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I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once. At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for

I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once. At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators. Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward. I guess maybe I can imagine making it harder to fire people so you have to find something to do with them. But that also has negative consequences. Small companies won't/can't hire because they can't make the guarantees big companies can.

paul7986 9mo ago
Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my house up for sale and received an offer. Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse. My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Sorry to hear that. But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable seeing the difference between these two types of things On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $ of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative) I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5 million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money. My point is that all of these companies burn massive amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it and then some of these same companies go the other way and then fire people working. I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting anyone new up and running would be hard especially given you had customer relations. Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you off? I mean, is the company doing really bad (I am considering something like tailwind happening here?) or what exactly. But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more specifics if possible.
  - paul7986 9mo ago
    Well it's a small govt contracting company. The adminstration cutting down on federal jobs, IT contracts and the tech layoffs has/is flooding the market with UX/UI folks in these parts (mid Atlantic region). Now AI is hastening the shrinking of this field. The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      > Well it's a small govt contracting company. The adminstration cutting down on federal jobs, IT contracts and the tech layoffs has/is flooding the market with UX/UI folks in these parts (mid Atlantic region). Now AI is hastening the shrinking of this field. > The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive. Thanks for providing more context, This feels much the govt. faults than the contractor but I feel like moves like these will come to bite the govt. sooner than later. I feel like though contracting companies also might've overhyped. Like yea sure for basic things AI's fine but AI won't be fine for govt. projects & shouldn't be fine. Govt.'s can spends an unknown amount of money on defense with literally no accountability with billions of $ literally not knowing where they went but they will try to price squeeze thigns here only to some years down the line have catastrophic event. I mean LLM's still hallucinate and they can be poisoned. If govt.'s use LLM the aspect of poisioning becomes really important. Chatgpt still pulls grokipedia whose primary source is X where bots can be created and spread and a certain narrative can be established. I am pretty sure that if we see govt.s in any capacity have AI generated websites then the idea of poisoning the whole web to negatively impact the other nation becomes a good strategy for agressions between countries. Although I may have gotten off topic but sorry to hear this that you were in such a weird and messy chopping block due to mistakes from the govts in general. Wishing you the best in your future that things get better for ya :hug:
esseph 9mo ago
> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. That's what the TSA is in the US
Shocka1 9mo ago
IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely in the crosshairs now. If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.
- BigHatLogan 9mo ago
  What is your repurposing plan, if you don't mind my asking? I am trying to think of alternatives too, but it's quite stressful.
  - nyantaro1 9mo ago
    same here
    - Shocka1 9mo ago
      for notification purposes, see one of my latest comments above.
  - Shocka1 9mo ago
    I have friends in commercial sheet metal/plumbing/electrical, and the work is endless right now in my area in the Midwest. My immediate goal would be to get on a journeyman program making a fraction of what I make now, and then onwards and upwards from there as I know the more skilled people in these jobs are making top tier money in my area. When I was in college I worked part-time in residential, so it seems logical that I would gravitate in this direction, especially with the supply of work. At the same time I'd be applying to senior software engineering positions geared towards anything energy/nuclear and possibly datacenter tech/engineering positions as well, but I would be extremely picky. Since everyone is so obsessed with AI/productivity, the electrical grid is going to be more stressed than ever. I'd target positions with no H1B competition, cleared positions and whatnot - this isn't a crack on H1B, but I would imagine there is higher probability in getting interviews without them in the picture. BUT I'm at the whim of hiring managers and whiteboards at that point, which isn't ideal, hence the trades route mentioned first. I love software so much and have spent the majority of my life doing it, spent all that time getting a CS Master degree and whatnot. It would be a sad day for me, but you do what you have to do. I have a family as well, so not as much mobility and time to burn as a person without. I think this plan is specific to my situation, but I hope it helps getting a few ideas kicking around in your mind. It is definitely a stressful thing if you think about it too deeply, but I try to distance myself from that mental mode and focus more on what I would have to do if that time comes.
greekrich92 9mo ago
What progress? Our planet is dying and those who have most loudly touted "Progress" are the ones killing it. If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.
throwaway-11-1 9mo ago
The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls. “At least the companies will be more efficient” is such a cucked take, insane
- pessimizer 9mo ago
  This is goofy. Your job isn't special and this already happened to a lot of other people while coders were laughing in libertarian. It doesn't suddenly get real when it happens to you. The people whose jobs were shipped overseas were physically stronger and less sheltered than you. If they couldn't stop it, your pencil arms and retreat into revolutionary cosplay fantasy certainly doesn't bode well for you. They weren't even fired because of an advance in technology, they were fired because we just dismantled workers rights and allowed every job to be shipped to China, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines. And literally, now, the "opposition" is angrily protesting for free trade and for illegal workers with no rights; you all still don't get it. Automation raises productivity, and creates wealth that we can choose to share, even though "we" don't. Not lowering labor standards and not allowing jobs to be shipped out to poverty stricken countries with low labor standards would have just taken compassion and not being completely self-centered for at least 5 minutes a day. Fighting when you had something to lose rather than waiting until you have nothing. I'm supposed to make up a fake job for you? There won't even be Oxy for you to turn to. You'd better be happy with legal weed, even if you can barely afford it on your Taskrabbit income.
  - throwaway-11-1 9mo ago
    You really made an astounding number of assumptions which I don’t think you have the insight to extract from a single comment. You clearly have zero idea where I’m coming from so try to chill. I stand by my point that there is no political will among the current elites for meaningful distributional policies. For the record I am a staunch defender of worker rights in all industries and deeply despise neoliberal economics. Geez man
unethical_ban 9mo ago
The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive, diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two. Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone. COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.
- macintux 9mo ago
  The safety net in the U.S. today is completely inadequate, and under constant fire from the right. I have no idea how we’re going to cope with the coming waves of layoffs.
Uehreka 9mo ago
> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward. If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction. You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.
- WalterBright 9mo ago
  The math doesn't work out for UBI.
  - joquarky 9mo ago
    UBI will become at least as complicated as federal taxes. Perverse incentives will creep in.
    - WalterBright 9mo ago
      Paying people to not work will never work.
      - stonogo 9mo ago
        It's working in the farm bills for a hundred years.
        WalterBright 9mo ago
        Paying people to not work accomplishes what?
tokioyoyo 9mo ago
> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.
- pezezin 9mo ago
  On the other hand the Japanese economy has been quite stagnant since 1990, and the yen is right now on a downwards spiral, so I don't think it is such a good solution. And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.
  - tokioyoyo 9mo ago
    Every country has their own problems. Honestly, there aren't a single large country where everything is perfect. Too many opinions, too many needs, increase median age of the politicians and the population, and etc. causes imperfect solution to every problem. At the end of the day, you have to prioritize and figure out what's important to you. I agree with literally every point you made. Sure economy is stagnant, but I'd rather take stagnant economy than a collapsing one. I agree with a lot of things are slow, but also, most of things are just... not a big deal, at least for me? I lived in Canada, and have parts of my family living in NYC as well. For every slow government related slow things, you can find something that's also slow in the NA as well. I'm not going to mention Europe at this point, as from what I've witness from my European partner, you can find inefficiencies there as well. Again, pros and cons everywhere, just gotta pick and choose what matters to you.
- Klonoar 9mo ago
  I was going to comment the same thing. The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably). Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.
techblueberry 9mo ago
> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress. "Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was." But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.
- _dark_matter_ 9mo ago
  You want Victorian healthcare? Or privacy? No air conditioning? Dirty air? Horse shit everywhere? No different, people stink, can't shower, and it takes hours of labor to wash clothes without a washing machine?
  - techblueberry 9mo ago
    No, it’s 2026, we can create a hybrid, that’s the point! The ability to choose our destiny! Also - Horse shit doesn’t sound that bad. People stink in 2026 too. But I do think, I dunno if inflection point is precisely the right concept, there will plenty of future developments I’ll be glad , but I think less and less of a percentage of our innovation is positive for general human happiness. Big tech ceos even often talk about this sort of longtermist perspective where today’s human happiness doesnt matter, just progress toward an unknown future.
- circlefavshape 9mo ago
  > Why can't we architect the world we want to have? Side effects. Society is not planned, it evolves
spicymaki 9mo ago
> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference. I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.
alexashka 9mo ago
> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward Everyone works 20 hours/week. The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them. They are right. Hence the stalemate.
georgemcbay 9mo ago
> We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators. As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods. The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before. Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers. > Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward. I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.
brikym 9mo ago
I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on. Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain. Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding skills or trade skills will be fine. For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.
- coffeemug 9mo ago
  I still don’t understand why people oppose that rather than enthusiastically desire it. The end state you’re describing is the culmination of the enlightenment project. Automating labor is the point! Then you can paint, or play chess, or eat amazing food, or do whatever you want. Work isn’t the end, it’s the means. Products and services is the end. If we can achieve the end via technology, who cares about the work?
  - mikeweiss 9mo ago
    Yes work is the means, the means to earn an income. Do you live in a country that has a big enough social safety net that you trust it to provide you the necessary income and healthcare so that you can just paint and play chess all day? I certainly don't... I live in the U.S.A :-/
    - p1esk 9mo ago
      Safety nets only work while there are people paying (a lot of) taxes.
      - mikeweiss 9mo ago
        I guess you could tax the companies and people still earning money at like 95% or something.
  - rcruzeiro 9mo ago
int_19h 9mo ago
The alternative is indeed UBI, and the obvious way to fund it is to tax automation so that it actually scales to however many people end up without jobs. But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.
jnaina 9mo ago
have been hearing from several ex-AWS colleagues about the job losses within their teams and the number of people impacted since yesterday. it’s depressing, but also symptomatic of a much larger obvious shift already underway for some time now, now being further accelerated by new technology. AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy. harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient. beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.
anon291 9mo ago
This is exactly how I feel. I entered the software industry right before GPGPU programming was becoming a thing. I was aware of AI and neural nets back then and saw the future and decided I wanted to be part of it. So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point. There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's. People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful. Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol
poulpy123 9mo ago
Thinking that because in the past the effect of progress was a net positive after a while it will always be like that is a cognitive bias. When looking at the large scale, in previous cases, people replaced by automation would go into jobs that were not automated. But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?

paul7986 9mo ago

Just lost my UX Researcher, Designer, UI Developer and CX Support job (8 years) two weeks of ago. They said doing a great job but have to lay you off. Within a week i put my house up for sale and received an offer. Time to downsize, "try," to stay in tech yet study to be a nurse. My field and career of 20 years seems like a vanishing one.

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
Sorry to hear that. But coming to this point, its absolutely unfathomable seeing the difference between these two types of things On One hand we have cursor whose burning like 5-6 Million $ of money in trying to build a browser only for it to be riddled with bugs and literally just the money went into fire (read emsh's post and how he built better alternative) I mean I guess I learnt something from them burning 5 million $ but I see a lot of Companies burn so much money. My point is that all of these companies burn massive amounts of money in LLM's sometimes just for the sake of it and then some of these same companies go the other way and then fire people working. I mean is there no way for a company to be reasonable. You worked there 8 years, You knew how things worked. Getting anyone new up and running would be hard especially given you had customer relations. Tf they mean doing a great job but they have to lay you off? I mean, is the company doing really bad (I am considering something like tailwind happening here?) or what exactly. But tailwind's situation was (unique?) because their business was eaten by AI itself. Not sure about your (former) company though but I hope that you can tell more specifics if possible.
- paul7986 9mo ago
  Well it's a small govt contracting company. The adminstration cutting down on federal jobs, IT contracts and the tech layoffs has/is flooding the market with UX/UI folks in these parts (mid Atlantic region). Now AI is hastening the shrinking of this field. The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    > Well it's a small govt contracting company. The adminstration cutting down on federal jobs, IT contracts and the tech layoffs has/is flooding the market with UX/UI folks in these parts (mid Atlantic region). Now AI is hastening the shrinking of this field. > The contracting company I worked for promotes on their LinkedIn their use of AI saying we created this prototype with AI in less then a day vs. years, months and days. In September they told us this is the way forward as all govt contractors are bidding for contracts with smaller teams using AI. Per that story they are telling they need to change to survive. Thanks for providing more context, This feels much the govt. faults than the contractor but I feel like moves like these will come to bite the govt. sooner than later. I feel like though contracting companies also might've overhyped. Like yea sure for basic things AI's fine but AI won't be fine for govt. projects & shouldn't be fine. Govt.'s can spends an unknown amount of money on defense with literally no accountability with billions of $ literally not knowing where they went but they will try to price squeeze thigns here only to some years down the line have catastrophic event. I mean LLM's still hallucinate and they can be poisoned. If govt.'s use LLM the aspect of poisioning becomes really important. Chatgpt still pulls grokipedia whose primary source is X where bots can be created and spread and a certain narrative can be established. I am pretty sure that if we see govt.s in any capacity have AI generated websites then the idea of poisoning the whole web to negatively impact the other nation becomes a good strategy for agressions between countries. Although I may have gotten off topic but sorry to hear this that you were in such a weird and messy chopping block due to mistakes from the govts in general. Wishing you the best in your future that things get better for ya :hug:

esseph 9mo ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. That's what the TSA is in the US

Shocka1 9mo ago

IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely in the crosshairs now. If I lost my software engineering job tomorrow and was unable to find work within a few months, I have a repurposing plan ready to go. Yes it would be terrible for me economically and I'm sure there would be some sad days, but sometimes bad things happen and we have to make the best of them and move on.

BigHatLogan 9mo ago
What is your repurposing plan, if you don't mind my asking? I am trying to think of alternatives too, but it's quite stressful.
- nyantaro1 9mo ago
  same here
  - Shocka1 9mo ago
    for notification purposes, see one of my latest comments above.
- Shocka1 9mo ago
  I have friends in commercial sheet metal/plumbing/electrical, and the work is endless right now in my area in the Midwest. My immediate goal would be to get on a journeyman program making a fraction of what I make now, and then onwards and upwards from there as I know the more skilled people in these jobs are making top tier money in my area. When I was in college I worked part-time in residential, so it seems logical that I would gravitate in this direction, especially with the supply of work. At the same time I'd be applying to senior software engineering positions geared towards anything energy/nuclear and possibly datacenter tech/engineering positions as well, but I would be extremely picky. Since everyone is so obsessed with AI/productivity, the electrical grid is going to be more stressed than ever. I'd target positions with no H1B competition, cleared positions and whatnot - this isn't a crack on H1B, but I would imagine there is higher probability in getting interviews without them in the picture. BUT I'm at the whim of hiring managers and whiteboards at that point, which isn't ideal, hence the trades route mentioned first. I love software so much and have spent the majority of my life doing it, spent all that time getting a CS Master degree and whatnot. It would be a sad day for me, but you do what you have to do. I have a family as well, so not as much mobility and time to burn as a person without. I think this plan is specific to my situation, but I hope it helps getting a few ideas kicking around in your mind. It is definitely a stressful thing if you think about it too deeply, but I try to distance myself from that mental mode and focus more on what I would have to do if that time comes.

greekrich92 9mo ago

What progress? Our planet is dying and those who have most loudly touted "Progress" are the ones killing it. If "Progress" means a massive immiserated underclass is necessary for it to proceed, then who is it for? The answer is obvious.

throwaway-11-1 9mo ago

The people benefitting from the profits accumulated from layoffs would never allow their margins to be cut by having to pay for UBI. Why do people act like this even remotely on the political horizon? There will simply be an even larger underclass and the wealthy enclaves will build higher walls. “At least the companies will be more efficient” is such a cucked take, insane

pessimizer 9mo ago
This is goofy. Your job isn't special and this already happened to a lot of other people while coders were laughing in libertarian. It doesn't suddenly get real when it happens to you. The people whose jobs were shipped overseas were physically stronger and less sheltered than you. If they couldn't stop it, your pencil arms and retreat into revolutionary cosplay fantasy certainly doesn't bode well for you. They weren't even fired because of an advance in technology, they were fired because we just dismantled workers rights and allowed every job to be shipped to China, Mexico, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines. And literally, now, the "opposition" is angrily protesting for free trade and for illegal workers with no rights; you all still don't get it. Automation raises productivity, and creates wealth that we can choose to share, even though "we" don't. Not lowering labor standards and not allowing jobs to be shipped out to poverty stricken countries with low labor standards would have just taken compassion and not being completely self-centered for at least 5 minutes a day. Fighting when you had something to lose rather than waiting until you have nothing. I'm supposed to make up a fake job for you? There won't even be Oxy for you to turn to. You'd better be happy with legal weed, even if you can barely afford it on your Taskrabbit income.
- throwaway-11-1 9mo ago
  You really made an astounding number of assumptions which I don’t think you have the insight to extract from a single comment. You clearly have zero idea where I’m coming from so try to chill. I stand by my point that there is no political will among the current elites for meaningful distributional policies. For the record I am a staunch defender of worker rights in all industries and deeply despise neoliberal economics. Geez man

unethical_ban 9mo ago

The fear, which many (like myself, and Andrew Yang) have since before GenAI hit it big, is that the coming automation revolution will be magnitudes more disruptive than prior economic revolutions. It's one thing for particular skilled industries to evolve or go away; it's another when massive, diverse, frontline-and-management roles across the economy will all be wiped out in the coming decade or two. Management, warehouses, logistics, driving, retail/service industry, entertainment and advertising, programming/software engineering, even research and education. Potentially tens of millions of jobs in the US alone. COMBINED with the seemingly zero discussion in mainstream politics about improving the welfare system of the country to prevent system-scale unemployment and poverty, while the profits from "efficiencies" go to the small group of already-wealthy shareholders and owners.

macintux 9mo ago
The safety net in the U.S. today is completely inadequate, and under constant fire from the right. I have no idea how we’re going to cope with the coming waves of layoffs.

Uehreka 9mo ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward. If this is what you think needs to happen and you live in the US, then you should be freaking out right now, not calmly posting takes like this. UBI is not a thing almost any current American politician is considering, and the overton window is speeding in the opposite direction. You should not expect people to be reasonable about this. I don’t know what the answer here is, but if you want it to be UBI, you need to fight for it. The alternatives (artificial price controls, the dumb make-work policies you correctly disdained, first-amendment-breaking/privacy-violating AI bans) are out there, and if you don’t fight for the thing you want, you’re gonna get one of those.

WalterBright 9mo ago
The math doesn't work out for UBI.
- joquarky 9mo ago
  UBI will become at least as complicated as federal taxes. Perverse incentives will creep in.
  - WalterBright 9mo ago
    Paying people to not work will never work.
    - stonogo 9mo ago
      It's working in the farm bills for a hundred years.
      - WalterBright 9mo ago
        Paying people to not work accomplishes what?

tokioyoyo 9mo ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. It’s going to sound naive and stupid, but I think it somehow works. There are millions of jobs here in Japan that exist for the sake of existing. Government knows, people know, workers know as well. But everyone understands that the flipside also sucks. Sure, we can say we should optimize and people need to re-learn and etc and etc. But that’s not the reality. At some point people just want to exist without worrying about 50 years down the road, or if they can feed their family tonight.

pezezin 9mo ago
On the other hand the Japanese economy has been quite stagnant since 1990, and the yen is right now on a downwards spiral, so I don't think it is such a good solution. And as a gaijin living in Japan, I usually get extremely pissed off at the extreme inefficiency of Japanese companies, things that in any other country would take one month here take 5 years.
- tokioyoyo 9mo ago
  Every country has their own problems. Honestly, there aren't a single large country where everything is perfect. Too many opinions, too many needs, increase median age of the politicians and the population, and etc. causes imperfect solution to every problem. At the end of the day, you have to prioritize and figure out what's important to you. I agree with literally every point you made. Sure economy is stagnant, but I'd rather take stagnant economy than a collapsing one. I agree with a lot of things are slow, but also, most of things are just... not a big deal, at least for me? I lived in Canada, and have parts of my family living in NYC as well. For every slow government related slow things, you can find something that's also slow in the NA as well. I'm not going to mention Europe at this point, as from what I've witness from my European partner, you can find inefficiencies there as well. Again, pros and cons everywhere, just gotta pick and choose what matters to you.
Klonoar 9mo ago
I was going to comment the same thing. The prime example for me was always driving at night in Japan and coming across some grandma waving a traffic light for construction. On the surface, it's ridiculous that she's even there - but then again she has a job and can pay her bills (presumably). Shit might be annoyingly inefficient over there, but it does just work.

techblueberry 9mo ago

> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress. "Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I mean Keynes argued something like: if the Treasury filled old bottles with banknotes, buried them in disused coal mines, filled the mines with rubbish, and then left it to private enterprise to dig them up again, there would be no more unemployment and the real income of the community would probably become a good deal larger than it actually was." But it really does feel sometimes like. Why do we feel this powerlessness to progress? Why can't we architect the world we want to have? I have really been wondering. Lots of religious groups want to revert some progress. Maybe these whole network cities folks have a point. Maybe we can have a city like pegged to the like technical and architectural standards of the victorian era.

_dark_matter_ 9mo ago
You want Victorian healthcare? Or privacy? No air conditioning? Dirty air? Horse shit everywhere? No different, people stink, can't shower, and it takes hours of labor to wash clothes without a washing machine?
- techblueberry 9mo ago
  No, it’s 2026, we can create a hybrid, that’s the point! The ability to choose our destiny! Also - Horse shit doesn’t sound that bad. People stink in 2026 too. But I do think, I dunno if inflection point is precisely the right concept, there will plenty of future developments I’ll be glad , but I think less and less of a percentage of our innovation is positive for general human happiness. Big tech ceos even often talk about this sort of longtermist perspective where today’s human happiness doesnt matter, just progress toward an unknown future.
circlefavshape 9mo ago
> Why can't we architect the world we want to have? Side effects. Society is not planned, it evolves

spicymaki 9mo ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. And what is? AI slop? There is no objective purpose to any of this, all of it is preference. I prefer that people have a way to express themselves in a way that gives them subjective meaning, maybe a bullshit job is a good enough solution.

alexashka 9mo ago

> Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward Everyone works 20 hours/week. The 'problem' isn't what you think it is. The people in power are worried that lifting the boot off of the neck of the working class may result in loss of power for them. They are right. Hence the stalemate.

georgemcbay 9mo ago

> We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators. As you point out we've had plenty of examples in the past of jobs being displaced but (while I'm sure it always sucked to be one of the people displaced) those displacements were always relatively contained to certain industries within different time periods. The nightmare-inducing aspect of AI-related job displacement is the possible combined breadth and speed of it, which we have absolutely never seen before. Assuming the optimistic (from the perspective of the AI providers) AI predictions pan out the oncoming rush of AI job displacements are going to upended a lot of industries simultaneously, causing both increased uncertainty of what the (stable) other options are (the ground will be shifting everywhere, all at once) plus drastically increased competition for whatever other options do still exist when the music stops playing. I don't think it'll work out for us all to be nurses, plumbers, electricians and influencers. > Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the only way forward. I agree that these sorts of solutions are the rational way forward, but it just seems incredibly unlikely that this is how it is going to play out, at least in the US where we seem to be putting approximately zero political or corporate effort into planning for these possibilities. A violent class war seems far more likely of an outcome to me if we're being honest.

brikym 9mo ago

I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on. Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain. Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding skills or trade skills will be fine. For a while. It will be musical chairs without many chairs as a growing number of people retrain into a fixed or shrinking job pool.

coffeemug 9mo ago
I still don’t understand why people oppose that rather than enthusiastically desire it. The end state you’re describing is the culmination of the enlightenment project. Automating labor is the point! Then you can paint, or play chess, or eat amazing food, or do whatever you want. Work isn’t the end, it’s the means. Products and services is the end. If we can achieve the end via technology, who cares about the work?
- mikeweiss 9mo ago
  Yes work is the means, the means to earn an income. Do you live in a country that has a big enough social safety net that you trust it to provide you the necessary income and healthcare so that you can just paint and play chess all day? I certainly don't... I live in the U.S.A :-/
  - p1esk 9mo ago
    Safety nets only work while there are people paying (a lot of) taxes.
    - mikeweiss 9mo ago
      I guess you could tax the companies and people still earning money at like 95% or something.
- rcruzeiro 9mo ago

int_19h 9mo ago

The alternative is indeed UBI, and the obvious way to fund it is to tax automation so that it actually scales to however many people end up without jobs. But for all the talk about UBI in techbro circles, it seems to never actually translate to any meaningful political moves. Microsoft, Amazon etc are pretty happy to throw millions of dollars at politicians to ensure that they can keep building their data centers, but UBI just gets lip service.

jnaina 9mo ago

have been hearing from several ex-AWS colleagues about the job losses within their teams and the number of people impacted since yesterday. it’s depressing, but also symptomatic of a much larger obvious shift already underway for some time now, now being further accelerated by new technology. AI and automation are rapidly erasing roles across both white and blue collar work. this is now a present present reality in almost all sectors. extrapolating this, it is clear this ongoing displacement will drive successive waves of unemployment and underemployment, placing severe strain on social contracts and accelerating societal instability. countries with strong social compacts may weather the coming storm. but others, especially those with larger population that lack "cultural ballast" >cough USA< will likely to slide into chaos, if not outright anarchy. harder question to ponder is this: in a world where human labor is no longer the primary allocator of income and resources remain finite, sustaining nearly half of today’s global population under existing economic models begins to look fundamentally untenable. china’s one child policy starts to feel less irrational and more prescient. beginning to think that perhaps I should be advising my kids to learn a trade on the side, as a backup plan, even as they chart their budding careers in the corporate world.

anon291 9mo ago

This is exactly how I feel. I entered the software industry right before GPGPU programming was becoming a thing. I was aware of AI and neural nets back then and saw the future and decided I wanted to be part of it. So what if my job is no longer a thing in several decades. That's the entire point. There's infinite number of ways to make a living. My way isn't better than anyone else's. People willing to adapt will always have opportunities awaiting them. The world is rich and fruitful. Plus all the fun parts of computer science are still remaining to be pondered. The fun of computers is the high of the aha moment, not the coding lol

poulpy123 9mo ago

Thinking that because in the past the effect of progress was a net positive after a while it will always be like that is a cognitive bias. When looking at the large scale, in previous cases, people replaced by automation would go into jobs that were not automated. But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?