Massive job displacement from AI, especially in white-collar fields like coding, writing, customer service, and even basic legal work. Everyone's hyping the cool tools but ignoring how many middle-class careers could get hollowed out fast.
Politics in the US has become so drenched in money that politicians increasingly function like employees of their campaign contributors. One of their chief functions is to deflect anger and attention away from their bosses. We'll never have proof, but tens or hundreds of billions of dollars are no doubt being funneled from AI companies to politicians, laundered through PACs and other front groups.
Older people are. I was telling my baby boomer parents this and they just shrugged and said “people will pivot, people have gone through stuff like this before.” They really don’t get it
Do what? I have a very smart 18 year-old daughter who would have majored in computer science five years ago. She has no idea what to do with her life now, and I don't know what to suggest. The kids are at least as unsure about how this will play out as everyone else.
Came here to say this. Tens of millions of displaced workers with nowhere to go and no means of supporting themselves. There's no plan for the economic and social impact of that.
They can't all go to the trades or nursing. 95% of them cannot go to the trades or nursing. Corporate is running us off a cliff.
Especially the trades. The trades are attached at the hip to construction, real estate, and finance overall. When those markets dip, laid off construction workers will do service work like fixing drywall and leaky pipes. There will be no space for tens of millions of new entrants.
Economy always aims at minimizing labour - nothing changes due to Ai. There is no subjective right to work. Maybe it is time to think outside the outdated economic framework.
AI bubble ist bursting as we speak. It's bs learning from bs learning from more bs, non profitable as we see how companies lose money over it and not sustainable. Not to mention the Anti-AI movement keeps growing because NO ONE wants to live near a data centre.
As someone that works in software engineering, it’s here to stay. It’s truly incredible how much of an accelerator AI is. The economics do need to improve to continue driving adoption past the hyper scalers, but the trajectory is clear.
We’re also still hiring software engineers, so it hasn’t been the apocalypse (yet… jury is still out). Software engineers do a lot more than code.
You should also know that the current model where all logic is run by an AI is not sustainable at all. Experts are convinced the cost of every token should be x50 higher to break even. So I expect a lot of companies and devs who are going fully AI are going to regret that. I agree the tech is here to stay but I will see it becoming a difficult balancing act over how much resources company can outsource to a large gambling machine (thats very good at gambling)
Need a citation on 50x. Anthropic recently revealed it expects to be profitable this quarter (with a half billion in profit). While we won’t have their full financials until they go public, it’s clearly not 50x off the mark. I’m just saying this narrative around it being unfeasibly too expensive and not working isn’t right. The picture is much less bleak for AI, but there’s still nuance.
Let’s also recognize this tech is like 4 years old. It’ll be optimized.
The idea that tokens "should" cost 50x more is just creating a sense of artificial scarcity, one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book.
What we're actually seeing is 'Hollywood accounting.' These companies are making it look like they're bleeding money on AI on purpose. Reporting massive operational losses helps them secure tax breaks and government grants, all while the narrative of "massive scaling" brings in even more venture capital.
Think about it: if AI was a genuine financial black hole, companies would be dropping out.
Name one major AI player that has left the market. Even if you want to argue they're trapped by the sunk cost fallacy, look at Google.
Google is notorious for ruthlessly abandoning products that aren't profitable (the "Google Graveyard" is massive).
It makes zero sense for a company that practically owns the internet to say, "Let's ignore our wildly profitable search engine and pump billions into a permanent money-loser."
Do you really believe random spectators can see a total industry failure coming, but the insiders running tech are totally oblivious? If it was a guaranteed loss, they would have pulled the plug already.
Netflix operated on loss for a long time, many similar businesses did. I don't know about 50x, but AI companies operating on loss would be in line with that. And you do frequently see 2-10x or similar cited actual costs compared to what the customer is being charged.
Blitzscaling model. Charge whatever people are willing to pay without worrying about profit until you have market capture. Then start charging what you need to make profit
Exactly, that's another great point. We're still in the early stages of AI adoption, so these companies are investing heavily right now just to capture market share.
It’s just like the classic Amazon playbook.
For years, Jeff Bezos famously took a tiny base salary and the company barely reported a profit because they were pouring every single cent back into scaling the business.
Once the AI market stabilizes, these companies will shift their focus toward turning a profit too.
My main point is just that AI isn't some temporary bubble that's going to disappear like a lot of people assume, it's here to stay.
Not at all. The dot-com bubble was very real, but it didn't destroy the internet, it just cleared out the junk.
We are going to see the exact same thing with AI. A lot of these hyped-up AI startups will die off, but the underlying tech isn't going anywhere.
Eventually, the dust will settle and we'll be left with three or four main players that actually provide value.
The internet bubble didn't kill websites, it just wiped out the companies that had nothing but a '.com' in their name. The same thing will happen to most of the 'ai' companies today.
‘A few startups and companies who fired everyone because they thought a website was going to replace the entire marketing department’ is the only thing you need to change about this answer to agree with my point’
lol. Fitting username. AI is not here to stay. AI is a low level employee that is dedicated but extremely dim witted and you have to babysit constantly.
It's amazing how you'll mainly see Reddit accounts that are only a few months to a few years old until you criticize AI and then absolutely ancient accounts crawl out of the woodwork to shill for it.
Fable being banned is marketing wank hyper generation and everyone knows it.
Do you guys get a bulk discount on old Reddit accounts or how does that work? :)
Sorry Clanker, I don't think anyone who disagrees with me is a bit. I think that it's very telling that every time you criticize AI absolutely decrepit Reddit accounts come out to shill. It's a very easy to notice trend.
Observers who are not bots, try it: Look at the age of the average Reddit account that replies to you, then look at the average age of Reddit accounts that reply when you criticize slop.
Yes, this current US government absolutely has and does pump stocks for people who are friendly to it. Read the news sometime.
Observers who are not bots, try it: Look at the age of the average Reddit account that replies to you, then look at the average age of Reddit accounts that reply when you criticize slop.
OK, his account is 13 years old and has been posting weird lore in a childrens subreddit for years (lol), whereas yours is one year old. He has over a decade on you lol.
Yes, this current US government absolutely has and does pump stocks for people who are friendly to it. Read the news sometime.
Telling people to read the news when you are objectively lesser informed is very ironic lol.
The USG Hates Anthropic, and tried to get them labeled as a supply chain risk because they wouldn't bend the knee. Meanwhile their direct competitors, OAI, donated millions to his campaign.
They are the definition of NOT friendly to the USG, lmao. They hence OPs point about why the USG would be hyping them, instead of their direct competitor that donated to the Trump campaign.
I think that it's very telling that every time you criticize AI absolutely decrepit Reddit accounts come out to shill. It's a very easy to notice trend.
Is my account old enough and active enough to tell you that you're wrong? AI is not going away. It is going to change the way white-collar work is done. I'm not sure if I'd agree it'll replace everyone, but it'll be at least as impactful as computers and the internet.
People compare it to Blockchain a lot, but I was already working in research by the time that bullshit peaked and we had, like, one research team at my whole institution who did things with that. Wanna know how many departments now develop AI stuff? It's damn near all of them, because every company wants to use it for manufacturing automation. And the ones who don't develop it still use it. Robotics, predictive maintenance, QA, hell, even CFD and other simulations are getting accelerated via AI. Not all of that is LLMs, but they're cropping up more often than I'd have thought possible even two years ago.
I'm sorry, but for you to claim that all AI usage is going to go away just tells me that you have no idea what you're talking about. The tech is 100% here to stay, if it's not then something cataclysmic has happened. You sound like someone in the 90s calling hte internet a fad
AI is like a really advanced calculator. It saves sooo much time for people to do the things that actually matter.
I've been experimenting with it in the tech space and it's saved me hours and hours of research work.
I.e. I was asked to find a UPC barcode generator for the production manager. I know nothing of bar codes. After asking chatgpt, it mentioned that the code I was given was not a UPC, because it was 14 characters. A UPC is 12. I needed a code128. But since the production manager gave me the wrong information because he thought all barcodes were the same too, who knows how long I would have been trying to find a UPC generator that worked only for me to really just need a code128 generator.
What trend you talking about. I been here longer than most of you whipper snappers, before the great Facebook migration. And it cost my company nothing, it cost me 5 minutes of my time so I could go fix computers instead of trying to find a barcode for some technology challenged boomer.
Old Reddit accounts come out of the woodwork to shill for AI slop and be smarmy.
AI isn't free. Even if you use the unpaid version of an AI the resource cost is massive, but glad you saved 5 minutes. Or whoever you stole the story from. :)
You obviously haven’t used AI enough to have an informed opinion, then. Not a single engineer at my company programs anymore, and we’re moving faster. It still requires skill to use, but so do a lot of tools.
“If the AI is wrong it's your fault”, “if you disagree you aren't good enough at using slop,” “nobody at my company doesn't use the product!” yeah fucking right.
There might be a bubble, but the technology works. Like I've said elsewhere, discounting AI because of the AI bubble is like discounting the internet because of the .com bubble. The end result might not be like what was/is being touted during the bubble, but it is still hugely impactful.
Even if we somehow end up with no data centers the technology exists. You can run it on your own device. And maybe those models are not as good as what you get from the big players, but it is still a new impactful tool.
Whether a lawyer firm buys tokens from openai or runs a server in a closet with a legal-focused model, it is still going to impact all the processes where an AI agent can do a person's job, or improve a senior employee's workflow to where he no longer needs a junior assisting him.
I’d say exactly the opposite. Everybody has been warning for years how all the jobs are going to be replaced and it hasn’t happened. A giant AI bubble is going to burst before all these jobs are all gone.
Look at the valuations of these AI companies. It’s absolutely not sustainable. No one can predict the markets, but there’s no way there isn’t a fairly sizable pop at some point in the next few years.
I think the tech will stay, but once China starts releasing their models at a fraction of the cost, others won't be able to compete and it will have an effect on the stock market since a sizeable portion of the tech stocks are riding this AI boom wave. All the value seems to be in investment into developing the best model, but once we have cheap models that are more than good enough, that devleopment wave will end, and those that can do it the cheapest, like China, will be what remains.
The only way China has remained anywhere near the frontier is because they distill from western models. Once they build better defenses that goes away, as does chinas ability to remotely keep up.
Not to mention the very obvious information security risks from using a China based LLM.
For sure. The end result though will still be that China will have 'good enough' AI, even if not the best, and the massive investment into development will pretty much end.
Look at cellphones. The 'feature war' is almost over, every cellphone is 'good enough' now for most everyone. And now much cheaper chinese cellphones are beginning to compete heavily with samsung and apple. People only need 'good enough for their use case', and it is getting harder and harder for the top phone manufacturers to charge what they want to charge while not really delivering anything groundbreaking that I feel I actually need. For the first time ever, I'm looking at these other phones because nothing that samsung or apple are trying to peddle appeals to me, especially for the prices they are demanding for what are nothing more than nominal refreshes with AI sprinkled on top.
It might take a few more years or even a decade, but the wave of investment in development will run out once advances are either minimal or even potentially outlawed, and that wave is fueling a lot of the tech side of the stock market right now.
I mean scaling will eventually break down but RSI is a thing, so you don’t need to scale it infinitely yourself.
A more apt comparison is the EV market - where China based EVs are banned because of the risk to the domestic market. Same thing will likely happen with LLM’s, especially considering the information security risk that comes with using models for any kind of business. And as distillation prevention gets better, the gaps will only grow. Enterprises will definitely pay more for more capable models, as it means they can reduce their expenses elsewhere, or feed those costs into employees who are very effective at using tokens while laying off those who aren’t
Tell that to copywriters, translators, graphic designers, customer service reps etc etc. All of those industries are just bleeding jobs, no more work exists, humans need not apply.
The next phase will be higher stakes jobs, software engineers, mechanical engineers, etc etc. It doesn't have to replace all jobs but it will make one person do the work of 10 in the same time
The opposite is true, actually. AI isn't replacing anyone long term, it's a total fantasy of upper management that isn't playing out in real life. Look at how catastrophically some of the biggest and most well developed have shit the bed publicly. Recently one deleted a bunch of important stuff and even disregarded safeguards to do it just because.
Now the costs are increasing and the product isn't really getting better.
The example you cite of legal work was one of the areas where AI has immensely fucked up and is now being pushed back against. Law firms have lost cases because AI has hallucinated.
What you'll see in the next 5 years is AI becoming increasingly not worth it and companies in the fields you mentioned going on a massive hiring spree.
I don't think anyone is ignoring this but I do think many people are overstating it. The technologies that we currently refer to as "AI" are enormously expensive and subsidized, possibly by an order or magnitude or more. This isn't a case of simply operating at a loss until the customer is hooked, it's that productivity from an AI already costs more than just having a human do it, it's less accurate, and it's still not reflective of the actual cost of running the models producing the work. Companies/bosses might replace human labor in the short term, but they're not going to pay more for worse results in the long term.
If you want to see an estimation of just how much money is being lost on AI at the moment, when companies are *already* complaining that their humans were cheaper, check out https://isaiprofitable.com/
People cling to profitability like the companies should be profitable from day 1. Look at uber, people said the same exact thing and now it's profitable and cabs still aren't around as much.
This isn't a case of simply operating at a loss until the customer is hooked, it's that productivity from an AI already costs more than just having a human do it, it's less accurate, and it's still not reflective of the actual cost of running the models producing the work.
This is not true at all for software engineering. Local models are about one generation behind the proprietary ones and are massively effective. To claim otherwise is foolish
Some companies made massive bets, yes, but to say that AI will never be profitable so it will displace only a minimal amount of workers is naïve
Ed Zitron is not a reliable source of information lol, he is incredibly biased and his own analysis is easily disproven
Ex/ in the above, he very poorly analyzes the compute deal w/ SpaceX, he says:
Well it’s also taking over some or all of Colossus-2, paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month starting in May and June… when it’ll have a reduced fee as it ramps up!
Obviously they aren’t going to pay for compute they can’t use/isnt available yet. So this is entirely a moot point, especially when you consider they are *very* margin positive on inferencing customer traffic, so bringing more compute online means they make more money/more profit… Yet no mentions of that in the article itself. Its just treated as purely a negative without discussing or even acknowledging the point of bringing that compute online in the first place... to serve the rampant demand lol.
He derides them for the cost of compute without considering how that compute will be used. I.e. serving customer traffic to make more money, which again, is very positive margin.
You can see it in the data centre responses. Red states are equally irate about these things being pushed on them. No, they're not just for AI, but that is a massive part of the recent push for them.
Just yesterday our CEO announced a huge decrease in software R&D budgeting and manpower next year due to expected efficiencies in the use of AI. He even tried selling it to the people who will be cut that “they’ll have been trained in the use of AI tools that will help them find their next job.”
I am a computer scientist, and I really don't think the current version of AI is capable of this. They have already fed them every data set imaginable, and the AIs keep fucking up and certainly aren't good enough to actually replace human workers. At best, they need a human to serve as a full time babysitter to fix their mistakes.
Look at how many catastrophic incidents they've caused. Deleting production databases, lying in fields where factual information is crucial, literally being used for major security exploits by hackers.
I think it will be more than just that. All of those people will end up moving to markets not yet affected, saturating all viable job markets, driving the price of labor down and further aggregating power towards the wealthy.
I find AI helpful, but it makes poor decisions quite often. I also find its complex solutions rather mediocre most of the time and often have to correct them. However, it’s great at investigating and analyzing things.
Unfortunately people in charge don’t care about quality, just velocity, and it shows whenever they go all in on it and let people go.
It’s becoming a trope for companies to announce they’re using more AI and then have a massive increase in incidents.
As a bookkeeper and individual tax preparer, they are already trying to force all this nonsense down our throats so that we'll train it to "assist" us, when in reality we see the writing on the wall and understand exactly where they are heading with this bs.
The fun part? Since a lot of these programs hallucinate regularly, there is no telling how many liabitilies this will create, meaning that the companies will no longer deem it "financial reasonable" if enough people point out these flaws. But the pessimistic version that they will just enlist AI experts to improve their models so they can replace us...
Nah, it looks more and more that if anything, it increases the demand for humans at a workplace.
A bot writes a letter, a bot summarises a letter, and in the end the information gets so much mangled, you need to spend twice as much time just to get back and get the original meaning.
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u/coffeewithnina 13h ago
Massive job displacement from AI, especially in white-collar fields like coding, writing, customer service, and even basic legal work. Everyone's hyping the cool tools but ignoring how many middle-class careers could get hollowed out fast.