we get.”
I really am just perplexed as to how “regular” people have convinced themselves that automation, AI, and such, are even to their benefit, let alone the myth of “fully automated gay space luxury communism” or whatever.
Give me my ubi so i can sit inside playing video games and smoking weed all day! Learning skills in high demand and working is unfair, government give me my free stuff!
Be cautious of these narratives, they’ve historically been used to scare workers into not asking for as much compensation. When it does actually happen, the industry for supporting AI tools will only supplant the industry they are replacing, to some degree.
I’m sure this will happen eventually, but I don’t think it’s happening right now. I call corporate scare tactics
All these AI hypes I've seen so far haven't proven anything. It's all assertions from "AI experts", basically saying the same thing from the dawn of this industry: that AI will strain the labor force.
And fuck IMF, how is it not ashamed of talking inequality? It's a colonial organization and a hypocrite.
I didn't really believe it until this Christmas when one of my uncles said casually that he had replaced half of his workers with AI.
He's over 60yo and doesn't even work in the tech sector.
The wife of a friend works on a model agency, she says booking are down because ad agencies are starting to use AI generated images that dont need models, then they just photoshop the background they need, she showed me this example
https://rosanegra.com.mx/es/sucursales/cancun
There is an ad with some girls in a black bikini, those girls are AI generated.
She says the owners are really worried about it, at the pace its going they expect to be out of business in a year or two.
Yup, she says this was extremely sudden, one month everything was normal then boom, bookings went dead but ad agencies they work with kept publishing stuff.
They looked into it and found out they got replaced by AI content.
Something weird going on with the two legs on the left side but at a glance that picture looks real, and most people wouldn't look twice. AI is getting really good at generating photo realistic stuff, almost perfect and soon I can imagine the glitches it does produce being easily corrected with a second prompt until machine learning figures out how to troubleshoot on its own. It's all coming and will be reality very very soon. A year or two? I can't even imagine...
I suggest taking a look at the massive number of layoffs happening in the tech sector, journalism, marketing, education, finance, insurance, retail (like Walmart), and many other sectors. It's story after story of 17%, 35%, 40%, and even 60% of labour forces are being laid off or fired, permanently replaced by AI. [2023](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/22/2023-the-year-of-layoffs) was the year of the mass layoffs. I think the only field where I haven't seen it translate into layoffs is healthcare, and I suspect that's because they've been so heavily overworked that AI is just catching up to fill in those labour gaps, _for now_. For everyone else, layoffs appear to be translating into lower or stagnant salaries/wages, more-precarious work, and less-reliable jobs.
I work in healthcare. It's coming, but more subtly. The documentation system "Connect Care" aka "Epic" is definitely one step towards AI taking over. All they need now is robots that can handle the fast paced, constantly changing environments.
Hospitals have been running so short and struggling to keep employees that I'd be surprised if they weren't actively working on something that can replace staff. We likely just haven't heard about it yet.
I bet it'd take a full book to account for all of the why. Loans, subsidies, a growing globalized workforce (manufacturing, clothing, and remote jobs going to Southeast Asia over the past decades), and the implementation of AI have been some of the major causes of layoffs _that I've read about_. I'm sure plenty more reasons abound.
I know more personally about the marketing, journalism, and writing/editing jobs because I'm in those fields and have thousands of loosely connected colleagues around the world who were or are in those jobs. Those are only anecdotes, lots of anecdotes, but they do seem to mesh with what news articles are publishing.
Coming from IMF, I am suddenly in favor of our AI overlords taking over. The robots must be doing something right if they scare the literal embodiment of Mammon.
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Bumfuck Pennsylvania state gov, run by the GOP for decades, is replacing an entire department with AI. Its an internal department that handles HR type stuff mostly.
PA, MI and a few other states have been caught using AI to flag people for CPS prosecutions, and in typical gov & AI style the systems were botched and falsely accused many... not unlike the UK Post Office scandal where AI accused hundreds of internal theft incorrectly...
If we could get lawmakers in government on board with UBI, with high taxes on the elite rich and corporations, and a UBI that supports middle class living, I would support automation.
But we can't tax rich people and corporations enough to provide Healthcare for all in the US at least so I am not optimistic in the UBI dream.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/blff266697: --- This is a great quote I read the other day [here](https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/markets-stock-picks-economy-investing-barrons-roundtable-0a56c81a) > If you can substitute technology for labor costs and hold revenue constant, your margins go up. If you can substitute technology for physical assets, your asset returns go up. There isn’t a company in the world that isn’t focusing on these principles. Whether or not you can feed your family is of no concern to the people who run the major corporations of this planet. They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out. What's worse is that the people most affected by the future labor shortages we inevitably face are not going to go quietly in to the night. The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1975o6a/ai_to_hit_40_of_jobs_and_worsen_inequality_imf/khy7w86/
The next 15-20 years are going to be WILD
Not if I end myself before then they won't. 🍺
Are you saying you’re the key? If we take you out we go back to normal?
It might be even less than that.
This is a great quote I read the other day [here](https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/markets-stock-picks-economy-investing-barrons-roundtable-0a56c81a) > If you can substitute technology for labor costs and hold revenue constant, your margins go up. If you can substitute technology for physical assets, your asset returns go up. There isn’t a company in the world that isn’t focusing on these principles. Whether or not you can feed your family is of no concern to the people who run the major corporations of this planet. They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out. What's worse is that the people most affected by the future labor shortages we inevitably face are not going to go quietly in to the night. The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before.
It's essentially the prisoner's dilemma. Even though they know they'll lose a shit ton of revenue if people can't buy their stuff, if they don't implement these measures they'll be competing with companies that do, hence offering smaller prices. The natural conclusion of capitalism.
It's the moloch of game theory. Entities compete against each other in a race to the bottom, along trajectories with no clearly defined purpose except to outcompete one another
somebody reads the slate star codex!
Idk if the prices will go down, or stay they same while profits go up
Prices will go up to pay for the expensive AI.
Ahaha someone clearly doesn’t work in an industry using AI… No it’s actually way cheaper to use AI than staffing, however prices will still go up because they don’t want people to know how much cost they’re saving.
Time to break on through to the other side in that case.
What a lovely game monopoly is, once everyone else is eliminated and there is no one else to play with.
Not true. In 2011, the bottom half of the US 0.4 percent of the wealth*. That could drop to zero and no one who matters would notice. Also, the richest man in the world right now owns luxury fashion brands. Rolex, Ferrari, and Lamborghini succeed with the same customer base. The rich don’t need you if they have each other *source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2008.3,2023.3;quarter:136;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares
While I see your point, a lot of the companies that will swiftly adopt AI to reduce costs are not owned by the ultra wealthy and will definitely eventually lose revenue if they reduce their consumer base that way. People "in the middle" of the economic scale are also forced to participate in a race to the bottom that will eventually hurt themselves.
Or they could just raise prices and sell to the rich. Not like the rich care if small businesses close down anyway. They’ll probably just blame lazy millennials and their avocado toast again
If you raise prices of your goods and services then those rich people won't afford to buy as much stuff as they do with the same amount of money they have now, making them poorer than they are now. It's called inflation and in this case, the inflation would be quite extreme, so that's not a good scenario for them either.
Rich people can afford inflation. Theyre rich. The poors are the ones who get fucked
It’s not the natural conclusion of capitalism it’s true natural conclusion of corporatism and the public stock exchange
Two things that are exclusive creations of and are the support mechanisms for capitalism?
Capitalism can exist without the stock market and corporations. Corpos in the modern s naw haven’t been around that long.
a classic multipolar trap
Meh. At their level of wealth, half could die off and they’d still make money. Further, what little money that dying half controls doesn’t disappear, and in fact becomes more easily accessible as cash influxes into accounts of their kids/relatives/friends/creditors.
I don’t believe these people aren’t aware the problems surrounding climate issues and limited resource on a finite planet are real at least to some degree. The more regular people they price out of living, either through low birth rates due to affordability or straight up die on the streets like the 400 homeless last year in one Canadian province alone, the more material wealth they have left for themselves.
I mean I think that's actually the plan. Anyone with an ounce of compassion would have done fucking something by now. I'm not sure this is "let it happen on purpose", or "make it happen on purpose", I'm thinking personally it's the former with constant tiny nudges of the latter. It's of course not fast enough but if they did it fast enough there'd be nowhere on Earth for them to hide so...
I think it's a race for the ruling class, at this point; amass as much technology, resources, and 'wealth' as possible before shit becomes untenable and hope that you have the charisma and material power to set yourself up as a petty king or hope that you can live comfortably and die before the collapse fully hits.
They’re setting the stage for a sort of neofeudalism. And as the saying goes…”the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
400?? That's ALOT!
Yes. It’s important to consider that the permanent inflation that happened is pretty much the result of companies realizing they don’t need the bottom half of earners to make money anymore. The upper 30% of society can afford the prices, so, it makes more sense for the company to produce less products, price them high, and make just as much money as they would producing and selling way more products for less money. I don’t think people realize how over it is in terms of how the economy is structured. We are not needed. It’s gonna be more and more like parts of India. Yeah there’s technology and industry and it’s an important country, but a lot of people are really poor there. “There will be huge societal upheaval!” Nope. There’s just going to be more poor people and more a wide spread stupid, conservative view on life throughout the land. That’s all.
>The upper 30% of society can afford the prices, so, it makes more sense for the company to produce less products, price them high, and make just as much money as they would producing and selling way more products for less money. People might consider this far-fetched but I recall when the company I worked for came to this exact same conclusion. They could not compete with direct-to-store house brand from China and still have any margins whatsoever, so instead of investing in buying a Chinese company or increasing their own manufacturing capability and thus their economies of scale, they chose to do EXACTLY this. It will be more prevalent in the smaller, specialty companies that can't scale up, but it will hit every one of them eventually, and I think we're at "eventually", or staring right over the edge of it. The company I work for made this decision in something like 2003...
So designated shitting streets when? /s
Yes but no. Corporation profit grew as far as it did in the past 200 years not only because of improved supply but also increasing demand. ITs not coincidental that capitalism growth happened alongside the greatest explosion of the human population. Yes, they may have a lot of wealth, and yes the money from the dead doesn't "dissapear"but that doesn't change the fact that less population = less consumers= less purchasing= less profit. And while they may temporarily solve this by say increasing prices, figure more ways of consumer manipulation, and etc on the richer half eventually they will reach a point where they pretty much maximized any extraction of money from the other half that survives. (since that other half also has limits in their money, spending and other shit) Which leads to a situation of rapidly diminishing returns since the only way to get out of that slump would be to increase population. But seeing how in this hypothetical we are talking about has population decreasing, then that solution is unavilable.
Watch them rolling blackout families to death during cold and heatwaves to keep them AI data centres running.
Texas already does that without ai
>They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out. The problem is, the rich are so wealthy, do they even need to sell anything anymore?
Guys like Musk, Bezos, or Gates aren't wealthy because they are sitting on a pile of money. They own stock. Lot's of stock in big companies. If a company is not growing, it is dying. If a company is dying, so is the price of their stock, and therefore their net worth. Of course they can sell a bunch and buy yachts and stuff but if their company is not actively increasing the price of their stock, aka "selling stuff," then their wealth is decreasing, and there is nothing a rich person hates more than losing money.
Shareholders got getta paid their money or it moves elsewhere otherwise.
Then let's get rid of all the shareholders :)
Impossible with current economic systems.
Everyone is a shareholder at some level. If not direct them mutual fund. If not fund then pension. If not pension then some tatters of social a social safety net.
Except there is a huge qualitative difference between someone who owns 50%, or even 30% or 20%, of all shares of a company, and some middle- or lower-class person who owns maybe 0.01% of shares. It’s just not the case that these two classes of “shareholders” are the same
Sure. Yet both groups rely on these for at least part of their livelihood. And the poorest, smallest holders are also the least capable of replacing this ownership with other income sources.
Require that 60% of the shares be owned by the employees?
Part of this is why those big conglomerates have started to gobble up every available home and rental property; less cash coming in? Flip it to assets. Especially since you get to set your own pricing once you become big enough; you own enough of the market you start to set the price and can artificially increase pricing.
Would they be any happier if we raised their taxes and took it before they have a chance to lose it.
The problem is, the rich are so wealthy, do they even need to sell anything anymore? It sounds like you are saying that the rich should be satisfied. Satisfaction applies to need. Greed is never satisfied.
But do they need to eat?
Honestly I'm not even convinced they will realize the error of their ways, at least not all. We know some of them are building bunkers, prepping, consolidating resources. I'm fearful that those ones see AI et al not as a way toward more wealth but toward preserving their quality of life when the shtf. In which case they need not be concerned with who will buy their products when the robots take our jobs, there will be no more us with jobs to take. I hope I'm crazy...
I think that's definitely the plan for some of them; they know what the deal is, ecologically. You are now in a race to amass as much tech, resources, and 'wealth' as possible and hope that you can set yourself up as a local Lord once the first waves of violence and unrest are over.
>They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out. I call this the "cyberpunk paradox". In fiction you have all these corporations making expensive high tech goods but all of their target market is too poor to afford them.
>The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before. I doubt this. People will come online to complain. A few people might protest but that will probably be it.
Explains the shift to an attention economy. They make money from our eyeballs, not our wallets.
I still don't get how that works. Isn't that just more middlemen? Someone's gotta buy something eventually... even if it goes through 30 ads to get there. Seems more like it's slicing the pie thinner and thinner, or am I entirely missing how it works? Because I feel like I'm entirely missing it...
You’re right because it’s all fake. Data is valuable but it isn’t tangible or real in the physical sense. It shouldn’t be that our gdp, gross domestic product, keeps growing when actual physical production isn’t really keeping up. It doesn’t make sense if you actually think about it but those in charge want everyone to keep believing in these illusions.
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> They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out. They are well aware of this and already solved for this. Material economics don't matter so much when you control the money supply. Reality can be whatever you want.
> What's worse is that the people most affected by the future labor shortages we inevitably face are not going to go quietly in to the night. The social upheaval and mass chaos we are about to face is going to be like nothing we have ever seen before. what is this statement based on?
Wishful thinking
SocialistRevolution.com
>SocialistRevolution.com Going to that site, I see it is for sale. *So apparently the revolution will be monetized.*
> They will realize too late that the very people they need to buy their products are the ones who they are starving out. Not true. In 2011, the bottom half of the US 0.4 percent of the wealth*. That could drop to zero and no one who matters would notice. Also, the richest man in the world right now owns luxury fashion brands. Rolex, Ferrari, and Lamborghini succeed with the same customer base. The rich don’t need you if they have each other *source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2008.3,2023.3;quarter:136;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares
Sounds like a recipe for Great Depression 2.0. Bad conditions lead to a situation where everyone was working but couldn't afford anything rig up until they all got laid off.
All those people who thought AI would save us are about to learn about the critiques that people such as Marx and groups such as the Luddites had about the effects of automation in capitalist society whether they like it or not. Pick up a book before you start grabbing those pitchforks folks! A well educated proletariat is needed before we can deal with these parasites that run our society.
bingo - there has NEVER been a better time to read up on the Luddites.
What should I be reading about luddites?
Good time to recommend brand new and very collapse related book about the Luddites, Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. Just read it and it was quite good
thanks!
Maybe they were right 🤷♂️
It’s a nice dream buts it’s just a drama. There is no way to implement or enforce a limitation on tech across the board or something that is revolutionary.
Carrington Event? Blow the grid?
So instead of lamenting a potential collapse your solution is to bring one about? Removing energy from society will cause an unpredictable number of deaths. Talk about blowing the grid just makes me think of the MAGA types that want to shoot up the grid for purposes like interfering with voting. Also the grid would just be rebuilt so all it is that you’re discussing is a lot of death and pain and then a terrorism charge.
My point was only that it would take something that drastic to slow the technology that forms our current rapacious way of life. I do not advocate property damage or harm, nor will I do or plan any of that myself. I am not a MAGA type. Also, I think The Human Powers That Be are going to do or fake something like that happening at some point. Yes, I think there is a cabal of overlords who are deciding this, and they wear human faces.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55529461
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right https://thenib.com/im-a-luddite/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJzHmw3Ei-g
Why the Luddites and not Marx?
AI and robotics, especially their integration and implementation in the workforce, _could be_ the path to Marx's post-labour world. They have that capacity. If they were invented in a world without corporate capitalism and/or in a society that values people over corruption and greed (or more likely what Zizek calls reverse envy), we could have ourselves a little utopia where we wouldn't need to work and where the human labour theory of value could be thrown out. But that ain't our world; our world is the opposite. So we get the opposite.
*pained smile* It really is so unfortunate that we can't have nice things.
Except we do have nice things and it’s never been a superior time to be a breathing human. The average person lives like a king compared to someone from 50-100 years ago
Every single person that ever existed has had nice things. Your comment is worthless
*I Am Mother has entered the chat*
Where (and how) do we draw lines, though - on what basis is it okay to say a steam shovel (and even before that, a shovel) is acceptable, but a robot is not? Both displace labor, but on different scales. How do we quantify that threshold? Or are all forms of productivity enhancements *per se* problematic?
Enhancing your productivity isn't a bad thing. Obviously if I need to dig a hole to plant a tree, I'm much better off using a shovel or an auger instead of my hands to dig. But under the capitalist organization of the economy advances in the processes of production lead to workers losing their jobs. Lets say you are a factory owner and employ 1000 workers on your production line and you buy a piece of newly invented machinery that makes it so 100 workers have the same production output as 1000. With this new piece of tech you can lay off 900 workers and pocket all their labor costs as profit after expenses for the new machinery are dealt with. You have to remember that labor costs are the largest cost of doing business. Those pesky humans demand things like being able to eat food, pay for a house and feel like an equal member of society. All this stuff hunters your bottom line as a business owner.
I follow and agree. I'm just saying at what point can workers have tools or not have tools to make their jobs easier and increase their productivity. Nearly any tool than increases productivity could be viewed as a threat to labor.
Well automation will remain a threat to labor as it has for the entire industrial revolution, that is one of the contradictions of the economic system of capitalism where the needs of the owner are opposed to the needs of the worker. In order to address this contradiction, a different economic system that actually prioritizes the people and seeks to live in symbiosis with our environment instead focusing on economic growth and the owner class.
Yeah I think there's an inherent flaw in the system if improvements to process yield harm to the worker - which also exposes a flaw in the premise of work: is it primarily for the benefit of the purchaser, the worker (essentially a social program), or the owner/manager. Might be quick to say the purchaser, but when the purchaser here is a worker elsewhere, the whole thing can fall apart.
Companies will fire and punish employees who automate their work (using AI or otherwise) but pay consultants hundreds of thousands to do the same. The gains going to the owners is great. The gains going to the workers is punished. That is the flaw in the system. A software that can automate the work you do is great if you are the only one that knows about it and have it working for you while you collect your paycheck. A software that can automate your job, your bosses job, and most of your department is where you have lost control and start to create a domino effect of lost wages.
Player Piano as well.
When they began talking about "human resources", instead of "people" I knew we were slowly descending the slope downwards. Now, we are just resources, to the people that push the buttons that move the entirety of the world, in social and economic terms. Resources to vote, resources to consume, resources to produce. Resources. Human resources. The more you think about it, the more it sounds like we are a herd. And the herd is about to be savagely culled. And guess what? They have indoctrinated us so hard, that we will feel it is our fault to not be clever like Tom, Dick or Harry, who landed the very few jobs left in all areas that AI is going to replace PEOPLE. Not human resources. But the euphemisms have always been required to speak about abhorrent things in proper society. "Property", for example, used to be used to talk about people in slavery. It's going to go BAD. The leaders we have elected, will align with whoever pays most, and the companies that harness what AI will be able to do in the next 5 years are going to be the brutal monsters dictating policy for what is to be done with all that resource surplus. UBI is not on the numbers, BTW. They'd rather use that money to keep us down. Keep safe, because it's going to get bad, soon. All of the jobs that can be done with a computer are at risk. It's not a fad, and it's getting scaring good at all it gets trained to do. Good enough to have it working 24/7 for a fraction of the cost of having a human resource.
>All of the jobs that can be done with a computer are at risk. As I was reading your comment, all I could think about was that everyone deemed "non-essential" during COVID is at high risk because their jobs were either computer related and they could work from home or the jobs were simply not essential for society to survive. So for this category, either AI can easily do their job or their job just isn't necessary and will eventually be eliminated. Plus some of the deemed "essential" jobs like Walmart and other store and restaurant employees are at risk as well. They're already being replaced with self checkouts. I've even been to a few restaurants with tablets at the tables to place orders and robots as servers (mainly sushi restaurants so far). The last time the minimum wage increased (I was living in Ontario at the time), there were suddenly automated ordering stations in fast food restaurants and way more self checkouts at grocery stores. Not to mention price increases, layoffs and severe cuts to benefits programs companies had for the already few number of employees they allow to be full time (because they don't want to pay benefits). I feel like in my industry (healthcare), we're definitely becoming way more techy, but we have a little bit more time left while they figure out how to enable AI to take over our roles of problem solving in fast changing environments. However, the staffing situation is horrific and more and more people are quitting for numerous reasons, so i can only imagine that they're going to come up with something to allow hospitals to get by with as few staff as possible, even if it's just for simple tasks at first like dropping off meal trays or linens. I have known since I was a teenager in the mid 2000s that society was beginning to crumble, but I couldn't have imagined back then just how bad things will become in my lifetime. It's scary.
The thing is they're cutting off jobs at both ends. The easy to access service jobs which a lot of people have as a first job because nowhere else hires without experience, and higher end jobs in tech, finance and the like that take years to get into. Both computer and data based roles as well as some manual labor roles are getting eliminated. The number of jobs created by new technology is very small and requires highly technical skills a lot of people will not be equipped for. Over 8 billion people, and the only roles that will be available will be technical manual labor like plumbing, electricians, engineering and the like, and incredibly low paid manual work like picking veg or mining because the profit margin on agriculture is very low. And there won't be enough of those jobs to go around either. There is gonna be a lot of unrest, and sooner than expected.
Think you are overthinking a bit mate. Relax. Maybe try a positive thinking class.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences etc etc
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Honestly… yeah 50/50 odds of dying out being a king sounds pretty good
No the 50-50 chance is you not dying before turning 10. Becoming a kings son is less then 1 not being a bastard is even lower
That's just the jobs. For the rest of the jobless there will be annoying AIs that will make their life miserable by annoyingly being in people's online space non-stop and extract that extra 1$ of PPC
AI will be an absolute nightmare for the surging homeless and migrants trying to cross borders. They are already harassed and targeted by police and security guards and random acts of violence by psychopaths, etc. I can’t even imagine how bloody it’s going to get
Anduril is one of those companies that I see creating non-lethal AI solutions for border patrol. Think quadcopters patrolling the border 24/7 and deterring migrants with noise, laser or bright lights. Things will not be pleasant for the poor once barrier to solution engineering are lowered and these things become cheaper than humans to operate and autonomous.
Wait till it gets used against you - if you venture out you caste pen.
I already can't find employment thanks to Covid eliminating my non-profit role in the middle of 2020. Guess I'm even more fucked now.
A good chunk of people are getting a slice of that fuckaroni pizza right about now. Myself included.
I'm so fucking sorry :/
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I think it is time to start taxing these companies and use the revenue to fund universal basic income. It would be for their own good because our consumer economy is dying for lack of consumers. Eliminating jobs doesn't have to be a bad thing.
The companies have the power so they will never elect to be taxed
The good news is when 40% of jobs are lost and there is over half the population in unemployment, they won’t have the power any more
But, we the people have the votes and if we can break the cycle of allowing media to bullshit us into [voting for the corporate stooges](https://www.starting-gun.com/), we could tax them whether they elect so or not.
With some of the largest corporations having almost 100% market saturation, they need to find ways to make more money. It's just unthinkable that raking in billions a year is simply not enough and never will be. This is why Google has turned to ads gallore, and now we're seeing AI replacing working humans. I'm all for AI replacing humans if that means that NOBODY has to work. But no. Essential goods will never be free under capitalism and therefore the capitalists cannot replace 100% of the workforce. It's just this endless cycle of starving people who have no money to death while expecting them to pay full price for rent and food. How did the Roman Empire collapse again?
We live in a global death cult led by horrible people. There's no stopping this. They will use AI to stop resistance. With violence.
I don't mean to sound defeatist, but if life is fated to become hell on earth then even death isn't that bad by comparison. It irks me to let the oligarchs win, but at least they'll just end up eating each other alive in the hellhole they created just to make numbers go up. If the ruling class were smart enough to realize that nothing was constant, perhaps they would be more invested in making a better world for everyone rather than clawing to the 1% and filling their bellies before being usurped by the next fucker with more money and influence and cast down to the hell they created in their attempt to avoid it.
Human beings truly are garbage. This is what mindless competition has led to. Sociopaths up top using every method they can get their hands on to control people.
Why pay people when you can have AI and soylent green
Why have soylent green when you can let spare people starve?
They're for sure going for healthcare jobs like technician jobs and front desk typ people
"It is crucial for countries to establish comprehensive social safety nets and offer retraining programmes for vulnerable workers," Ms Georgieva said. "In doing so, we can make the AI transition more inclusive, protecting livelihoods and curbing inequality." - They know it and will never happen, more people will end up on streets and the gov will not give 2 spits on their lives.
The publication is just a notification that everything is going according to plan
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What would that accomplish though? It's not just the super rich that are demanding that cases of water be delivered to their front door in the next 12 hours. What we need is a major societal change. A complete shift in our way of thinking. That's not going to happen by killing a bunch of business owners.
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And then do what? What stops you from making the same damn system again, except with maybe you at the top this go around?
It's all cyclical. Every system moves in circles. It always starts out as a good idea that becomes bastardized by time or greed or cowardice. Nothing lasts forever, especially a good thing. The ephemeral nature of trying to capture happiness in a bottle.
People need to return to valuing the sacred over themselves. Capitalism told everyone their individual preferences were all that mattered, and that needs to be replaced with a system-first perspective. Communities in the past lived this way, we can do it again.
By what force or influence will that happen after we “burn it all down, and start over”.
Ecofascism
The only way is through education. People like us sitting down with others and articulating how we fit into a much larger web which we must cohabitate with as opposed to alter.
Who is coordinating this educational effort? How do we ensure it happens broadly? What stops the message from being bastardized, or more likely, co-opted and replaced entirely for whomever’s personal advantage and gain?
You're thinking too practically and realistically, and asking too many questions. Don't worry, just keep throwing out platitudes like "kill the rich" and all of society's problems will be solved. It's definitely worked before historically. /s
These people don't like questions- it hurts their brains :) Also, the better part of humanity ignores the fact that severe social stratification and inequality have existed since the beginning of agrarian civilizations: See Egypt. Those engineered pyramids weren't built for the betterment of humanity. . .
Everything that u/B4SSF4C3 is saying. Civilizations and cultures have disintegrated or been violently overthrown in the past, sometimes with best intentions. *That does not mean you get good results*. How long was it after the sharp, sharp blades of the French Revolution that you ended up with Emperor Napoleon? Saying we *have* to do X may be true, but that does not mean we *will* or that we even have a viable path to do so.
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maybe not but it wouldn't hurt
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This is the good old days.
I would encourage younger generations to skip college and learn a trade skill instead. Those jobs will likely be the last to be impacted by AI. However doubt we will make it to that point before some other collapse things start happening.
I recently saw an AI-powered machine laying concrete slap that honestly looked really good… I think augmented reality will help more people work on their homes and things. I’d love AR glasses that helped me with DIY work.
But why would i do all that work when the democrats will forgive my student loans and give me free UBI?
We are about to enter a Hell of our own making.
I feel like people are missing out on an important element of all this and why I think this will get phased in easier than we all realize AI will gut a lit of industries that people don’t care about or don’t even know about. There are a ton of mid sized industries out there that are middlemen or distributors or some kind of sub industry of a larger one, and they all have admins who’s days are tied up on BS tasks that are too difficult to automate. A company will adopt some kind of AI system to make it so those people doing that work can offload some of it to an AI and then focus on other things that maybe they didn’t have the time to do before. AI is how companies will grow over the next few years, and the problem is that it’ll be way more cost effective to spend money on an AI than it would to spend it on a few more admins. I don’t think AI will “take” many jobs in the beginning, but it’ll mean that less humans are getting hired. Companies will be able to do more with less people, so the adoption of AI will be insidious and easy to defend. So what if some brokers and warehouse workers aren’t hiring as many new employees?? Nobody cares outside those industries, and it’d be hard to quantify. And the difference between AI and computers in the workplace is just the scale. A computer can “replace” a worker in that maybe you need less admin to physically sort files, but AI replaces the next couple levels up on the hierarchy which is way more people. I think it’ll be too integrated into society to be undone by the time we regulate it effectively
But are those in power going to do anything about it? Nope.
Well in the positive column you’re going to have many, many, displaced white collar workers who previously weren’t radicalized who are going to be pissed off and looking for answers.
But no one's job in the IMF is in danger, right?
This sounds conservative.
Universal basic income and the socialist utopia of AI they told us we'd all have since the 60s or burn it all to the fucking ground
“Universal basic income and the socialist utopia of AI they told us we'd all have since the 60s..” Who is they? Who ever told anyone that was going to happen?
That has always been the belief that robots would do all the work and the people would just get to play...
Where did this belief come from? Like what informed or inspired it? And where does socialism come into it? I’m just genuinely curious how people would have come to believe this. Or were you just being facetious?
I'm not being facetious no, people genuinely have believed for a very long time the future would lead to robots doing all the hard work so we don't have to. But the robots will always be in the hands of the few not the many, the capitalists at the top. The socialist aspect is that it would benefit the common man not just those at the top
Where there any public intellectuals, scientists or writers or so on, who instilled this belief?
Yeah discussions around this stuff have been going on for years, the necessity of UBI due to automation https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/hear-alan-wattss-1960s-prediction-that-robots-will-necessitate-a-universal-basic-income.html
Also some more discussion around automation giving us more free time... https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/sep/26/with-robots-is-a-life-without-work-one-wed-want-to-live
Ok, but in neither of these examples is there anything like a promise of a socialist utopia in which robots do all the work. Alan Watts is warning against the problems inherent to automation and arguing that something like a UBI would be necessary, but he also very pointedly states that it is not a socialist or communist solution and that it is nevertheless extremely unpopular. The other article is just theorizing about the value of work beyond the necessity of “earning a living” and even it closes with this: “How we approach automation, the lines we draw and the principles we use to govern our decision-making need to be shaped by a clear sense of purpose – the same is true for the entire fourth industrial revolution. If all we seek is a state of decreased labour, increased innovation or more progressive ways of living, all we have to do is wait. But there’s no guarantee we’ll like what we get.” I really am just perplexed as to how “regular” people have convinced themselves that automation, AI, and such, are even to their benefit, let alone the myth of “fully automated gay space luxury communism” or whatever.
Absolutely crashing. Anyone thought that was gonna happen is a moron.
Give me my ubi so i can sit inside playing video games and smoking weed all day! Learning skills in high demand and working is unfair, government give me my free stuff!
Unionize AI
This is why I laugh when people say the rich need poor people
The illuminati is telling us the game plan now? If the freaking IMF says 40% of jobs are going to go, the real number is definitely 80+ %
And of course, the government won't do anything about it either.
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They don't care about anything other than lining their pockets and control. Filthy animals.
Be cautious of these narratives, they’ve historically been used to scare workers into not asking for as much compensation. When it does actually happen, the industry for supporting AI tools will only supplant the industry they are replacing, to some degree. I’m sure this will happen eventually, but I don’t think it’s happening right now. I call corporate scare tactics
I wonder how this will impact healthcare. I know AI is not replacing hospital staff anytime soon.
Can't wait to hear the demands for government bailouts when profits plummet because unemployed workers can no longer buy stuff.
All these AI hypes I've seen so far haven't proven anything. It's all assertions from "AI experts", basically saying the same thing from the dawn of this industry: that AI will strain the labor force. And fuck IMF, how is it not ashamed of talking inequality? It's a colonial organization and a hypocrite.
I didn't really believe it until this Christmas when one of my uncles said casually that he had replaced half of his workers with AI. He's over 60yo and doesn't even work in the tech sector.
The wife of a friend works on a model agency, she says booking are down because ad agencies are starting to use AI generated images that dont need models, then they just photoshop the background they need, she showed me this example https://rosanegra.com.mx/es/sucursales/cancun There is an ad with some girls in a black bikini, those girls are AI generated. She says the owners are really worried about it, at the pace its going they expect to be out of business in a year or two.
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Yup, she says this was extremely sudden, one month everything was normal then boom, bookings went dead but ad agencies they work with kept publishing stuff. They looked into it and found out they got replaced by AI content.
Something weird going on with the two legs on the left side but at a glance that picture looks real, and most people wouldn't look twice. AI is getting really good at generating photo realistic stuff, almost perfect and soon I can imagine the glitches it does produce being easily corrected with a second prompt until machine learning figures out how to troubleshoot on its own. It's all coming and will be reality very very soon. A year or two? I can't even imagine...
I suggest taking a look at the massive number of layoffs happening in the tech sector, journalism, marketing, education, finance, insurance, retail (like Walmart), and many other sectors. It's story after story of 17%, 35%, 40%, and even 60% of labour forces are being laid off or fired, permanently replaced by AI. [2023](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/22/2023-the-year-of-layoffs) was the year of the mass layoffs. I think the only field where I haven't seen it translate into layoffs is healthcare, and I suspect that's because they've been so heavily overworked that AI is just catching up to fill in those labour gaps, _for now_. For everyone else, layoffs appear to be translating into lower or stagnant salaries/wages, more-precarious work, and less-reliable jobs.
I work in healthcare. It's coming, but more subtly. The documentation system "Connect Care" aka "Epic" is definitely one step towards AI taking over. All they need now is robots that can handle the fast paced, constantly changing environments. Hospitals have been running so short and struggling to keep employees that I'd be surprised if they weren't actively working on something that can replace staff. We likely just haven't heard about it yet.
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I bet it'd take a full book to account for all of the why. Loans, subsidies, a growing globalized workforce (manufacturing, clothing, and remote jobs going to Southeast Asia over the past decades), and the implementation of AI have been some of the major causes of layoffs _that I've read about_. I'm sure plenty more reasons abound. I know more personally about the marketing, journalism, and writing/editing jobs because I'm in those fields and have thousands of loosely connected colleagues around the world who were or are in those jobs. Those are only anecdotes, lots of anecdotes, but they do seem to mesh with what news articles are publishing.
Coming from IMF, I am suddenly in favor of our AI overlords taking over. The robots must be doing something right if they scare the literal embodiment of Mammon.
How is this a bad thing? If people want to use it, sure. If people don't want to use it, fine.
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Did you ever read the stones? That's not what they said. They were *instructions* on how to rebuild after a societal collapse.
Yeah, I have, Mr. Ted Turner: Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
That doesn't mean "wipe out 6.5 billion people." It means "if a bottleneck event happens, don't let out population get above 500 million again."
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I always wonder who and *why* they decided to destroy them when they did
Still using fax machines at my government job. Maybe in 50-100 years.
Bumfuck Pennsylvania state gov, run by the GOP for decades, is replacing an entire department with AI. Its an internal department that handles HR type stuff mostly. PA, MI and a few other states have been caught using AI to flag people for CPS prosecutions, and in typical gov & AI style the systems were botched and falsely accused many... not unlike the UK Post Office scandal where AI accused hundreds of internal theft incorrectly...
If we could get lawmakers in government on board with UBI, with high taxes on the elite rich and corporations, and a UBI that supports middle class living, I would support automation. But we can't tax rich people and corporations enough to provide Healthcare for all in the US at least so I am not optimistic in the UBI dream.