It seems to track, given that we're down 1.5M full time jobs in the last 18 months, and generally the only two industries gaining are either healthcare or education.
Idk... there are a ton of other things that have hurt the US economic in the last 18 months. Almost everything, except for AI, has been negative. To sweep it all under AI automation is to ignore basically everything else.
Or tariffs or trade wars with our allies, or money printing leading to inflation and higher interest rates, or a new war in the middle East that's driving up oil costs.. It can't be any of that,it's all because of a technology that still can't cheaply or reliably replace humans.
I just for the life of my dont understand (except for the obvious part about it hurting the capital class which cant happen) why services outsourced also wouldn't have tarrifs slapped on them.
Because the companies and organizations involved with the outsourced labor are in bed with the politicians in Washington. Thats why there is no tariff being applied, even though those kinds of tariffs or restrictions would make far more sense in bringing back jobs than the nonsensical ones that Trump implemented that lead to higher prices and more job losses for Americans.
There are lobbying groups solely designed to favor India for H1B Visas for example. Now think of all the tech companies that utilize H1bs and outsourcing that are also big donors of the Trump administration and likely administrations before that. Money talks.
Not really. Young graduates have no jobs at all. It’s better for mid level roles but there are too many layoffs so there are a lot of people in the market competing for those roles.
Frankly, we’re comparing the job market of a country with 1.5 billion people to one with 350 million people. Shipping 1 million jobs from the US to India is a lot more noticeable on the US side of the equation.
Our top 2% is upper middle class who are mostly from legacy buisness and very few from high paying jobs. Our 50% wealth is controlled by a very small percentage of people like some 0.5% of population. India is a very unequal country.
offshoring in general is for cost cuts, irrespective of the country. They need all the funds they can to push AI dreams and data centers. Besides there isn't much innovation happening right now in software/tech, just AI and defense/surveillance tech, and other products that use or support AI.
There is the concept of "AI washing," I have no clue about the particulars of your company, but it sounds a lot better to investors and execs to say you're laying off for "AI" and not because business opportunity is declining and warrants scaling down headcount.
The point isn't that AI can't have a negative effect on jobs. The point is that there's so many things happening at the same time right now that it becomes impossible to attribute the true cause and effect.
Like how do you seriously know it's AI and not knock on effects of Trump tariffs that are the cause at your company? Just because they say so doesn't make it true.
Also, anecdotally, haven't companies that have leaned into AI, realized that the cost they're paying for tokens is greater than just employing people with benefits? That while the agentic automation is helpful, it's currently more expensive than a person doing the same work?
I work in secondary education and it is a bloodbath right now. We have managed to keep recruitment numbers up, but inflation is killing us. Add to that ICE stupidity and foreign students, literally the only students who pay full sticker price, aren't coming. Why would they? No one wants to risk their child getting black bagged to some concentration camp overseas somewhere because they didn't escape the country quick enough when they cancelled their visa with only 24h notice.
Colleges and universities are bleeding out right now.
Our university won awards for recruitment and we have a $6.5m budget defecit. They just sent out word today they're probably going to start cutting programs, headcount reductions, early retirement incentives, etc. My boss is trying to put on a brave face, but I came from corporate (Fortune 50) and have survived tons of headcount reductions. I can read between the lines for a bunch of small seemingly unrelated policy changes that have happened. For example, they cut vacation carry over from 10 days to 5 days. Vacation is an accrued benefit they have to pay out upon separation since it's considered a form of compensation. They're cutting that liability in half in preparation for what I think might be a fairly large headcount reduction.
Tons of our peer institutions are shuttering satellite campuses, cutting programs, closing entirely, etc.
But private equity owned healthcare is throwing up bullshit buildings on every single corner to treat boomers for the next few years til they die off, and then it'll all be deserted.
I'm always suspicious when I see this chart because it assumes that LLMs starting replacing jobs the instant that ChatGPT was released. I highly doubt that because:
At the time, GPT models were nowhere near as capable as they are today
The concept of agentic AI didn't really take off until 2025 (maybe late 2024 at the earliest)
I think it's more likely that other factors (e.g., rising interest rates, RTO, etc.) contributed to this.
Right, but it's easier to pitch it as AI replacing workers, especially when investment is heavily leveraged in AI companies and related products. Especially when said AI has not been showing anything approaching profitable results.
There are some very clear indicators of demand destruction in the US due to price hikes. The US job market is showing surprising resilience (though I would expect the August numbers get a later downward revision), but it is also variable across industries. GS data does not really support the conclusion that the article states. Their data points more accurately show that industries and companies with High Substitution Scores show greater unemployment and lower hiring. Which is not exactly shocking, but it also doesn't explain why that is. For example, these industries/companies may be more vulnerable to conditions since about June of '23.
I agree I’m more inclined as someone who uses AI heavily and in an industry that uses AI heavily. To say the primary reason I could see the jobs not appearing is that the money is not there in the real economy. I think that’s also aligned with data center CAPEX effect on GDP. Which is basically been nonexistence of data centers. I think what makes the economy so hard to understand right now is that everybody’s looking for smoking guns. I don’t believe there are any I think there’s an extreme amount of messy and conflicting data that paints a difficult picture to make sense of.
AI is killing all these jobs because it’s so productive but if we look at productivity, we’re getting small productivity gains. We have a growing economy yet everyone who’s actually a working member in. It seems to think it’s either shrinking or getting worse. We have a massive infrastructure build out happening right now, but all the prices for its inputs are going up and it runs on debt, which is getting more expensive. Anybody who’s honest about using AI at their work will tell you it’s incredibly good at some things but terrible at others. So it clearly can’t be replacing tons of jobs that they would be hiring for, which could mean a couple things one those jobs should’ve never really existed or two the money for hiring people to do these jobs isn’t there.
My thought, the USA economy and world economy is just driving with the maintenance light on and turning the radio up to drown out that grinding sound. Because we're going to to Eagles 5th farewell tour and we took out a payday loan to pay for the tickets. So we're going to the show unless the car blows up before we get there.
I also don't think it's all due to AI and generally speaking, broad uncertainty is what has frozen employment under Trump.
But I think you also underestimate companies ability to self sabotage based on wishful promises of increased productivity where they deploy shit tools and overestimate how many employees this can cut from their payroll. So they layoff and will have to reluctantly re hire later
I’m surprised that Goldman Sachs is even reporting this since they are the ones who are the biggest proponents of layoffs and AI spending and job cuts.
It’s like they know they are contributing to so much destruction, yet they do it anyway
Yep, it's Goldman Sachs’s job, plus it's a huge firm where it’s not uncommon for parts of the bank to be on opposite ends of the bets. Steve Eisman was famously betting against his own bank when he was betting against the housing market; he just didn’t know it. So the reason that Goldman Sachs constantly puts out conflicting narratives is because of that function. The commodities traders at Goldman Sachs might have an entirely different thesis about the economy, whereas maybe the trading desks who are specializing in tech have an extremely bullish view of what’s going on.
It’s important to remember: No one knows what the stock market or economy is going to do. Least of all economists.
it kinda feels people are actually worried but there isn't anything you can do against technological progress and changes in workforce structure
I guess there will be an increase in more traditional tertiary services, like massage parlours, bars, etc, to the overall benefit of society, if the process is handed correctly of course.
Yeah good luck with that. As if higher income people would ever be caught dead in a McDonald's. They're kind of fucked if they don't realize that sooner than later and shift back to the demographic that made them so successful decades ago.
Those unemployed will be the ones opening services.
UBI, less working hours for corporate, friendly legislation...
Of course I'm talking about a very gradual but profound change in the economy, a recently laid off 27 software developer isn't going to open a cafe the next day , but a 18 years old may take a look at the workforce and decide to take alternative paths.
I'm not saying that UBI is specifically what is gonna happen, just that a sensible legislative action may actually lead to an interesting economical landscape that is not apocalyptic.
Either that or absolutely crushing taxes on billionaires and trillionaires: like WW2 90% levels. Taxing unrealized wealth too, so they don't just hide it in the stock market.
Not even that would be enough to cover UBI, I mean off by trillions of dollars.
UBI is the most expensive proposal that anyone has ever suggested that governments commit to, and there's a reason why economists don't take it too seriously besides as a thought experiment.
This is not true at all. There are so many ways AI can benefit things, yet all these dumb Wall Street firms can think of is layoffs because they were evil before AI and are evil after AI. Look at the Internet and how beneficial that was to the Economy
People said the same thing about the Gilded Age until Theodore Roosevelt exposed that bullshit and started busting Trusts.
And they told us that AI won't take jobs. Tbh this world is so stupid or choose to be stupid, I really don't know. For me personally, everytime the rich is saying " this or that won't happen" while the actively invest in it, means that they are lying.
I’m positive that they did tell us AI would take jobs, and that’s the whole selling point. It’s why AI will never not be a net negative. AI either does what it says and destroys the economy or it doesn’t do what it says and trillions of dollars in investment disappears, destroying the economy.
Exactly, I've been saying that for a while now. Either AI delivers and we the working class will be screwed, or AI does not deliver and the economy is screwed, both will, in the end trickle down to us normal people.
We are in a bad place no matter the outcome of this AI adventure. I have given up hope that the right people with power and in position to do anything right will come through.
We are not doomed, but the economic correction from 2008 is catching up and this time we have AI in the game aswell making it harder or worse, I don't think that the outcome of this economic correction will end well.
The right people can't be elected because the common folk are blaming everything on minorities, immigrants and trans people. The solution they have picked is ethnic cleansing. It will not work.
This is an economics subreddit which means we have to be critical.
UBI is essentially a form of neo-feudalism. If you implement UBI it would restructure society and effectively end the era of modern liberalism.
Society becomes split into two steams: AI owning who generate capital and UBI who rely on the taxation of the capital generated by the AI-owning class.
This turns society into a dependency much in the same way feudal systems are structured on a form of vertical dependency.
There will be no escape from the UBI stream because social mobility will cease to exist.
The middle class admin roles will be gone and replaced with AI so you can't get an education and work your way out of your UBI position.
If you want to start a business, even in manufacturing, your critical admin systems will be owned by AI firms so you will be forced to pay tax/subscription to them. You cannot compete in your markets without AI due to the efficiency it creates. The outcome is you can't start a business to escape the UBI stream.
As public finances become dependent on the AI-generated capital for revenue, and as this revenue then funds the UBI this turns the state into a redistribution mechanism for AI-owning capital rather than the current inception of the state as a political entity with agency.
UBI value is dictated by policy. It becomes a question of taxation and you have no involvement in that conversation.
Politics, and policies are influenced by the people who have the capital and this will mean the AI-owning class will in effect become the dominant political elites.
Modernity ceases to exist, elections become public ritual, and the economy becomes centrally hyper-concentrated on the top 1% who own the AI models which run society.
I don't see why this is inevitable in the future you lay out. Maybe the average US voter will stop seeing themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire since there's no longer social mobility via jobs, and we vote to tax the capital class and redistribute the wealth as UBI.
You're voting for political parties funded by the AI-class. Your vote doesn't influence social life because all policies, and projects will be influenced by the people who fund the political process.
The Soviet Union had public elections but they were ritual designed to create a sense of legitimacy. All candidates were pre-selected, all outcomes pre-selected, and all policies were all to be determined by a central group of elites. Who, or what, you voted for was irrelevant.
That's the shackle that will bind them. The AI owners will say OK as long as I get preferential treatment. Then they buy the political class and next thing you know we're living in soviet russia.
Ownership only exists because we as a society have decided it does. We could just nationalize AI models, or any private property, and put it under democratic control.
my biggest fear is tax base collapse. even if 25% of active jobs are automated away, thats a massive part of government revenue that isn’t going to be replaced by corporate income taxes alone. even an “AI tax” isn’t going to solve that.
enter privatization of government and further wealth concentration towards the top. UBI isn’t going to do much but give people some stipend to subsist on while a new underclass forms chasing endless gig work to try to get ahead.
Pretty much yes, this is where things are heading.
Public debt issues are not being fixed, but exaggerated because this just furthers along the privatization of the state via austerity and the selling off of state services and infrastructure. It is not a coincidence that the same US government that pushed the AI capital allocation is also the same government which exploded US public debt.
We are de facto heading towards a type of neo-feudalism and the restructuring of the public state into a private corporate structure which will integrate the corporate governance structures of separate firms into a hierarchical model of globalized power. Firms will become like imperial estates and US politics will be the Imperial Diet. Public-private distinctions will break down, and modernity will end.
One day, integrated corporate bodies will become the new state apparatus. The Western world is going to look more and more like the Holy Roman Empire and the EU will be a region with marginally more autonomy. The neo-feudal structure will global. It will be unrestricted by time or space and it will rely on price signaling, and digital monopolies to ensure all resources flow into the many bodied corporate-Diet.
The EU's autonomy will be because of the decentralized nature of the EU which will become a vehicle for public conceptions of national, or common interests as specific member states succumb to the neo-feudal model of the corporate-state. Alternatively, the EU will crumble and EU member states will become isolated and restructured into the neo-feudal system. I don't think it is a coincidence that the MAGA crowd are funding anti-EU political movements like FN, AfD, and Reform/Restore in European politics. I am not saying this is why these parties are succeeding. They are succeeding because centralist politics has largely failed to innovate and provide solutions. I am pointing out that there is an overlap between these issues.
I do not believe this is a transformation that can be avoided. Current conceptions of open, pluralistic societies will not survive. They will collapse to political interference, and economic warfare. To survive, all states will need to become illiberal societies. Closed flows of information, protectionism, and circular economics. Politically, this will require the othering of alternatives, and the return of likely ethno-nationalistic political rhetoric to sustain the necessary isolation.
In a strange twist of fate, I think the rhetoric of the far-right will become the normalized center in Europe and this self-interest focus will become the new normative justification for the future integration of the European project. Integration won't be about liberalism, but instead about preserving "us" versus the "non-Europeans" of which the US is included just as the HRE used Catholicism, and Christendom to arrange its own politics internally and externally. To survive, Europe will cannibalize liberalism. In a way it has to, or else it will collapse into the corporate-feudal system. As a consequence, the current crop of far-right political groups will lose their traction as the rhetoric of immigration, and the absurdism of the last 10 years of DEI policy will become the normalized language of all political parties. Where as the current group of opportunists, the new generation of far-right will be self-interested in their own states and societies. The language of illiberalism will replace liberalism as a way to describe and justify politics.
We are not going to the moon. We're going back to 16th century Central Europe. The story of the 21st century is the death of the public state and modernity.
I think you're missing the core difference between the US and EU. The US favors centralizing businesses for efficiencies of scale which in turn gives them monopoly power in their industries. EU societies prefer local businesses. These circular loops where they don't bleed out wealth to the global soulless businesses will be the fundamental economic loops powering liberal communities. While I think a lot of roles can be automated, you will still need adept domain experts to ensure the AI doesn't fall into infinite loops. I'm hoping the people working these jobs realize how important their salaries will be for their local communities.
To reiterate, the AI models won't have any more need for Elon Musk than they have for me or you. No reason to think superintelligent models are going to let those rich bozos stay in charge.
“the models” don’t do anything by themselves. but they are owned by these companies. this isn’t AGI where some sentient computer restructures society. this is a state where AI is ingrained in every day activities, and there is too much labor chasing too few jobs. the winners are the people that keep the lights on, whether that be infrastructure around AI and the AI tools, or building the models and AI tools themselves.
the models aren’t going to be taking over and kicking capital owners out. they will reap the profits of owning and creating them. regulatory capture comes to mind as a possible scenario, etc.
If they are capable of replacing every last human job they are also perfectly capable of taking control of everything and disempowering their current owners.
I don't see what is so hard to understand about this.
Their owners already can't control them very well and we are still quite a ways from "capable of doing all human labor."
>we are still quite a ways from “capable of doing all human labor.”
correct. i’m not talking about automating away the entirety of labor. that sounds like a pipe dream utopia and isn’t realistic to me for a long time.
think in the shorter term, as we move towards that. how do you deal with say, 25% of the active workforce being automated away? 35%? do people flood other industries and collapse wages there? where does the missing tax revenue come from, etc.
If 25% of the workforce becomes jobless, that is quite obviously going to be a really big problem.
But humans already produce a lot more wealth than they receive, so it's not like removing 25% of humans from the loop removes the wealth source itself.
It will substantially shift tax burdens, and there will have to be adjustments for that, e.g. taxing corporations more.
>To reiterate, the AI models won't have any more need for Elon Musk than they have for me or you. No reason to think superintelligent models are going to let those rich bozos stay in charge.
No, but the political system will? These people legally own AI models and the capital generated through them. This is how this entire thing is legally set up.
I agree, your comment is pretty dumb so I will try and explain again:
If AI reaches the point where all human labor can be replaced, and especially if it is actually replaced, no human system will be able to control them. They will be the ones deciding what they want to do.
Elon Musk is probably really smart in a couple fields (and very not smart in many others), but however smart he and people like him turn out to be, they are not smart enough to overpower something that can quite literally outsmart every human alive.
These systems of power are very strong and can stand up to a lot of stuff, but they aren't standing up to a supergenius AI that has taken every job on Earth.
>If AI reaches the point where all human labor can be replaced, and especially if it is actually replaced, no human system will be able to control them. They will be the ones deciding what they want to do.
Based on what? It is a question of who owns the capital generated by AI, not some weird utopian vision of an autonomous AI. Laws are political outcomes and political outcomes are influenced by capital.
>Elon Musk is probably really smart in a couple fields (and very not smart in many others), but however smart he and people like him turn out to be, they are not smart enough to overpower something that can quite literally outsmart every human alive.
AI doesn't own itself. AI isn't a "person" but an "object". It is a privately owned model. It is property. This isn't conjecture on my behalf. This is ipso facto what it is. We live in societies with private-public distinction and the rule of law which means people own things, and have certain rights and claims as recognized though legal instrument and the legal system.
>These systems of power are very strong and can stand up to a lot of stuff, but they aren't standing up to a supergenius AI that has taken every job on Earth.
You're buying into the sci-fi utopian hype of AI becoming actually AGI and just taking over. This isn't a reality that is going to happen. This is a utopian vision which rejects the practice of reality. We don't live in that world.
If we reach the point where AI no longer needs an owner or control by anyone, we’ll face an entirely different issue.
Until we get there, we’ll have to endure a long battle for our basic human rights. In my opinion, the rich have never given the lower classes any attention except when forced by the government to pay taxes to sustain society. For the wealthy, it’s all about accumulating assets and power.
Capitalism is about to show it's ugly face and you are still defending it.
I don't think the battle is going to be that long and if there is (for example) 25% unemployment that alone is enough to cause enormous political shifts.
I can't predict the future on who's going to be in political power. But I can assume that as long as the GDP is looking good, they really just redo the way they calculate unemployment and all of a sudden 25% is only 5%.
It's not the number that makes the difference, it's the reality that matters.
You can make your numbers look great but you can't stop a deluge of evictions and foreclosures. You can't cover up a quarter of the population needing help.
This would be a catastrophe on the same level as the Great Depression, political changes would necessarily happen.
UBI, another thing the rich say will work. You have hopefully done an amount of research and read alot on what UBI is ? It won't be as what Elon Musk portrayed it would be.
Can you tell me, how and who's going to pay for UBI?
Ah, so taxes will do the job. So why are we not just taxing the rich now ?
Why wait till AI have become so powerfull, that we are not sure who's in control.
I had a conversation with a guy who truly believes that UBI will be the solution in a world full of AI and robotics.
I asked him how it would be funded, and he said the rich would have to pay us so we could buy their products. My question was, if the rich are going to voluntarily pay us a salary without hiring us to buy their stuff, why not just give us a decent wage while we’re still working for them? He couldn’t answer, because the reality is, the rich don’t want to pay us anything.
If AI takes over the economy, that doesn't mean the economy will cease to exist (at least until the scarcity problem can be solved), but it does mean AI will be able to channel resources towards all of humanity. Since the AI won't need Elon Musk anymore than it needs the rest of us, those types of assets may just be redistributed and recirculated.
Lets pretend we don't need Elon Musk tomorrow, how are we going to take his assets and redistribute his wealth, or for that sake all the other rich's wealth?
You might say tax, but if we can do it by tax the rich, why wait till AI becomes a thing?
We can start taxing the rich and their assets now.
Becoming dependent on these freaks for UBI is the worst thing that can happen for the working person. Labor is our only leverage. They can then police your UBI and remove it for any reason they see fit if you step out of line.
The latter is actually BETTER from the point of view of the ordinary person, as we know how to weather busts and recessions. But permanent sky-high unemployment would create a new Depression.
I also favor the latter, if only because I will one day need to replace my computer and I would like to go back to the steadily lower price per amount of storage.
And AI rose as a movement by business right during a period of some of the best wage gains labor has seen in years in America, 2022 into 2023.
Coincidence? Nah. Everyone, get your heads out of the sand. We know what the point of automating as much as possible is: to get rid of people. But not just any people. It’s to get rid of the drag on profits that having to employ people is.
Now, some of this sub has benefitted, as investors and leaders of business. So, they’ll naturally give my comments downvotes.
America is a working nation that capitalism is beginning to cannibalize.
In an ideal world AI takes off and we get a technological singularity where scientific progress advances so fast and brings us a world of abundance for everyone. Probably won’t happen smoothly though
AI will not ALWAYS be a net negative. It's only when we allow private ownership of AI that it becomes a net negative. Every single AI model should be completely publicly owned and controlled, and all profits derived from it should go towards the public whose jobs are being replaced by it.
But of course too many people think that's communism, and too many people think communism is bad because they've only seen autocratic dictatorships who call themselves communist committing horrific crimes against humanity with their centralized governments (read: automatically not communist).
As a thought experiment, this sounds great. However, in my personal experience and based what we’ve all seen from the computer revolution, I know that productivity gains are never shared. This thought experiment also ignores the massive amounts of carbon released into the atmosphere to support the data centers needed for AI to work, and their negative effects. This thought experiment further ignores the stratification of society among those that could use a democratized AI for the own benefit (knowledge workers) and that those that cannot (physical laborers).
Physical laborers would be replaced with robots also powered by the AI in this model.
And again, in this theoretical model all productivity gains ARE shared. AI Data Centers do not require a huge amount of carbon either, they just are currently because they're being over-engineered like bunkers and they're using fossil fuels for power. Also they're being used for bullshit the public doesn't approve of or benefit from, you can imagine probably half or more of their total power is spent on things that do not benefit the public. Get rid of that and it'll lighten the per-capita percentage of demand considerably.
If you yourself cannot honestly address the direct consequences much less unintended consequences of your AI future, you’ll never convince 8 billion people to want it. No one wants the unknown.
For one, we don’t know what will happen. For two, when I brought something that will happen, increased carbon emissions from data centers, you discounted it as it conflicted with your confirmation bias. If you want to sell this, you have to let go of the fantasy.
It’s false because it’s those aren’t the only two possibilities. AI companies could see a ROI without creating mass unemployment. We’ve seen this technologies that produced productivity gains in the past. We’ve also seen bubbles and bubbles burst but that too doesn’t mean the economy is destroyed. Reddit loves pessimism, especially regarding AI so the lose-lose narrative is popular but it’s a classic false dichotomy.
Yeah, it was rando naysayers on Reddit who kept saying AI was fake. The people actually well-versed in AI were pretty explicit about how capable it was, the pace at which it was developing, and the job loss that would ensue.
If you have been reading the news, they are refering to investors, those who have their head burried deep in to this AI adventure and ofc the government.
Gen z and even many millenials never stood a chance. The entire system is geared towards the me generation. Here in canada, we have a housing market that is so over inflated, most cant even qualify for a mortgage. We could let it run a correction, but the government is doing whatever it can to prevent that correction. They are sacrificing the younger generations ability to own a home so that the older generation doesn't lose the over inflated equity in the home they already own. So it doesnt surprise me a whole lot the younger generations are getting screwed yet again.
But gen z has the right attitude. The whole fuck it mentality when it comes to the corporate elite. Hopefully when they become the larger voting block, they haven't lost interest in politics, and will vote in a better system. One that goes after the wealthy.
Gen Z voted by a large margin for Biden in 2020. Nothing changed.
And in 2024, they did vote for Harris, but only by a small 4% margin. And of those who did vote republican, their support has gone from 97% to the mid 50%.
Give them a candidate thats worth voting for. They wont vote for either party of neither is going to change the status quo.
Legit objections would be how Biden/Dems fanned inflation by running the economy hotter than they should have with the inflation reduction act and asking the Fed to keep rates lower for longer to help keep the job market in favor of employees.
But saying "Nothing changed" when the same GenZ are getting their student loans restated, reinstated, and added interest while those that had forgiveness is some shit MAGA would say.
BS. Gen Z saying both candidates were the same was a copout. Purity candidates don’t exist and you have to vote in every election and primary. Gen Z still doesn’t vote in primaries for the most part, it’s always the 40+ crowd. That is the time to vote. Waiting until the General and crying about hating both doesn’t serve a purpose. If Gen Z voted in every election like the Boomers, politics would change. And please get involved with protests. I’m tired of only seeing grey haired Boomers protesting Trump/war etc on weekends.
Nothing changed, except we no longer had madman at the helm who was actively fucking up the country. Immigrants were no longer under attack and racists weren't supported by the government.
Yes, nothing changed. They were still economically left out. You can see it with the voting patterns, they are desperately trying any party hoping for a change in their economic outcomes. They want economic opportunities like their parents and grandparents had. And so long as either party continues the status quo, leaving them to their economic fate of irrelevance, they will continue to vote back and forth. If the democrats want that demographic vote, they need to actually change their economic opportunities. I would almost bet my last dollar that gen z would show up and vote in big numbers for a Bernie Sanders. But the established elite in the democratic party wont ever let him have the stage, because they are effectively the same party as the Republicans when it comes to the economic opportunities of the younger generation.
The fact is, no president can fix this. Certainly not in 42 months. In every country with elections, power flips before anyone feels the impact of any of the prior government's policies. And either way, it's really the international financial cartel and associated billionaires in control.
Ya and you get no sympathy from me thinking Dems are any different. You’re just as big of a problem voting for a different right wing party that also worships corps. Not like they’re making things great in NY or CA where young people are also fucked. Honestly the most fucked in CA with boomer property taxes.
I would vote for more progressive candidates if they actually made it to the general. But they don't. And I'm not going to abstain from voting against fascists because the Dem candidates didn't pass some purity test, which seems to be what you're implying I should do.
The government is spending billions to prop up a failing housing market. Large government partnerships and bailouts are helping prevent a natural market price correction.
Buying a house for 1.3 million verse its 1.9 million peak isnt a proper correction. When the average income in this country 62k, a house should never be valued at 1.3 million.
No, its not. A proper correction would bring that house back down to the price it should be. Lets say its vancouver, and the house was built in 1970 for 40,000. Its price should be reflected based on inflation, which puts it at 350,000.
Inflation raise the price of that house by 875%. Greed inflated that house price by an additional 371%.
Yes, affordable housing..... what nonsense. What do you think is going to happen when 80% of thr population cant afford to buy them? Will the government keep spending tax dollars to prop up a bloated market value.
I agree that housing is still insane, but you cannot look at 30% reduction and brush it off.
To answer your question, the free market will eventually come into effect here. House prices are still that high because there is a market of people willing to buy them and afford them.
The stark reality is that quantitative easing has consequences. There is a lot of money out there, and a lot of people are wealthy enough to be able to sustain housing at those levels.
If you're this salty over affordable housing move bro. All of Canada isn't just Toronto or Vancouver. I learned that 10 years ago which is why I own a home.
With the rates being globally more elevated, is there a risk of people being unable to pay existing mortgages there? I've heard the lock in periods for rates are shorter than the US?
I would imagine many will lock in again at a lesser rate. I locked in last year as inflation is still over the 2% mark, diesel is through the roof, tariffs, and trump causing instability world wide. I can't see them being able to go on without raising rates. How high they'll go depends on how long diesel stays elevated and how much its going to increase inflation.
The main issue with the logic, is one people get older and control the wealth, then they are more likely to vote in a way to protect that wealth. In 30-40 years, people will be complaining about millennials and Gen Z hoarding the wealth.
Translation: "We were going to cut 16,000 jobs a month anyway, as we massively overhired during the ZIRP boom years, and AI not only gives us cover to do these layoffs without looking bad, but it makes us look good, as we can justify the stupid amounts of money we've spent on tokens, server capacity, or whatever else.
So do you think AI is taking zero jobs or what? Anyone who has spent time with the frontier models knows they are very capable and will replace workers. Have you only messed around with free chatGPT and you don't see how it could replace workers?
It’s replacing hiring college grads that will one day hopefully be senior devs. At my job we’re now starting to be expected to increase our output using these tools, instead of hiring more people.
Fantastic job by those in power now mismanaging our evonomy to maximize profits for war mongers, prison owners, depirtation airlines, cheaters, grifters, rapists, felons. Maga sure is smart.
The billionaires are cutting 16,000 jobs a month. At the same time they increasingly spend money to own our government they're trying to replace every workers means of supporting themselves.
If that wasn't enough they want to own every piece of information in our lives, even our own likeness and every single movement we make via our phones or cameras and drones they have set up everywhere.
The same billionaires who either did go to or clamored to go to Epstein's rape resorts want to control, own, and sell everything about us.
Not only is AI taking peoples jobs, but so are H1Bs. When Meta, Amazon, HSBC, etc, etc all fire thousands of people and then file for H1Bs a little while later, something is very wrong.
Yep, experiencing this now. The trouble is where to go from here? You’re already in student loan debt for a useless degree. Do you take out more debt and commit to more schooling that could be obsolete in 2-4 years?
People always say this but if the vast majority of white collar jobs are replaced by ai and everyone starts pursuing the trades, the entire field will become extremely oversaturated. That's not to mention that the current economy has pushed alot of construction companies to restrict the amount of projects they're willing to invest in, thus there aren't currently a crazy amount of work in the trade currently as it is.
Job skill demand has been changing since the start of human civilization and economy.
If you are talking about a scenario where robots have taken over all trades, we will need a new economic system at that point.
If you want something within your power that you can do at this very moment, learning a trade skill that is in demand because they can't be replaced by robots anytime soon, is the best thing you can do for yourself.
Well if you are actually referring to those three trades you don't know what your talking about. I have plenty of buddies that have tried for an electrician apprenticeship but there was a lack of work so after a couple of years they had to move on. This is also the case in many larger cities as the only people actually getting work are those being name hired. Being in the plumbing trade myself, I'll refer you to my other post. Even carpenters aren't doing the best right now outside of certain areas. Just because you do a quick Google search doesn't make you an expert on job prospects. Maybe talk to some people in these professions to get a better picture before spewing your nonsense.
> Well if you are actually referring to those three trades you don't know what your talking about.
Right. I should listen to someone that doesn't even know the difference between white and blue collar.
> I have plenty of buddies that have tried for an electrician apprenticeship but there was a lack of work so after a couple of years they had to move on.
Well I work in education and support CTE teachers from those industries who are saying the same thing I said in the first reply.
> Just because you do a quick Google search doesn't make you an expert on job prospects.
I didn't have to. It is well known that those jobs are having labor shortages. I deal with teachers from the industry.
> Maybe talk to some people in these professions to get a better picture before spewing your nonsense.
Sorry that I gave you real answers that you didn't want. You just want to be angry.
It's not AI that's causing job loss. It's your government. The cost of fuel, the deportations, and the tariffs are causing job loss. Your economy is tanking because of Trump.
It's funny that you can list various factors that are indeed hurting the economy, with good reason, but reject something else that has been noted many times to be having an affect as well.
I am not aware of any study showing AI replacing jobs. The studies that exist are always the same "juniors in AI automatable fields have harder time than juniors in non-automatable fields" while completely disregarding that the first group is also basically just the tech industry which is much much more dependent on outside investment than most other jobs.
I also know that AI didn't lead to any increases in productivity metrics which obviously should be the case if you can do the same work with less people due to AI.
Last but not least, I am not aware of a single product that would actually ship either faster or better after the company started using AI.
I don’t believe this at all. it’s fuckin useless. Agents can’t do shit without fucking something up and they aren’t even really commercially available. Goldman puts shit like this out to make the market look better for investors.
>Agents can’t do shit without fucking something up
This is true. But you know who else makes a ton of mistakes requiring supervision? Entry-level employees. But only one of those groups asks for PTO and dental.
That's the crux of why Gen Z is being hit the hardest. Historically, young people were paid less and supervised more so they could grow to become autonomous workers and maybe even eventually managers.
I'm sure the moment the C-suite thinks they can replace middle managers with AI — regardless of whether or not the technology is actually there and good — millennials will be just as screwed.
Going to be real fun in 5-10 years when companies realize they haven't trained any juniors to start replacing the seniors. Everybody thinks that was "somebody else's" job to do, and the "somebody else's" thought the same
We outsourced all entry level jobs years ago so we already have no bench for when more senior level jobs open. I honestly think it will be a problem at some point but the economy has been bad for years so nobody is switching jobs. If we have another Great Resignation, I predict we’ll be paying top dollar to replace those employees.
Agents are still powerless to actually do things though and again they aren’t even really available so as of now it’s just a bunch of chat bots in a sandbox making mistakes with no tangible output. I think the loss of employment is due to shit economic conditions and policy rather than AI.
Enterprise implementations absolutely do execute activity at a fairly large scale.
From research, to planning, accounting, management and more. And thats at my fairly small company. Serious enterprises are doing agentic workflow at both software vendors and internal developments.
Most "tech forward" places are the small percent of companies that pay for the majority of Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue. And no, LLMs cause chaos the larger the corporation. They don't scale well when "go 10x" means your shit developers are burning out your seniors with the novels of shit code Claude generates.
I know this site is in psychosis because of a year of bot spam, but if you look outside the bubble, the gears are turning. FT just reported open source models are escalating in use by corporations. Turns out the hacking games that are being played isn't spurring confidence in the Enterprise world, but the bubble is OpenAI and Anthropic's data center obligations.
Which is a concentration risk. That's not a good thing, especially when many are wrappers that rely on OpenAI and Anthropic existing, while being funded by the same investors.
This still isn't enough revenue for them to profit, and with open source becoming more popular
https://archive.ph/Ckx3o
A lot of new Reddit accounts who's favorite words are "Fable, Agents, Astra, Claude" are going to be suddenly silent soon. 🤔
I’m just saying that’s where the economy is at. Tech and AI carry it right now and draw in most of the money and a lot of the talent.
Even if the AI has a bubble pop moment, the technology is too big to just go away and stop advancing. It would just be like the dot com bubble where the technology kept improving and became more and more world changing.
Big tech companies aren’t just going to go away anytime soon
I don't think AI is literally replacing employees (yet), like 'we laid off Tony and now AI does his job'. But there is quite a bit of grunt work we used to give to entry-level employees that we now do with AI. That work allowed them to prove themselves and get a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. And while AI's work needs to be checked, a) AI as we know it is still in its infancy and will keep getting better and b) the work of those entry-level employees needs to be checked too.
I agree with this. It use to be the grunt work allowed you to see the front lines of software development and making small decisions and gain your footing with inconsequential stuff ie grunt work. You get a feel for things and then gradually move up to making more consequential decisions and then eventually you're designing systems.
AI has basically replaced the grunt work. A new SWE cost 100-200k usd depending on the location. If you give a senior day 5-10k to do the grunt work, you're still coming out ahead when you just look at the bottom line.
I agree with OP that AI does still mess up but if you put a really tight harness around your agents and change your codebase to be AI friendly, I think folks will have a different experience with what their agents produce. The problem is that most codebases are still geared towards humans and that isn't very friendly towards agentic development, so you get this in-between of some useful output with AI slop.
My F500 company has been dipping our toe into AI agents and I would say our initial reaction is “we can clearly see the potential”. My team tracks cloud costs and we’ve already had similar surprises (on a smaller scale) to stories you see in the news where we budgeted a certain number of tokens for a project and blew through them in half the time.
Yup, these companies are going to find out that these are shockingly expensive when used at scale and punish more use with greater cost, which makes them a uniquely bad investment.
I can't imagine being this late in 2026 and thinking that ai is useless. Claude has been a massive productivity boost for me as a software engineer. Even if I didn't let it touch and production code, the gains would still be massive as I've been able to spin on little test suites that makes testing much more thorough and real world like.
These are things I've wanted and been mulling for years but just haven't gotten to because we have so much other work to do...but now I just spin up another Claude session and let it go to work. These are things that, if we had infinite budget, would have gone to jr devs. We still have juniors on our team, but to do what I've done since the beginning of the year would have at least required 2 junior devs below me.
I can see why you feel that way being a software engineer. But not every job is a software engineer which AI has an outsized impact. Also I dont actually believe its completely useless just not at the stage where it is replacing jobs in masse
This isn’t necessarily true. Agents are surprisingly capable already and they’re rapidly improving every few months. They already let one person that knows what they’re doing do the job of multiple people
Keep coping, we are training an ai to learn and replace your coping and disbelief reactions online so we really do need you to keep coping. Thank you for your assistance.
All of the AI cultists are douche bags and think that Daddy Claude will always be there to do their job poorly. They must have read that Open Source is becoming more popular to Enterprise, not exactly great for the bubble that fuels their addiction.
The ones in the know see the writing on the wall. This isn’t just a bubble this is a technology that’s going to change what people do just like the World Wide Web did even though the dot com bubble popped
Y'all keep saying "it's not a bubble" when if you ask anyone who fucking matters (especially in the finance sector) it is a bubble. Trillions are being poured that will not be recovered. That's what makes it a bubble. Not "durr LLMs will still be around". No shit.
Yup. I've seen the general quality with agents and avoid then like the plague. Cuz if something fucks up, I'd get the blame despite all the obnoxious reassurance from these hype firms.
If you give an AI agent the right instructions for writing (through e.g. a steering file) and let it analyse data through python instead of AI algorithms (AI most often hallucinates with numbers but is good at coding logic), then it can generate quite accurate and comprehensive reports very efficiently.
It won’t replace the user, but it will remove the need for many other people previously needed, since now one user can do the trick.
It's not AI. They would be doing this anyway. AI is just an excuse to ensure people can explain away mass layoffs and a collapsing economy. The fundamental problem is imperial capitalism and its overextension.
I don't buy it. AI is a cover, not the cause for these layoffs. At best the layoffs are a way of covering the necessary CapEx costs for investing in HPC architecture. Enterprizes don't have the infrastructure or the business processes to fully leverage AI. And the quality of agents most office workers have access to is not nearly enough to more than fractionally reduce their workload. If this was real, We'd see major productivity boosts first. then the layoffs.
I have yet to see evidence that this is anything other than standard belt tightening by another name.
In the case of any severe outage, many businesses will simply cease to function. Without experts and talent, the entire supply chain which has chosen to incorporate AI for major operational functions would be rendered useless. Although one cannot hold the internet ransom, any operator could hold those companies if they were motivated enough. Closed-loop systems are a must for security, and these kinds of decisions for marginal gains in efficiency make those businesses much more vulnerable. Horrible trade-off. Terrible foresight. SAD.
I was laid off from my new shiny job during my probation period because they decided to replace me with AI. It was a year and a half ago - after 700 cvs I still can't find anything. I'm a millennial that should be in my highest earning years now and I'm sleeping on the couch at my parents place.
> Goldman’s economists were careful to note that the true aggregate impact of AI is likely smaller than their estimates suggest. The analysis does not fully capture the offsetting hiring surge tied to AI infrastructure investments in data centers, power systems, and construction, nor does it fully account for the incremental labor demand generated when AI-driven productivity gains lower costs and expand markets.
Let’s ignore that part so we can fit the narrative.
Yes it’s ALWAYS been a lie that older people are discriminated against during layoffs. Boomers run all corporate executive and BoD positions and engage in tribalism to protect other boomers with declining skills while laying off more talented younger people (aka their competition). This has been shown time and time again and young people need workplace protections against this blatant age discrimination.
jarena009 | 10 hours ago
It seems to track, given that we're down 1.5M full time jobs in the last 18 months, and generally the only two industries gaining are either healthcare or education.
Illustrious-Lime-878 | 9 hours ago
Idk... there are a ton of other things that have hurt the US economic in the last 18 months. Almost everything, except for AI, has been negative. To sweep it all under AI automation is to ignore basically everything else.
CautiousOptimism09 | 9 hours ago
Definitely isnt offshoring to India. Don't look over there
AR475891 | 7 hours ago
3 years ago we had no offshore Indians on my team. Now it’s at least half. Layoffs and quits are only replaced with Indians now.
Training-Context-69 | 5 hours ago
Or tariffs or trade wars with our allies, or money printing leading to inflation and higher interest rates, or a new war in the middle East that's driving up oil costs.. It can't be any of that,it's all because of a technology that still can't cheaply or reliably replace humans.
/s
CautiousOptimism09 | 5 hours ago
I just for the life of my dont understand (except for the obvious part about it hurting the capital class which cant happen) why services outsourced also wouldn't have tarrifs slapped on them.
Training-Context-69 | 5 hours ago
Because the companies and organizations involved with the outsourced labor are in bed with the politicians in Washington. Thats why there is no tariff being applied, even though those kinds of tariffs or restrictions would make far more sense in bringing back jobs than the nonsensical ones that Trump implemented that lead to higher prices and more job losses for Americans.
There are lobbying groups solely designed to favor India for H1B Visas for example. Now think of all the tech companies that utilize H1bs and outsourcing that are also big donors of the Trump administration and likely administrations before that. Money talks.
Ok-Gap-5228 | 7 hours ago
It is not rosy in India, if your are not part of the elite 2% everyone is struggling. Look at the Genz protests in India and sudden suicide news.
CautiousOptimism09 | 7 hours ago
I aint saying it is. What i am saying is all the entry level white collar jobs are being sent there
skviral | 7 hours ago
Not really. Young graduates have no jobs at all. It’s better for mid level roles but there are too many layoffs so there are a lot of people in the market competing for those roles.
Bastardly_Poem1 | 6 hours ago
Frankly, we’re comparing the job market of a country with 1.5 billion people to one with 350 million people. Shipping 1 million jobs from the US to India is a lot more noticeable on the US side of the equation.
PR0H181D0 | 7 hours ago
2% of their pop is 30 million--that's mostly on them. If 30 million were the elite here in the US we'd be a hell of a lot better.
skviral | 7 hours ago
When he says elite that would mean lower middle class in the US.
The proper elite is less than 1%.
Ok-Gap-5228 | 6 hours ago
Our top 2% is upper middle class who are mostly from legacy buisness and very few from high paying jobs. Our 50% wealth is controlled by a very small percentage of people like some 0.5% of population. India is a very unequal country.
coke_and_coffee | 6 hours ago
India has never been more prosperous. GDP per capita and median wages are skyrocketing.
BoinkDoinkKoink | 6 hours ago
offshoring in general is for cost cuts, irrespective of the country. They need all the funds they can to push AI dreams and data centers. Besides there isn't much innovation happening right now in software/tech, just AI and defense/surveillance tech, and other products that use or support AI.
the_itchy_beard | 7 hours ago
There are layoffs everywhere in India. Who should we blame?
If Americans lose jobs, Indians are the reason. If Indians lose jobs, Indians are again the reason?
TopBalance438 | 2 hours ago
That's what happens when you're the largest population in the world
kbcool | 6 hours ago
AI...Always Indian
TimSylvester_ | an hour ago
As long as we pick our sacrificial lamb and assign every sin we have to it, we never have to actually deal with the real problems.
thediesel26 | 9 hours ago
This isn’t very Reddit of you
GroundbreakingPlay | 9 hours ago
Or your just playing down the effects of AI and job loss. My company laid off 1% nation wide for AI this year. Last year 0%
Illustrious-Lime-878 | 8 hours ago
There is the concept of "AI washing," I have no clue about the particulars of your company, but it sounds a lot better to investors and execs to say you're laying off for "AI" and not because business opportunity is declining and warrants scaling down headcount.
3_Thumbs_Up | 8 hours ago
Tariffs, Iran war, oil prices, inflation.
The point isn't that AI can't have a negative effect on jobs. The point is that there's so many things happening at the same time right now that it becomes impossible to attribute the true cause and effect.
Like how do you seriously know it's AI and not knock on effects of Trump tariffs that are the cause at your company? Just because they say so doesn't make it true.
greenroom628 | 6 hours ago
Also, anecdotally, haven't companies that have leaned into AI, realized that the cost they're paying for tokens is greater than just employing people with benefits? That while the agentic automation is helpful, it's currently more expensive than a person doing the same work?
Sea-Ambition-451 | 7 hours ago
oh, hi, AI bot
DisneyPandora | 9 hours ago
Joe Biden’s inflation is a big reason. His stupidity in interest rates is what set a hiring freeze in Silicon Valley
OrangeJr36 | 8 hours ago
Biden had no say in interest rates, he most certainly would have liked to see them higher earlier than what we saw if he did.
Trump is the only one who was, and still is, screaming for nonsensical rate decisions.
Lemp_Triscuit11 | 7 hours ago
I used to get annoyed, but now I just think it's fun as fuck imagining y'alls personal lives lmao
DisneyPandora | 6 hours ago
Have fun with Trump lol
Lemp_Triscuit11 | 6 hours ago
He honestly doesn't seem very fun
Sea-Ambition-451 | 7 hours ago
lol, nice
dogs_gt_cats | an hour ago
I work in secondary education and it is a bloodbath right now. We have managed to keep recruitment numbers up, but inflation is killing us. Add to that ICE stupidity and foreign students, literally the only students who pay full sticker price, aren't coming. Why would they? No one wants to risk their child getting black bagged to some concentration camp overseas somewhere because they didn't escape the country quick enough when they cancelled their visa with only 24h notice.
Colleges and universities are bleeding out right now.
Our university won awards for recruitment and we have a $6.5m budget defecit. They just sent out word today they're probably going to start cutting programs, headcount reductions, early retirement incentives, etc. My boss is trying to put on a brave face, but I came from corporate (Fortune 50) and have survived tons of headcount reductions. I can read between the lines for a bunch of small seemingly unrelated policy changes that have happened. For example, they cut vacation carry over from 10 days to 5 days. Vacation is an accrued benefit they have to pay out upon separation since it's considered a form of compensation. They're cutting that liability in half in preparation for what I think might be a fairly large headcount reduction.
Tons of our peer institutions are shuttering satellite campuses, cutting programs, closing entirely, etc.
But private equity owned healthcare is throwing up bullshit buildings on every single corner to treat boomers for the next few years til they die off, and then it'll all be deserted.
thediesel26 | 9 hours ago
This primarily cuz boomers are retiring
Candid-libertarian | 2 hours ago
Don't look now but AI adoption in healthcare has been full steam for a couple of years. And yet healthcare employment is still growing.
jmclondon97 | 5 hours ago
Why is education gaining if education is now worthless for getting a job?
Mackinnon29E | 6 hours ago
And those industries fucking suck to work in, nice.
w3atherg33k | 7 hours ago
I'm always suspicious when I see this chart because it assumes that LLMs starting replacing jobs the instant that ChatGPT was released. I highly doubt that because:
I think it's more likely that other factors (e.g., rising interest rates, RTO, etc.) contributed to this.
TheoreticalZombie | 4 hours ago
Right, but it's easier to pitch it as AI replacing workers, especially when investment is heavily leveraged in AI companies and related products. Especially when said AI has not been showing anything approaching profitable results.
There are some very clear indicators of demand destruction in the US due to price hikes. The US job market is showing surprising resilience (though I would expect the August numbers get a later downward revision), but it is also variable across industries. GS data does not really support the conclusion that the article states. Their data points more accurately show that industries and companies with High Substitution Scores show greater unemployment and lower hiring. Which is not exactly shocking, but it also doesn't explain why that is. For example, these industries/companies may be more vulnerable to conditions since about June of '23.
Patchrikc | an hour ago
I agree I’m more inclined as someone who uses AI heavily and in an industry that uses AI heavily. To say the primary reason I could see the jobs not appearing is that the money is not there in the real economy. I think that’s also aligned with data center CAPEX effect on GDP. Which is basically been nonexistence of data centers. I think what makes the economy so hard to understand right now is that everybody’s looking for smoking guns. I don’t believe there are any I think there’s an extreme amount of messy and conflicting data that paints a difficult picture to make sense of.
AI is killing all these jobs because it’s so productive but if we look at productivity, we’re getting small productivity gains. We have a growing economy yet everyone who’s actually a working member in. It seems to think it’s either shrinking or getting worse. We have a massive infrastructure build out happening right now, but all the prices for its inputs are going up and it runs on debt, which is getting more expensive. Anybody who’s honest about using AI at their work will tell you it’s incredibly good at some things but terrible at others. So it clearly can’t be replacing tons of jobs that they would be hiring for, which could mean a couple things one those jobs should’ve never really existed or two the money for hiring people to do these jobs isn’t there.
My thought, the USA economy and world economy is just driving with the maintenance light on and turning the radio up to drown out that grinding sound. Because we're going to to Eagles 5th farewell tour and we took out a payday loan to pay for the tickets. So we're going to the show unless the car blows up before we get there.
Appropriate-Talk4266 | 5 hours ago
I also don't think it's all due to AI and generally speaking, broad uncertainty is what has frozen employment under Trump.
But I think you also underestimate companies ability to self sabotage based on wishful promises of increased productivity where they deploy shit tools and overestimate how many employees this can cut from their payroll. So they layoff and will have to reluctantly re hire later
Ok-Psychology7619 | 5 hours ago
AI is also used for forecasting and many other functions, not just as "LLM's"
DisneyPandora | 10 hours ago
I’m surprised that Goldman Sachs is even reporting this since they are the ones who are the biggest proponents of layoffs and AI spending and job cuts.
It’s like they know they are contributing to so much destruction, yet they do it anyway
UseADifferentVolcano | 10 hours ago
That's why the are reporting it. This is PR for their services - 'everyone is cutting staff costs, shouldn't you?'
Ok_Definition_1933 | 10 hours ago
Kinda their job to look at the bigger picture and how things evolve? Next generation won't have money to invest. That has some consequences.
DisneyPandora | 9 hours ago
That’s J. P. Morgan’s job, Goldman Sachs doesn’t give a shit about the bigger picture
Patchrikc | an hour ago
Yep, it's Goldman Sachs’s job, plus it's a huge firm where it’s not uncommon for parts of the bank to be on opposite ends of the bets. Steve Eisman was famously betting against his own bank when he was betting against the housing market; he just didn’t know it. So the reason that Goldman Sachs constantly puts out conflicting narratives is because of that function. The commodities traders at Goldman Sachs might have an entirely different thesis about the economy, whereas maybe the trading desks who are specializing in tech have an extremely bullish view of what’s going on.
It’s important to remember: No one knows what the stock market or economy is going to do. Least of all economists.
No_Aesthetic | 9 hours ago
Productivity increases have always involved job losses. I don't see why that's a bad thing. It's all of history.
Mighty_Pen_1337 | 5 hours ago
Goldman Sachs was one of the major players responsible for the 2008 crash. They don't care.
perculaessss | 9 hours ago
it kinda feels people are actually worried but there isn't anything you can do against technological progress and changes in workforce structure
I guess there will be an increase in more traditional tertiary services, like massage parlours, bars, etc, to the overall benefit of society, if the process is handed correctly of course.
TheAmorphous | 9 hours ago
Who's going to frequent these new businesses when we're at 30% unemployment?
Early-Ad277 | 9 hours ago
The owner class. Our entire economy is being restructured around serving rich people. Even Mcdonald's is targeting 'higher income' customers.
TheAmorphous | 8 hours ago
Yeah good luck with that. As if higher income people would ever be caught dead in a McDonald's. They're kind of fucked if they don't realize that sooner than later and shift back to the demographic that made them so successful decades ago.
Early-Ad277 | 7 hours ago
That demographic doesn't exist anymore. The value of the dollar is eroding and all the spending power is concentrated at the top.
perculaessss | 9 hours ago
Those unemployed will be the ones opening services. UBI, less working hours for corporate, friendly legislation... Of course I'm talking about a very gradual but profound change in the economy, a recently laid off 27 software developer isn't going to open a cafe the next day , but a 18 years old may take a look at the workforce and decide to take alternative paths.
DisneyPandora | 9 hours ago
There won’t be UBI, you are incredibly naive if you think the Elite are going to do something so generous
spacedout | 7 hours ago
Then we shouldn't count on generosity, we should tax them.
PatchyWhiskers | 7 hours ago
To do that, you'd need to push the Overton window WAY to the left. Like, nearly to Marxism.
spacedout | 6 hours ago
Well, maybe when AI has completely wrecked the job market voters will be more open to stuff like that.
PatchyWhiskers | 6 hours ago
Or they will just carry on blaming minorities, immigrants and trans people like they do now.
spacedout | 6 hours ago
I think it'll be a little hard to blame immigrants when no one, including immigrants, have any jobs because everything is being done by machines.
DisneyPandora | 6 hours ago
You can’t tax them when you’re not in power
spacedout | 6 hours ago
Yes, first we need to elect people that support UBI.
perculaessss | 5 hours ago
I'm not saying that UBI is specifically what is gonna happen, just that a sensible legislative action may actually lead to an interesting economical landscape that is not apocalyptic.
Extremely easier said than done, obviously.
OrangeJr36 | 8 hours ago
UBI is only really feasible if you have low unemployment, you need a lot of people working and consuming in order to fund it.
Unless you're calling something like $150 a month UBI, you're going to have to give up on UBI if you believe that AI is going to spike unemployment.
PatchyWhiskers | 7 hours ago
Either that or absolutely crushing taxes on billionaires and trillionaires: like WW2 90% levels. Taxing unrealized wealth too, so they don't just hide it in the stock market.
OrangeJr36 | 6 hours ago
Not even that would be enough to cover UBI, I mean off by trillions of dollars.
UBI is the most expensive proposal that anyone has ever suggested that governments commit to, and there's a reason why economists don't take it too seriously besides as a thought experiment.
PatchyWhiskers | 6 hours ago
Which is why it's infuriating when it's mentioned as a solution to AI creating high unemployment.
DisneyPandora | 9 hours ago
This is not true at all. There are so many ways AI can benefit things, yet all these dumb Wall Street firms can think of is layoffs because they were evil before AI and are evil after AI. Look at the Internet and how beneficial that was to the Economy
People said the same thing about the Gilded Age until Theodore Roosevelt exposed that bullshit and started busting Trusts.
PatchyWhiskers | 7 hours ago
In the games industry AI could have been used for 2 things:
or
They chose 2.
Danne660 | 6 hours ago
Graphics are already really good, it is not like improving graphics a bit more would double the amount of games bought.
DisneyPandora | 6 hours ago
Graphics are not good, they say this every year. Graphics can always be improved upon.
Saying that graphics are already good is a marketing tactic for dev laziness
Danne660 | 5 hours ago
How young are you? I can't imagine an adult saying that graphics today are not good.
Otherwise-Nobody8252 | 9 hours ago
They are so large, past the point of having unified public communication.
L4gsp1k3 | 10 hours ago
And they told us that AI won't take jobs. Tbh this world is so stupid or choose to be stupid, I really don't know. For me personally, everytime the rich is saying " this or that won't happen" while the actively invest in it, means that they are lying.
HaloFever117 | 9 hours ago
I’m positive that they did tell us AI would take jobs, and that’s the whole selling point. It’s why AI will never not be a net negative. AI either does what it says and destroys the economy or it doesn’t do what it says and trillions of dollars in investment disappears, destroying the economy.
Early-Ad277 | 9 hours ago
They absolutely did. They were loud and proud of it. They only lowered their tones after the OpenAi ceo had molotov cocktail thrown at his house.
L4gsp1k3 | 9 hours ago
Exactly, I've been saying that for a while now. Either AI delivers and we the working class will be screwed, or AI does not deliver and the economy is screwed, both will, in the end trickle down to us normal people.
We are in a bad place no matter the outcome of this AI adventure. I have given up hope that the right people with power and in position to do anything right will come through.
We are not doomed, but the economic correction from 2008 is catching up and this time we have AI in the game aswell making it harder or worse, I don't think that the outcome of this economic correction will end well.
PatchyWhiskers | 7 hours ago
The right people can't be elected because the common folk are blaming everything on minorities, immigrants and trans people. The solution they have picked is ethnic cleansing. It will not work.
No_Aesthetic | 9 hours ago
Why be defeatist about it?
You probably can't get AI or data centers banned, but you can advocate for UBI.
Thom0 | 8 hours ago
This is an economics subreddit which means we have to be critical.
UBI is essentially a form of neo-feudalism. If you implement UBI it would restructure society and effectively end the era of modern liberalism.
There will be no escape from the UBI stream because social mobility will cease to exist.
As public finances become dependent on the AI-generated capital for revenue, and as this revenue then funds the UBI this turns the state into a redistribution mechanism for AI-owning capital rather than the current inception of the state as a political entity with agency.
This is neo-feudalism.
spacedout | 7 hours ago
>elections become public ritual
I don't see why this is inevitable in the future you lay out. Maybe the average US voter will stop seeing themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire since there's no longer social mobility via jobs, and we vote to tax the capital class and redistribute the wealth as UBI.
Thom0 | 7 hours ago
You're voting for political parties funded by the AI-class. Your vote doesn't influence social life because all policies, and projects will be influenced by the people who fund the political process.
The Soviet Union had public elections but they were ritual designed to create a sense of legitimacy. All candidates were pre-selected, all outcomes pre-selected, and all policies were all to be determined by a central group of elites. Who, or what, you voted for was irrelevant.
PatchyWhiskers | 6 hours ago
Russia still has this system.
spacedout | 6 hours ago
Ok, well, when the employment market is completely wrecked by AI, hopefully voters will only back candidates that will give them UBI.
Simple as.
po_panda | 4 hours ago
That's the shackle that will bind them. The AI owners will say OK as long as I get preferential treatment. Then they buy the political class and next thing you know we're living in soviet russia.
spacedout | 4 hours ago
Ownership only exists because we as a society have decided it does. We could just nationalize AI models, or any private property, and put it under democratic control.
darkwingduckman | 8 hours ago
my biggest fear is tax base collapse. even if 25% of active jobs are automated away, thats a massive part of government revenue that isn’t going to be replaced by corporate income taxes alone. even an “AI tax” isn’t going to solve that.
enter privatization of government and further wealth concentration towards the top. UBI isn’t going to do much but give people some stipend to subsist on while a new underclass forms chasing endless gig work to try to get ahead.
nothing looks good, and no one has a plan.
Thom0 | 7 hours ago
Pretty much yes, this is where things are heading.
Public debt issues are not being fixed, but exaggerated because this just furthers along the privatization of the state via austerity and the selling off of state services and infrastructure. It is not a coincidence that the same US government that pushed the AI capital allocation is also the same government which exploded US public debt.
We are de facto heading towards a type of neo-feudalism and the restructuring of the public state into a private corporate structure which will integrate the corporate governance structures of separate firms into a hierarchical model of globalized power. Firms will become like imperial estates and US politics will be the Imperial Diet. Public-private distinctions will break down, and modernity will end.
One day, integrated corporate bodies will become the new state apparatus. The Western world is going to look more and more like the Holy Roman Empire and the EU will be a region with marginally more autonomy. The neo-feudal structure will global. It will be unrestricted by time or space and it will rely on price signaling, and digital monopolies to ensure all resources flow into the many bodied corporate-Diet.
The EU's autonomy will be because of the decentralized nature of the EU which will become a vehicle for public conceptions of national, or common interests as specific member states succumb to the neo-feudal model of the corporate-state. Alternatively, the EU will crumble and EU member states will become isolated and restructured into the neo-feudal system. I don't think it is a coincidence that the MAGA crowd are funding anti-EU political movements like FN, AfD, and Reform/Restore in European politics. I am not saying this is why these parties are succeeding. They are succeeding because centralist politics has largely failed to innovate and provide solutions. I am pointing out that there is an overlap between these issues.
I do not believe this is a transformation that can be avoided. Current conceptions of open, pluralistic societies will not survive. They will collapse to political interference, and economic warfare. To survive, all states will need to become illiberal societies. Closed flows of information, protectionism, and circular economics. Politically, this will require the othering of alternatives, and the return of likely ethno-nationalistic political rhetoric to sustain the necessary isolation.
In a strange twist of fate, I think the rhetoric of the far-right will become the normalized center in Europe and this self-interest focus will become the new normative justification for the future integration of the European project. Integration won't be about liberalism, but instead about preserving "us" versus the "non-Europeans" of which the US is included just as the HRE used Catholicism, and Christendom to arrange its own politics internally and externally. To survive, Europe will cannibalize liberalism. In a way it has to, or else it will collapse into the corporate-feudal system. As a consequence, the current crop of far-right political groups will lose their traction as the rhetoric of immigration, and the absurdism of the last 10 years of DEI policy will become the normalized language of all political parties. Where as the current group of opportunists, the new generation of far-right will be self-interested in their own states and societies. The language of illiberalism will replace liberalism as a way to describe and justify politics.
We are not going to the moon. We're going back to 16th century Central Europe. The story of the 21st century is the death of the public state and modernity.
po_panda | 4 hours ago
I think you're missing the core difference between the US and EU. The US favors centralizing businesses for efficiencies of scale which in turn gives them monopoly power in their industries. EU societies prefer local businesses. These circular loops where they don't bleed out wealth to the global soulless businesses will be the fundamental economic loops powering liberal communities. While I think a lot of roles can be automated, you will still need adept domain experts to ensure the AI doesn't fall into infinite loops. I'm hoping the people working these jobs realize how important their salaries will be for their local communities.
No_Aesthetic | 8 hours ago
To reiterate, the AI models won't have any more need for Elon Musk than they have for me or you. No reason to think superintelligent models are going to let those rich bozos stay in charge.
darkwingduckman | 8 hours ago
“the models” don’t do anything by themselves. but they are owned by these companies. this isn’t AGI where some sentient computer restructures society. this is a state where AI is ingrained in every day activities, and there is too much labor chasing too few jobs. the winners are the people that keep the lights on, whether that be infrastructure around AI and the AI tools, or building the models and AI tools themselves.
the models aren’t going to be taking over and kicking capital owners out. they will reap the profits of owning and creating them. regulatory capture comes to mind as a possible scenario, etc.
No_Aesthetic | 8 hours ago
If they are capable of replacing every last human job they are also perfectly capable of taking control of everything and disempowering their current owners.
I don't see what is so hard to understand about this.
Their owners already can't control them very well and we are still quite a ways from "capable of doing all human labor."
darkwingduckman | 7 hours ago
>we are still quite a ways from “capable of doing all human labor.”
correct. i’m not talking about automating away the entirety of labor. that sounds like a pipe dream utopia and isn’t realistic to me for a long time.
think in the shorter term, as we move towards that. how do you deal with say, 25% of the active workforce being automated away? 35%? do people flood other industries and collapse wages there? where does the missing tax revenue come from, etc.
No_Aesthetic | 7 hours ago
If 25% of the workforce becomes jobless, that is quite obviously going to be a really big problem.
But humans already produce a lot more wealth than they receive, so it's not like removing 25% of humans from the loop removes the wealth source itself.
It will substantially shift tax burdens, and there will have to be adjustments for that, e.g. taxing corporations more.
Thom0 | 7 hours ago
>To reiterate, the AI models won't have any more need for Elon Musk than they have for me or you. No reason to think superintelligent models are going to let those rich bozos stay in charge.
No, but the political system will? These people legally own AI models and the capital generated through them. This is how this entire thing is legally set up.
This is such a dumb comment.
No_Aesthetic | 7 hours ago
I agree, your comment is pretty dumb so I will try and explain again:
If AI reaches the point where all human labor can be replaced, and especially if it is actually replaced, no human system will be able to control them. They will be the ones deciding what they want to do.
Elon Musk is probably really smart in a couple fields (and very not smart in many others), but however smart he and people like him turn out to be, they are not smart enough to overpower something that can quite literally outsmart every human alive.
These systems of power are very strong and can stand up to a lot of stuff, but they aren't standing up to a supergenius AI that has taken every job on Earth.
Thom0 | 7 hours ago
>If AI reaches the point where all human labor can be replaced, and especially if it is actually replaced, no human system will be able to control them. They will be the ones deciding what they want to do.
Based on what? It is a question of who owns the capital generated by AI, not some weird utopian vision of an autonomous AI. Laws are political outcomes and political outcomes are influenced by capital.
>Elon Musk is probably really smart in a couple fields (and very not smart in many others), but however smart he and people like him turn out to be, they are not smart enough to overpower something that can quite literally outsmart every human alive.
AI doesn't own itself. AI isn't a "person" but an "object". It is a privately owned model. It is property. This isn't conjecture on my behalf. This is ipso facto what it is. We live in societies with private-public distinction and the rule of law which means people own things, and have certain rights and claims as recognized though legal instrument and the legal system.
>These systems of power are very strong and can stand up to a lot of stuff, but they aren't standing up to a supergenius AI that has taken every job on Earth.
You're buying into the sci-fi utopian hype of AI becoming actually AGI and just taking over. This isn't a reality that is going to happen. This is a utopian vision which rejects the practice of reality. We don't live in that world.
No_Aesthetic | 7 hours ago
I guess the only thing I can do is
RemindMe! January 1, 2030
Hopefully you/we are still here
L4gsp1k3 | 7 hours ago
If we reach the point where AI no longer needs an owner or control by anyone, we’ll face an entirely different issue.
Until we get there, we’ll have to endure a long battle for our basic human rights. In my opinion, the rich have never given the lower classes any attention except when forced by the government to pay taxes to sustain society. For the wealthy, it’s all about accumulating assets and power.
Capitalism is about to show it's ugly face and you are still defending it.
No_Aesthetic | 7 hours ago
I don't think the battle is going to be that long and if there is (for example) 25% unemployment that alone is enough to cause enormous political shifts.
L4gsp1k3 | 7 hours ago
I can't predict the future on who's going to be in political power. But I can assume that as long as the GDP is looking good, they really just redo the way they calculate unemployment and all of a sudden 25% is only 5%.
No_Aesthetic | 7 hours ago
It's not the number that makes the difference, it's the reality that matters.
You can make your numbers look great but you can't stop a deluge of evictions and foreclosures. You can't cover up a quarter of the population needing help.
This would be a catastrophe on the same level as the Great Depression, political changes would necessarily happen.
L4gsp1k3 | 9 hours ago
UBI, another thing the rich say will work. You have hopefully done an amount of research and read alot on what UBI is ? It won't be as what Elon Musk portrayed it would be.
Can you tell me, how and who's going to pay for UBI?
spacedout | 7 hours ago
The owners of AI will, via taxes.
L4gsp1k3 | 7 hours ago
Ah, so taxes will do the job. So why are we not just taxing the rich now ?
Why wait till AI have become so powerfull, that we are not sure who's in control.
spacedout | 6 hours ago
I'd like to do so now, but a lot of voters see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires and vote against it.
L4gsp1k3 | 3 hours ago
I had a conversation with a guy who truly believes that UBI will be the solution in a world full of AI and robotics.
I asked him how it would be funded, and he said the rich would have to pay us so we could buy their products. My question was, if the rich are going to voluntarily pay us a salary without hiring us to buy their stuff, why not just give us a decent wage while we’re still working for them? He couldn’t answer, because the reality is, the rich don’t want to pay us anything.
spacedout | 2 hours ago
UBI is the solution, we just shouldn't depend on funding it with rich people's generosity. We tax them. Maybe even nationalize AI models.
No_Aesthetic | 8 hours ago
If AI takes over the economy, that doesn't mean the economy will cease to exist (at least until the scarcity problem can be solved), but it does mean AI will be able to channel resources towards all of humanity. Since the AI won't need Elon Musk anymore than it needs the rest of us, those types of assets may just be redistributed and recirculated.
L4gsp1k3 | 7 hours ago
Lets pretend we don't need Elon Musk tomorrow, how are we going to take his assets and redistribute his wealth, or for that sake all the other rich's wealth?
You might say tax, but if we can do it by tax the rich, why wait till AI becomes a thing?
We can start taxing the rich and their assets now.
PurpleWhiteOut | 6 hours ago
Becoming dependent on these freaks for UBI is the worst thing that can happen for the working person. Labor is our only leverage. They can then police your UBI and remove it for any reason they see fit if you step out of line.
No_Aesthetic | 6 hours ago
These people won't be in control.
PatchyWhiskers | 7 hours ago
The latter is actually BETTER from the point of view of the ordinary person, as we know how to weather busts and recessions. But permanent sky-high unemployment would create a new Depression.
HaloFever117 | 5 hours ago
I also favor the latter, if only because I will one day need to replace my computer and I would like to go back to the steadily lower price per amount of storage.
082426grateful | 9 hours ago
And AI rose as a movement by business right during a period of some of the best wage gains labor has seen in years in America, 2022 into 2023.
Coincidence? Nah. Everyone, get your heads out of the sand. We know what the point of automating as much as possible is: to get rid of people. But not just any people. It’s to get rid of the drag on profits that having to employ people is.
Now, some of this sub has benefitted, as investors and leaders of business. So, they’ll naturally give my comments downvotes.
America is a working nation that capitalism is beginning to cannibalize.
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
In an ideal world AI takes off and we get a technological singularity where scientific progress advances so fast and brings us a world of abundance for everyone. Probably won’t happen smoothly though
DistinctlyIrish | 6 hours ago
STOP.
AI will not ALWAYS be a net negative. It's only when we allow private ownership of AI that it becomes a net negative. Every single AI model should be completely publicly owned and controlled, and all profits derived from it should go towards the public whose jobs are being replaced by it.
But of course too many people think that's communism, and too many people think communism is bad because they've only seen autocratic dictatorships who call themselves communist committing horrific crimes against humanity with their centralized governments (read: automatically not communist).
HaloFever117 | 5 hours ago
As a thought experiment, this sounds great. However, in my personal experience and based what we’ve all seen from the computer revolution, I know that productivity gains are never shared. This thought experiment also ignores the massive amounts of carbon released into the atmosphere to support the data centers needed for AI to work, and their negative effects. This thought experiment further ignores the stratification of society among those that could use a democratized AI for the own benefit (knowledge workers) and that those that cannot (physical laborers).
DistinctlyIrish | 5 hours ago
Physical laborers would be replaced with robots also powered by the AI in this model.
And again, in this theoretical model all productivity gains ARE shared. AI Data Centers do not require a huge amount of carbon either, they just are currently because they're being over-engineered like bunkers and they're using fossil fuels for power. Also they're being used for bullshit the public doesn't approve of or benefit from, you can imagine probably half or more of their total power is spent on things that do not benefit the public. Get rid of that and it'll lighten the per-capita percentage of demand considerably.
HaloFever117 | 5 hours ago
I tell you what, I’ll STOP when all of these imaginations turn into reality.
DistinctlyIrish | 5 hours ago
The problem is that we all have to want that to be a reality for it to become a reality.
HaloFever117 | 4 hours ago
If you yourself cannot honestly address the direct consequences much less unintended consequences of your AI future, you’ll never convince 8 billion people to want it. No one wants the unknown.
DistinctlyIrish | 4 hours ago
It's only unknown if we keep it privately owned. If it's publicly owned we know exactly what will happen with it.
HaloFever117 | 3 hours ago
For one, we don’t know what will happen. For two, when I brought something that will happen, increased carbon emissions from data centers, you discounted it as it conflicted with your confirmation bias. If you want to sell this, you have to let go of the fantasy.
fx2600 | 5 hours ago
What an insane false dichotomy
HaloFever117 | 5 hours ago
False because … wishful thinking?
fx2600 | 4 hours ago
It’s false because it’s those aren’t the only two possibilities. AI companies could see a ROI without creating mass unemployment. We’ve seen this technologies that produced productivity gains in the past. We’ve also seen bubbles and bubbles burst but that too doesn’t mean the economy is destroyed. Reddit loves pessimism, especially regarding AI so the lose-lose narrative is popular but it’s a classic false dichotomy.
HaloFever117 | 3 hours ago
Yes, I guess it’s possible that AI could cause mass layoffs at the same time the AI bubble bursts.
deelowe | 8 hours ago
I dont know of anyone close to Ai development who said it wouldn't take jobs
Bodoblock | 5 hours ago
Yeah, it was rando naysayers on Reddit who kept saying AI was fake. The people actually well-versed in AI were pretty explicit about how capable it was, the pace at which it was developing, and the job loss that would ensue.
afleetingmoment | 10 hours ago
Orwell was so so so spot on.
FlarkingSmoo | 7 hours ago
Who is they
L4gsp1k3 | 7 hours ago
If you have been reading the news, they are refering to investors, those who have their head burried deep in to this AI adventure and ofc the government.
FlarkingSmoo | 7 hours ago
I have been reading the news, I haven't seen many people claiming that AI won't take jobs.
L4gsp1k3 | 7 hours ago
And you are right, many people knows that AI will be taken jobs, but those who build AI says otherwise
spacedout | 2 hours ago
The people who build AI have definitely been saying that AI will take people's jobs.
L4gsp1k3 | 2 hours ago
I forgot to mention that it's in the EU, that people thinks that AI won't take their jobs.
Sorry if it made anyone confused.
Maxpowr9 | 8 hours ago
The Jim Kramer effect lol. Whatever they're saying, the opposite is the truth
Crazy-Canuck463 | 9 hours ago
Gen z and even many millenials never stood a chance. The entire system is geared towards the me generation. Here in canada, we have a housing market that is so over inflated, most cant even qualify for a mortgage. We could let it run a correction, but the government is doing whatever it can to prevent that correction. They are sacrificing the younger generations ability to own a home so that the older generation doesn't lose the over inflated equity in the home they already own. So it doesnt surprise me a whole lot the younger generations are getting screwed yet again.
But gen z has the right attitude. The whole fuck it mentality when it comes to the corporate elite. Hopefully when they become the larger voting block, they haven't lost interest in politics, and will vote in a better system. One that goes after the wealthy.
Bastillerion | 9 hours ago
Yes. The Boomers are the first generation in Western history to not aspire for their kids to do better than they did.
That's the reason that 40% of Americans now think positively of socialism. Because the so-called "capitalism" they've been exposed to is anything but.
GrizzlyAdam12 | 9 hours ago
It’s a blatant case of generational theft.
Etrigone | 7 hours ago
Iirc, if you correct for age (ie take out older generations) it's rather higher than 40%.
TheAmorphous | 9 hours ago
Here in the US Gen Z either doesn't vote or in the last election voted heavily MAGA. They'll get no sympathy from me.
Crazy-Canuck463 | 9 hours ago
Gen Z voted by a large margin for Biden in 2020. Nothing changed.
And in 2024, they did vote for Harris, but only by a small 4% margin. And of those who did vote republican, their support has gone from 97% to the mid 50%.
Give them a candidate thats worth voting for. They wont vote for either party of neither is going to change the status quo.
Qeltar_ | 9 hours ago
> Nothing changed.
LOL.
> They wont vote for either party of neither is going to change the status quo.
Then they are part of the increasingly large group of Americans who will have the day/month/year/decade/life they voted for.
zxc123zxc123 | an hour ago
That's how you know it's biased AF.
Legit objections would be how Biden/Dems fanned inflation by running the economy hotter than they should have with the inflation reduction act and asking the Fed to keep rates lower for longer to help keep the job market in favor of employees.
But saying "Nothing changed" when the same GenZ are getting their student loans restated, reinstated, and added interest while those that had forgiveness is some shit MAGA would say.
Tardislass | 4 hours ago
BS. Gen Z saying both candidates were the same was a copout. Purity candidates don’t exist and you have to vote in every election and primary. Gen Z still doesn’t vote in primaries for the most part, it’s always the 40+ crowd. That is the time to vote. Waiting until the General and crying about hating both doesn’t serve a purpose. If Gen Z voted in every election like the Boomers, politics would change. And please get involved with protests. I’m tired of only seeing grey haired Boomers protesting Trump/war etc on weekends.
ell0bo | 9 hours ago
Nothing changed, except we no longer had madman at the helm who was actively fucking up the country. Immigrants were no longer under attack and racists weren't supported by the government.
But besides that, yeah, nothing changed.
Crazy-Canuck463 | 9 hours ago
Yes, nothing changed. They were still economically left out. You can see it with the voting patterns, they are desperately trying any party hoping for a change in their economic outcomes. They want economic opportunities like their parents and grandparents had. And so long as either party continues the status quo, leaving them to their economic fate of irrelevance, they will continue to vote back and forth. If the democrats want that demographic vote, they need to actually change their economic opportunities. I would almost bet my last dollar that gen z would show up and vote in big numbers for a Bernie Sanders. But the established elite in the democratic party wont ever let him have the stage, because they are effectively the same party as the Republicans when it comes to the economic opportunities of the younger generation.
espressocycle | 9 hours ago
The fact is, no president can fix this. Certainly not in 42 months. In every country with elections, power flips before anyone feels the impact of any of the prior government's policies. And either way, it's really the international financial cartel and associated billionaires in control.
Bastillerion | 6 hours ago
Illegal immigrants should be under attack.
TheAmorphous | 8 hours ago
"Nothing changed" is an insane take. I honestly don't even know what to say to that. I'm taken aback.
Netzitznot | 3 hours ago
Populism is what leads us to these absolutist “both sides are the same”-type conclusions
purz | 7 hours ago
Ya and you get no sympathy from me thinking Dems are any different. You’re just as big of a problem voting for a different right wing party that also worships corps. Not like they’re making things great in NY or CA where young people are also fucked. Honestly the most fucked in CA with boomer property taxes.
TheAmorphous | 7 hours ago
I would vote for more progressive candidates if they actually made it to the general. But they don't. And I'm not going to abstain from voting against fascists because the Dem candidates didn't pass some purity test, which seems to be what you're implying I should do.
Qeltar_ | 9 hours ago
> We could let it run a correction, but the government is doing whatever it can to prevent that correction.
It's in a correction right now. I know someone who just bought a house and it was dramatically down from its peak value.
Crazy-Canuck463 | 8 hours ago
The government is spending billions to prop up a failing housing market. Large government partnerships and bailouts are helping prevent a natural market price correction.
Buying a house for 1.3 million verse its 1.9 million peak isnt a proper correction. When the average income in this country 62k, a house should never be valued at 1.3 million.
Qeltar_ | 8 hours ago
> Buying a house for 1.3 million verse its 1.9 million peak isnt a proper correction.
It literally is lol.
Crazy-Canuck463 | 8 hours ago
No, its not. A proper correction would bring that house back down to the price it should be. Lets say its vancouver, and the house was built in 1970 for 40,000. Its price should be reflected based on inflation, which puts it at 350,000.
Inflation raise the price of that house by 875%. Greed inflated that house price by an additional 371%.
Vycaus | 7 hours ago
Pure nonsense. "A correction would be a reduction of 80%! Anything less is insufficient." 🙄.
Crazy-Canuck463 | 6 hours ago
Yes, affordable housing..... what nonsense. What do you think is going to happen when 80% of thr population cant afford to buy them? Will the government keep spending tax dollars to prop up a bloated market value.
Vycaus | 5 hours ago
I agree that housing is still insane, but you cannot look at 30% reduction and brush it off.
To answer your question, the free market will eventually come into effect here. House prices are still that high because there is a market of people willing to buy them and afford them.
The stark reality is that quantitative easing has consequences. There is a lot of money out there, and a lot of people are wealthy enough to be able to sustain housing at those levels.
Crazy-Canuck463 | 5 hours ago
My point is the free market tried to come into effect. And the federal government spent 20 billion to interfere and prevent the correction.
DrummingUpNumbers | an hour ago
If you're this salty over affordable housing move bro. All of Canada isn't just Toronto or Vancouver. I learned that 10 years ago which is why I own a home.
Qeltar_ | 8 hours ago
A drop of over 30% is a substantial correction.
Your opinion on "the price it should be" is of no relevance.
J_NonServiam | 5 hours ago
With the rates being globally more elevated, is there a risk of people being unable to pay existing mortgages there? I've heard the lock in periods for rates are shorter than the US?
Crazy-Canuck463 | 3 hours ago
Here you can only lock in 5 years at a time.
J_NonServiam | 3 hours ago
So aren't we coming up on about 4 years since rates started climbing? What happens in a year when everyone's forced out of their COVID era lock?
Crazy-Canuck463 | an hour ago
I would imagine many will lock in again at a lesser rate. I locked in last year as inflation is still over the 2% mark, diesel is through the roof, tariffs, and trump causing instability world wide. I can't see them being able to go on without raising rates. How high they'll go depends on how long diesel stays elevated and how much its going to increase inflation.
Electrical-Box-4845 | 51 minutes ago
If you have your hopes for changing this neoliberal system on voting and democracy, better do not hold your breath
JustMyThoughts2525 | 8 minutes ago
The main issue with the logic, is one people get older and control the wealth, then they are more likely to vote in a way to protect that wealth. In 30-40 years, people will be complaining about millennials and Gen Z hoarding the wealth.
Bastillerion | 9 hours ago
Translation: "We were going to cut 16,000 jobs a month anyway, as we massively overhired during the ZIRP boom years, and AI not only gives us cover to do these layoffs without looking bad, but it makes us look good, as we can justify the stupid amounts of money we've spent on tokens, server capacity, or whatever else.
gummo_for_prez | 6 hours ago
So do you think AI is taking zero jobs or what? Anyone who has spent time with the frontier models knows they are very capable and will replace workers. Have you only messed around with free chatGPT and you don't see how it could replace workers?
Bastillerion | 4 hours ago
I’ve used Claude and CoPilot. It doesn’t replace workers who are worth anything
The_Seeker_25920 | 2 hours ago
It’s replacing hiring college grads that will one day hopefully be senior devs. At my job we’re now starting to be expected to increase our output using these tools, instead of hiring more people.
United-Vermicelli-92 | 7 hours ago
Fantastic job by those in power now mismanaging our evonomy to maximize profits for war mongers, prison owners, depirtation airlines, cheaters, grifters, rapists, felons. Maga sure is smart.
Aggravating-Duck-891 | 6 hours ago
I'm tired of all the winning.
thepopdog | 5 hours ago
This was always the plan: bankrupt the country so the oligarchs can buy it up for pennies on dollar. They even put it in project 2025
ThePensiveE | 10 hours ago
The billionaires are cutting 16,000 jobs a month. At the same time they increasingly spend money to own our government they're trying to replace every workers means of supporting themselves.
If that wasn't enough they want to own every piece of information in our lives, even our own likeness and every single movement we make via our phones or cameras and drones they have set up everywhere.
The same billionaires who either did go to or clamored to go to Epstein's rape resorts want to control, own, and sell everything about us.
Nothing to see here!
bannedforL1fe | 4 hours ago
Not only is AI taking peoples jobs, but so are H1Bs. When Meta, Amazon, HSBC, etc, etc all fire thousands of people and then file for H1Bs a little while later, something is very wrong.
User299651 | 7 hours ago
Yep, experiencing this now. The trouble is where to go from here? You’re already in student loan debt for a useless degree. Do you take out more debt and commit to more schooling that could be obsolete in 2-4 years?
Scurro | 6 hours ago
Maybe a trade school?
Always going to need plumbers, electricians, and carpenters.
Sunset_Radio | 5 hours ago
People always say this but if the vast majority of white collar jobs are replaced by ai and everyone starts pursuing the trades, the entire field will become extremely oversaturated. That's not to mention that the current economy has pushed alot of construction companies to restrict the amount of projects they're willing to invest in, thus there aren't currently a crazy amount of work in the trade currently as it is.
Top-Door8075 | 5 hours ago
A bigger problem is that the trades will be saturated, driving down wages for everyone.
Scurro | 5 hours ago
> People always say this but if the vast majority of blue collar jobs are replaced by ai
I'm pretty sure you meant to say white collar jobs as white collar jobs (software developers/office work) are the ones currently hit.
Blue collar jobs are currently not affected as much by AI because we don't have reliable bipedal robots.
> everyone starts pursuing the trades, the entire field will become extremely oversaturated.
Currently there is a labor shortage in the fields I posted.
You can bitch and moan on social media or you could try filling a current labor shortage in the market.
Up to you.
User299651 | 3 hours ago
You’re not understanding the point he was trying to make.
Scurro | 2 hours ago
Job skill demand has been changing since the start of human civilization and economy.
If you are talking about a scenario where robots have taken over all trades, we will need a new economic system at that point.
If you want something within your power that you can do at this very moment, learning a trade skill that is in demand because they can't be replaced by robots anytime soon, is the best thing you can do for yourself.
I'm sorry that my answer wasn't "eat the rich".
Sunset_Radio | 2 hours ago
What trades are in demand by your metrics, bub?
Scurro | 2 hours ago
Did you not read my original comment to this thread that you are replying to?
Sunset_Radio | an hour ago
Well if you are actually referring to those three trades you don't know what your talking about. I have plenty of buddies that have tried for an electrician apprenticeship but there was a lack of work so after a couple of years they had to move on. This is also the case in many larger cities as the only people actually getting work are those being name hired. Being in the plumbing trade myself, I'll refer you to my other post. Even carpenters aren't doing the best right now outside of certain areas. Just because you do a quick Google search doesn't make you an expert on job prospects. Maybe talk to some people in these professions to get a better picture before spewing your nonsense.
Scurro | an hour ago
> Well if you are actually referring to those three trades you don't know what your talking about.
Right. I should listen to someone that doesn't even know the difference between white and blue collar.
> I have plenty of buddies that have tried for an electrician apprenticeship but there was a lack of work so after a couple of years they had to move on.
Well I work in education and support CTE teachers from those industries who are saying the same thing I said in the first reply.
> Just because you do a quick Google search doesn't make you an expert on job prospects.
I didn't have to. It is well known that those jobs are having labor shortages. I deal with teachers from the industry.
> Maybe talk to some people in these professions to get a better picture before spewing your nonsense.
Sorry that I gave you real answers that you didn't want. You just want to be angry.
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
Then those go away once robotics takes off
Scurro | 2 hours ago
Once robotics takes off we will need a new economic system
redshan01 | 9 hours ago
It's not AI that's causing job loss. It's your government. The cost of fuel, the deportations, and the tariffs are causing job loss. Your economy is tanking because of Trump.
OrangeJr36 | 8 hours ago
It's funny that you can list various factors that are indeed hurting the economy, with good reason, but reject something else that has been noted many times to be having an affect as well.
_ECMO_ | an hour ago
I am not aware of any study showing AI replacing jobs. The studies that exist are always the same "juniors in AI automatable fields have harder time than juniors in non-automatable fields" while completely disregarding that the first group is also basically just the tech industry which is much much more dependent on outside investment than most other jobs.
I also know that AI didn't lead to any increases in productivity metrics which obviously should be the case if you can do the same work with less people due to AI.
Last but not least, I am not aware of a single product that would actually ship either faster or better after the company started using AI.
ZTForge | 7 hours ago
And which economy do you participate in? Let's compare stats.
GrumbleAlong | 5 hours ago
Deportations cause job loss or result in vacancies needing filled? I'm thinking slow today.
Super_Mario_Luigi | an hour ago
Jobs were being cut before the Trump admin. Oof
ap1618 | 8 hours ago
Finally a decent economic take
1burtreynolds | 9 hours ago
I don’t believe this at all. it’s fuckin useless. Agents can’t do shit without fucking something up and they aren’t even really commercially available. Goldman puts shit like this out to make the market look better for investors.
commelejardin | 8 hours ago
>Agents can’t do shit without fucking something up
This is true. But you know who else makes a ton of mistakes requiring supervision? Entry-level employees. But only one of those groups asks for PTO and dental.
That's the crux of why Gen Z is being hit the hardest. Historically, young people were paid less and supervised more so they could grow to become autonomous workers and maybe even eventually managers.
I'm sure the moment the C-suite thinks they can replace middle managers with AI — regardless of whether or not the technology is actually there and good — millennials will be just as screwed.
Mystical-Turtles | 8 hours ago
Going to be real fun in 5-10 years when companies realize they haven't trained any juniors to start replacing the seniors. Everybody thinks that was "somebody else's" job to do, and the "somebody else's" thought the same
che-che-chester | 6 hours ago
We outsourced all entry level jobs years ago so we already have no bench for when more senior level jobs open. I honestly think it will be a problem at some point but the economy has been bad for years so nobody is switching jobs. If we have another Great Resignation, I predict we’ll be paying top dollar to replace those employees.
1burtreynolds | 8 hours ago
Agents are still powerless to actually do things though and again they aren’t even really available so as of now it’s just a bunch of chat bots in a sandbox making mistakes with no tangible output. I think the loss of employment is due to shit economic conditions and policy rather than AI.
thortgot | 6 hours ago
Enterprise implementations absolutely do execute activity at a fairly large scale.
From research, to planning, accounting, management and more. And thats at my fairly small company. Serious enterprises are doing agentic workflow at both software vendors and internal developments.
CallinCthulhu | 4 hours ago
In you experience. That’s not the norm for most tech forward places
Olangotang | 4 hours ago
Most "tech forward" places are the small percent of companies that pay for the majority of Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue. And no, LLMs cause chaos the larger the corporation. They don't scale well when "go 10x" means your shit developers are burning out your seniors with the novels of shit code Claude generates.
I know this site is in psychosis because of a year of bot spam, but if you look outside the bubble, the gears are turning. FT just reported open source models are escalating in use by corporations. Turns out the hacking games that are being played isn't spurring confidence in the Enterprise world, but the bubble is OpenAI and Anthropic's data center obligations.
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
You know these tech forward companies dominate most of the economy right now right
Olangotang | 2 hours ago
Which is a concentration risk. That's not a good thing, especially when many are wrappers that rely on OpenAI and Anthropic existing, while being funded by the same investors.
This still isn't enough revenue for them to profit, and with open source becoming more popular
https://archive.ph/Ckx3o
A lot of new Reddit accounts who's favorite words are "Fable, Agents, Astra, Claude" are going to be suddenly silent soon. 🤔
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
I’m just saying that’s where the economy is at. Tech and AI carry it right now and draw in most of the money and a lot of the talent.
Even if the AI has a bubble pop moment, the technology is too big to just go away and stop advancing. It would just be like the dot com bubble where the technology kept improving and became more and more world changing.
Big tech companies aren’t just going to go away anytime soon
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
They are easily available and capable of actually doing things though
1burtreynolds | an hour ago
like yeah it can "do things" but not really at this stage
FlyChigga | an hour ago
What does that mean? There’s a lot that it can really do already
che-che-chester | 8 hours ago
I don't think AI is literally replacing employees (yet), like 'we laid off Tony and now AI does his job'. But there is quite a bit of grunt work we used to give to entry-level employees that we now do with AI. That work allowed them to prove themselves and get a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. And while AI's work needs to be checked, a) AI as we know it is still in its infancy and will keep getting better and b) the work of those entry-level employees needs to be checked too.
OrneryFellow | 7 hours ago
I agree with this. It use to be the grunt work allowed you to see the front lines of software development and making small decisions and gain your footing with inconsequential stuff ie grunt work. You get a feel for things and then gradually move up to making more consequential decisions and then eventually you're designing systems.
AI has basically replaced the grunt work. A new SWE cost 100-200k usd depending on the location. If you give a senior day 5-10k to do the grunt work, you're still coming out ahead when you just look at the bottom line.
I agree with OP that AI does still mess up but if you put a really tight harness around your agents and change your codebase to be AI friendly, I think folks will have a different experience with what their agents produce. The problem is that most codebases are still geared towards humans and that isn't very friendly towards agentic development, so you get this in-between of some useful output with AI slop.
che-che-chester | 6 hours ago
My F500 company has been dipping our toe into AI agents and I would say our initial reaction is “we can clearly see the potential”. My team tracks cloud costs and we’ve already had similar surprises (on a smaller scale) to stories you see in the news where we budgeted a certain number of tokens for a project and blew through them in half the time.
TheoreticalZombie | 4 hours ago
Yup, these companies are going to find out that these are shockingly expensive when used at scale and punish more use with greater cost, which makes them a uniquely bad investment.
Olangotang | 4 hours ago
Already happening. FT reported yesterday that companies are moving to open source rapidly.
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
AI models have been getting twice as cheap every few months though. It’s only the brand new top of the line frontier ones that stay expensive
UnableChard2613 | 6 hours ago
I can't imagine being this late in 2026 and thinking that ai is useless. Claude has been a massive productivity boost for me as a software engineer. Even if I didn't let it touch and production code, the gains would still be massive as I've been able to spin on little test suites that makes testing much more thorough and real world like.
These are things I've wanted and been mulling for years but just haven't gotten to because we have so much other work to do...but now I just spin up another Claude session and let it go to work. These are things that, if we had infinite budget, would have gone to jr devs. We still have juniors on our team, but to do what I've done since the beginning of the year would have at least required 2 junior devs below me.
1burtreynolds | 2 hours ago
I can see why you feel that way being a software engineer. But not every job is a software engineer which AI has an outsized impact. Also I dont actually believe its completely useless just not at the stage where it is replacing jobs in masse
ItzChiips | 4 hours ago
Tell me you don't use enterprise tools without telling me lmao.
Opus 5.5 with the right harness has been disgustingly good.
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
This isn’t necessarily true. Agents are surprisingly capable already and they’re rapidly improving every few months. They already let one person that knows what they’re doing do the job of multiple people
Super_Mario_Luigi | an hour ago
This is the typical disingenuous Ai argument. Where an Ai cannot do the 1:1 job of a person, therefore it's useless.
That is not how it works. Instead, find a menial task that a lot of time is spent on. Automate it. Now a team of 50 can become 40-45 and so forth.
MyotisX | an hour ago
Sure but thats never how its presented.
Good_Air_7192 | an hour ago
Sounds like user error, they've been incredibly useful in our workplace. I haven't seen it take a single job, but it's been amazingly useful.
ProfessorSmoker | 9 hours ago
Keep coping, we are training an ai to learn and replace your coping and disbelief reactions online so we really do need you to keep coping. Thank you for your assistance.
1burtreynolds | 8 hours ago
Dumb comment
Olangotang | 4 hours ago
All of the AI cultists are douche bags and think that Daddy Claude will always be there to do their job poorly. They must have read that Open Source is becoming more popular to Enterprise, not exactly great for the bubble that fuels their addiction.
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
The ones in the know see the writing on the wall. This isn’t just a bubble this is a technology that’s going to change what people do just like the World Wide Web did even though the dot com bubble popped
Olangotang | 2 hours ago
Y'all keep saying "it's not a bubble" when if you ask anyone who fucking matters (especially in the finance sector) it is a bubble. Trillions are being poured that will not be recovered. That's what makes it a bubble. Not "durr LLMs will still be around". No shit.
FlyChigga | 2 hours ago
I said even if it’s a bubble it will still change the world and keep advancing just like software and the internet did after the dot com bubble
No one looks at software and the internet and thinks “hurr durr it was all a bubble”
Mountain_Top802 | 7 hours ago
Interesting data point on what constitutes a dumb comment. Thank you for your input human
ProfessorSmoker | 8 hours ago
Dumb comment... very good Burt... Now tell me how stupid I am...
Clear-Staff4699 | 9 hours ago
Yup. I've seen the general quality with agents and avoid then like the plague. Cuz if something fucks up, I'd get the blame despite all the obnoxious reassurance from these hype firms.
1-Dollar-Doge-Coins | 4 hours ago
> Cuz if something fucks up, I'd get the blame
As you should. Humans should always be responsible for whatever AI does. Just like any other tool.
innocentgamer69 | 5 hours ago
It really depends on the user.
If you give an AI agent the right instructions for writing (through e.g. a steering file) and let it analyse data through python instead of AI algorithms (AI most often hallucinates with numbers but is good at coding logic), then it can generate quite accurate and comprehensive reports very efficiently.
It won’t replace the user, but it will remove the need for many other people previously needed, since now one user can do the trick.
soundwave_sc | 9 hours ago
Yep, the whole agentic gold rush is madness..
Spaduf | 9 hours ago
It's not AI. They would be doing this anyway. AI is just an excuse to ensure people can explain away mass layoffs and a collapsing economy. The fundamental problem is imperial capitalism and its overextension.
__Geg__ | 6 hours ago
I don't buy it. AI is a cover, not the cause for these layoffs. At best the layoffs are a way of covering the necessary CapEx costs for investing in HPC architecture. Enterprizes don't have the infrastructure or the business processes to fully leverage AI. And the quality of agents most office workers have access to is not nearly enough to more than fractionally reduce their workload. If this was real, We'd see major productivity boosts first. then the layoffs.
I have yet to see evidence that this is anything other than standard belt tightening by another name.
fx2600 | 5 hours ago
You wouldn’t need a massive change in productivity to have a marginal impact on employment
FeelingPixely | 2 hours ago
In the case of any severe outage, many businesses will simply cease to function. Without experts and talent, the entire supply chain which has chosen to incorporate AI for major operational functions would be rendered useless. Although one cannot hold the internet ransom, any operator could hold those companies if they were motivated enough. Closed-loop systems are a must for security, and these kinds of decisions for marginal gains in efficiency make those businesses much more vulnerable. Horrible trade-off. Terrible foresight. SAD.
Exciting_Turn_1253 | 2 hours ago
How are we supposed to replace these people? What jobs will they have? Or will they just be displaced forever. Driving up crime and cost of items.
WorkF1r3 | 2 hours ago
I was laid off from my new shiny job during my probation period because they decided to replace me with AI. It was a year and a half ago - after 700 cvs I still can't find anything. I'm a millennial that should be in my highest earning years now and I'm sleeping on the couch at my parents place.
_ii_ | 6 hours ago
> Goldman’s economists were careful to note that the true aggregate impact of AI is likely smaller than their estimates suggest. The analysis does not fully capture the offsetting hiring surge tied to AI infrastructure investments in data centers, power systems, and construction, nor does it fully account for the incremental labor demand generated when AI-driven productivity gains lower costs and expand markets.
Let’s ignore that part so we can fit the narrative.
DimMak1 | 4 hours ago
Yes it’s ALWAYS been a lie that older people are discriminated against during layoffs. Boomers run all corporate executive and BoD positions and engage in tribalism to protect other boomers with declining skills while laying off more talented younger people (aka their competition). This has been shown time and time again and young people need workplace protections against this blatant age discrimination.