The End of Work as We Know It
CEOs call it a revolution in efficiency. The workers powering it call it a "new era in forced labor." I spoke to the people on the front lines of the AI takeover.
gizmodo.com
Oh sweet baby Jesus no, burn AI to the ground, humanity can't be trusted with it
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CEOs, January 2035: "We've done it! We've fired every worker everywhere! Now all the profits of our sales will go solely to us!"
CEOs, March 2035: "Why isn't anyone buying all the stuff we're using AI to make?!"
CEOs, March 2035: "Why isn't anyone buying all the stuff we're using AI to make?!"
AIs might not go on a strike or ask for a pay raise, but the company supplying your AI can sure as shit renegotiate its contracts at a higher cost under threat of removing its services. Which when you think about it is just like employees asking for a pay raise and going on strike if you don't agree.
CEOs can, like anyone else, be incredibly stupid in ways.
I'm more interested in what safeguards they're going to have in place when we wake up to a world where the tech overlords are worth trillions of dollars each and 50% of the world are unemployed. I assume a key reason why Musk wants robots is because when the revolution occurs, or even just if the government bends to public pressure and raises taxes on (tr-)billionaires to 90% to pay for welfare, he needs an army that will actually fight for him.
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The AI spending boom is eating the US economy
AI-linked spending has fueled more growth in the first half of 2025 on average than US consumer spending....
sherwood.news
Society might need a lot more than UBI. It's still just welfare, and welfare is not generous. Have to consider the psychosocial impact of mass unemployment: people lacking the dignity of providing for themselves, depression, boredom, lack of ambition, kids who ignore education because there's no point. Likely major increases in disorder or criminality. Society will therefore also need affordable (i.e. subsidised or public sector) transport, facilities, policing and so on to help manage.
Yes. And maybe that's where we're heading.
There is the cyberpunk model, where we end up run by corporations. But I think Donald Trump, busy corruptly gouging corporations for bribes and obeisance so he doesn't cripple them with adverse regulatory rulings, is giving us a graphic message of who really holds the cards. Although whether the state of the future is a judiciocracy (as it is in Judge Dredd), oligarchy or whatever is another matter.
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UBI might be able to solve it, depending on how it goes. Rents and housing increases based on what people can get for things but if everyone is on a UBI then we all known what people have and can afford so prices would probably flatten. We are already seeing the housing market go down as the economy cools and more housing is being built. If ai takes over then that implies ai printed housing. Just having ubi might be enough, if people use that extra free time to become more social, or maybe getting that ubi to force people to hang out for a day a week or something. Government mandated dance night or something.
We know how this shit plays out because it's how it has always played out. The haves are going to fight every last penny being taken off them to give to the have-nots. What the social, political and economic elites envisage for the future is not a mass reordering of society centred around egalitarianism, human development, fulfillment and all that hippy nonsense. It's a world much like today except with more technology, where they remain in charge and claim as large a proportion of the societal pie as possible.
There won't be any largesse, because of the same rules apply as now. The world is competition. Welfare is inefficient: if we tax lots and waste money paying for the poor then we'll be less competetive than China / Brazil / etc. and they'll become richer and more powerful than our country. So eat your Soylent Green and live in your 2 metre square box, otherwise you'll speaking Mandarin/Russian and have your media banned by the CCP / Putin-dynasty tsar.
The unemployed masses will be loaded up in accommodation as cheap as possible, with the cheapest, barely-edible food as possible, services as basic as possible, healthcare probably mostly unavailable, with everything as cheap and minimal as possible. With the usual rhetoric about what a bunch of useless wastrels the poor are. And if things get cheaper as you suggest due to AI efficiency, it just means the authorities can the needy less money: the aim, after all, is to give them a minimum standard of living, not a minimum amount of money.
It would be lovely to think people will use their free time to do something interesting and constructive, but a lot of the interesting stuff people want to do needs resources: space, equipment, resources, etc. There'll barely be any, so they'll be locked out of a lot of stuff. It just seems to me that being unemployed is utterly shit now. It's not going to magically be any better with an AI and UBI future.
There is this idea about voting, but in some of our countries, democracy already seems a little more nominal than actual. I bet you the powers that will be will accelerate that if people do annoying stuff like trying to make their numbers count. If the rise of the global far right, including Trump, tells us anything, it's that you can convince people to vote away their own democracy.
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Whereas we here in the free world are having our media banned by payment processors, like Jesus intended!
Despite Microsoft's promises, their AI "Recall" function is still capturing credit card numbers and passwords.
www.theregister.com
In short: AI cannot always tell what should or should not be screenshotted, I have no use for this tool and I will not allow it to be installed.
Microsoft Recall can still nab credit cards, passwords, info
exclusive: Our tests have shown there are ways to get around the promised security improvements
In short: AI cannot always tell what should or should not be screenshotted, I have no use for this tool and I will not allow it to be installed.
I will never install it either.Despite Microsoft's promises, their AI "Recall" function is still capturing credit card numbers and passwords.
Microsoft Recall can still nab credit cards, passwords, info
exclusive: Our tests have shown there are ways to get around the promised security improvements
In short: AI cannot always tell what should or should not be screenshotted, I have no use for this tool and I will not allow it to be installed.
Ah, here we go.
Jobseekers are en masse latching onto AI to write their job applications, but dislike being evaluated by AI for the jobs they are applying for. Meanwhile, companies want applicants to limit AI use in applying, whilst handing over a ton of their recruitment to AI.
We live in such a stupid world.
Jobseekers are en masse latching onto AI to write their job applications, but dislike being evaluated by AI for the jobs they are applying for. Meanwhile, companies want applicants to limit AI use in applying, whilst handing over a ton of their recruitment to AI.
We live in such a stupid world.
To be fair, writing certain types of job applications is fucking mind numbing and requiring such asinine writing that its honestly a little difficult to discern it from ChatGPT. Hell sometimes the ChatGPT can be better written.
I would say as someone who often sits on recruitment panels that there's an art to a good application, and bland platitudes (which AI usually throws up) I would give 1 on the 0-3 scale my employer uses: think descriptors like "borderline", "barely adequate", "below expectations".
It's making sure your application is in that right space where you say all the obvious stuff everyone's heard a million times and yet still needs to be said, but packaging it in an interesting way that makes the recruitment team feel like you actually put some thought into it. If it looks like a boilerplate copied from some big book of generic things to say, save everyone the effort and don't apply.
A lot of people are obliged to spam out job applications with no expectation of getting a response due to unemployment laws, though.