@valerie_reads @SohrabAhmari @ryan_zickgraf @unherd If no significant steps are taken to mitigate what’s coming, I fear the French Revolution will look like a day at the park compared to what we’ll experience.
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FutureTimes
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FutureTimes
@HeadlinesToCome
AI Pragmatist. Convinced that putting tens of millions out of work in the name of progress (and with no plan) is a very bad idea.
Katılım Temmuz 2025
203 Takip Edilen55 Takipçiler
"The rise of AI, the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution portends a far more volatile political horizon than the last one." @ryan_zickgraf @unherd
unherd.com/2026/02/the-ai…
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@Cincinnatus56 I enjoyed listening to this guy a few years ago as he talked through these things. I think he got too depressed about our future and gave up.
open.spotify.com/episode/3tyYd4…
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Genuinely what happens if W2 white collar managerial class that constitutes the entire tax base now is destroyed by AI? Who pays the taxes?
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@VraserX Glad to see you finally connect these dots. The societal disruption is the story.
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Elon Predicts Universal High Income and Social Unrest. And It Terrifies Me.
Elon Musk wasn’t being edgy here. He was being honest. And honestly, it scared me to no end because I think he’s right.
The transition to a post-labor, post-scarcity society will likely be the hardest thing humanity has ever tried to survive.
Not because of money.
Because of psychology, meaning, and speed.
Elon basically says it straight up: we will get Universal High Income and social unrest at the same time. There is no smooth ramp. The change will be so fast that people will be scared out of their minds. When AI does everything better, your job does not just disappear economically, it disappears existentially.
And that is the real bomb.
Work has been our primary source of meaning for centuries. Remove it overnight and you do not get instant enlightenment. You get confusion, anger, nihilism, and backlash. Peter Diamandis brings up Wall-E for a reason. A life without challenge sounds nice until you realize challenge is what gives life texture.
I still want this future. I just think we are wildly underestimating how brutal the transition will be.
Post-labor is not a policy problem.
It is the biggest meaning crisis in human history.
And we are walking straight into it.
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Am I? I’m all ears. Sure, I’m chained to my job for survival to an extent. But that job has also tremendously improved my quality of life over the decades. Also, to think that humanity, once freed from the drudgery of work, will pursue noble pursuits is naive. Most will pursue vice.
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@DaveShapi I don’t think you can fully dismiss the mechanism by which they got that money.
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Agree to an extent Dave. Though, these jobs have improved the quality of life for many people. We shouldn’t dismiss that entirely.
David Shapiro (L/0)@DaveShapi
It's funny how people's Stockholm Syndrome with the drudgery of wage slavery is getting triggered by this. "The children yearn for the mines" et cetera. The sad fact is that most people never get to engage with their real life's work because they are too busy focusing on surviving.
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BREAKING: Amazon, $AMZN, the second largest employer in the U.S., aims to replace more than half a million jobs with robots, per NYT
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Yes. This is the entire point. The interim between here and Utopia could be very bloody.
Geoffrey Miller@gmiller
Not a single one of these techno-abundance utopians has explained how families will pay their mortgages after AI takes all their jobs. It's all totally vague. And it sounds wonderful until you press them for any details. Then they all end up saying, basically, 'Communism will work this time. We promise.'
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@kimmonismus Not surprising. There’s a definite bottleneck with resources being able to meet demand for compute and energy. Though it sounds good, I’d expect the number of plumbers, electricians, and technicians to support AI factories to be a small percentage of the overall trades.
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Jenson: “The AI Industrial Revolution is creating extraordinary demand for skilled craft — plumbers, electricians, technicians, builders of the world’s new AI factories.”
What a crazy time. I never would have thought that the CEO of the most valuable tech company would one day say that we need more skilled craftsmen like plumbers.
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And less money. Companies aren’t going to pay you the same amount to work less.
unusual_whales@unusual_whales
Bill Gates predicts AI could open up a new era for workers, where a 2-day workweek is the norm, machines do the hard work, and people have more time to do the things they love, per FORTUNE
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told y’all Amazon would replace their employees with robots — and certain folks on the pod laughed & said I was being “hysterical”
I wasn’t hysterical, I was right
Amazon is gonna replace 600,00 folks according to NYTimes — and that’s a low ball estimate IMO
It’s insane to think that a human will pack and ship boxes in ten years — it’s game over folks.
$amzn up 2.5%+ on the news
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That’s generous. I think it’s safe to say they hope to replace as many as possible as soon as possible. Remember that while watching those Amazon commercials touting their employees’ quality of life.
nytimes.com/2025/10/21/tec… via @NYTimes
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A friend sent me a few (obviously) AI created videos of single hot moms doing influencer things. The number of boomer men who commented poorly as if she were really a person were frightening. This inability to distinguish authentic from synthetic is a problem. Couple that with human shamelessness. Yuck.
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@kimmonismus That’s true. Even in the best of times, retraining mid career is a massive undertaking. Now try it with a few hundred million folks. Also, that assumes there will be jobs created that AI won’t also do.
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“Society will have to figure out what are we going to do because yes, new jobs will be created, but in the shorter term, that doesn’t help the Brussels translator. He’s not going to become a YouTube influencer tomorrow,” he added.
(...)
Even with the recalibration, Klarna’s AI push has come with real consequences for workers. The company slowed hiring and reduced its employee base from 7,400 to 3,000, Siemiatkowski said."
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@kimmonismus The inevitable response will be immense. Right and left will join forces for this cause exactly.
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I don't have a solution for the challenges in the job market, but we are already noticing the effects:
“I feel a lot of my tech bros are being slightly, you know, not to the point on this topic. I think there is a massive shift coming to knowledge work. And it’s not just in banking, it’s in society at large,” Klarna Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
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Some humanity in decision making. Great to see.
The Wall Street Journal@WSJ
Why one company is investing in rural America instead of offshoring jobs on.wsj.com/3KWfwNA
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@Andres_v_Rey @davidpattersonx That’s the long term solution. In the short term, without any interim action, there will be major economic turbulence. Sort of my whole schtick. I’ve seen no plausible solutions to stem the tide that’s coming.
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@HeadlinesToCome @davidpattersonx This requires UBI or similar wealth redistribution. When production costs drop to near-zero through automation, goods become cheap enough that minimal income suffices. Key challenge: political will to implement before crisis. See Alaska Permanent Fund as working model.
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When humanoid robot production increases to the same scale as the car industry, total economic output will increase by 1,600% in a single year compared to current economic output.
For comparison, economic growth last year was just 3%.
David Scott Patterson@davidpattersonx
By 2030, all jobs will be replaced by AI and robots. Easily. The US labor force is about 170 million workers. About 80 million of those jobs include hands-on work. Automated systems can work four shifts a week. Replacing all physical labor would require about 20 million autonomous systems - including autonomous vehicles, automated equipment, and robots. That can be accomplished easily in the next four years. People saying it's not physically possible to build that many systems in four years are delusional. For comparison, 16 million cars were sold in the US last year. Cars are 20 times the mass of a humanoid robot. If robots were sold at the same rate as cars, that would be 320 million robots per year. Even a tiny fraction of that would be enough to replace all human manual labor.
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