The US is headed for mass unemployment, and no one is prepared
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5713876-ai-displacement-and-ubi/?fbclid=IwdGRjcAPrHcxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEenka2zYT5fgqpPUSMD0ebRfvQ4tjXJLBuT2ovafbygJKA8JTEckiTmGr7zSo_aem_b5J1uXNrXOKCwvJOYnwVJg
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Submission statement
This article is written by a conservative who was against universal basic income and now supports it as a response to the economic impacts of AI that will likely happen quickly and that politicians just aren’t taking seriously enough yet.
Well *some* are prepared with their bunkers in Hawaii. But I think the extraction class has forgotten a valuable lesson. Henry Ford was asked why he paid he paid his employees well and his response was that basically that the ultra wealthy needed people with enough money to buy the products that were being made at the time.
Shorter Geoffrey Hinton: “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this”
Minor gripe – but one thing I wish there was less of on Reddit is freaking opinion pieces; especially opinion pieces with a thumbnail of a different person than the one writing it. Hinton is a well known AI voice; cloaking an opinion in his image is misleading, although I have no doubt me might agree with parts of the opinion.
AI is somehow both hyped trash and the end of the civilization. Can we pick a lane?
Not just “the US”. This is going to affect most countries.
Guaranteed government job programs and universal basic income are the obvious stop-gap solution for AI-driven mass unemployment.
“The United States has no plan. None.”
Indeed. Pretty much no country has any plan, either.
Unprepared – HA. Speak for yourself. While you were busy partying, I studied being unemployed.
I came to the same conclusion around 2018 while talking politics with a few of my friends. I had no idea it would arrive so soon, but I feel this is spot on. There is no plan for when those who are willing to work no longer have work to do.
Nah, we’ll be able to adapt. AI and automation is a tool, which isn’t a new concept. We’ve been using tools for thousands of years. Tools have made some jobs obsolete but it has also created new type of jobs. In some ways, more jobs than have been lost.
The face of the economy will change, just like it has in the past. Fifty to sixty years ago, the US economy was changing from a manufacturing-base economy to a service-base economy / information technology-based economy.
Millions of manufacturing jobs were “*lost*,” not just because many of those jobs were moved overseas but because automation replaced those jobs. And yes, there was unemployment while a workforce restructured and trained into the new economy.
We’re going to see the same here. The main thing that I hope for is that, maybe, just maybe, we can have that work to our advantage to our personal lives. Should we really have to be working forty hours a week or more, when we might be able to work less hours and still do more.
thats what i dont like about ai situation. everyone is an expert but nobody knows what is really going on.
Trumps approval rating is supposed be at a new low, 37%. Supposedly his MAGA base is not turning on him. Midterms can not get here fast enough. Work has been slow ever since he took office.
Humanity has never been prepared for anything throughout its history.
the US now has a “i got mines, good luck getting yours” mentality. con man Dump is leading the pack. it’s wild people think he actually cares about them.
It’s going to get real when there’s a Jesse Plemons character from the movie Civil War calling the shots in every housing subdivision in America.
It has the potential to be a truly peak dystopian time to be alive.
Unemployment is not going up that fast. You know in the 80’s all these tech jobs didn’t exist and somehow people survived
I’m working on a data engineering project, and have been extensively using AI for workloads for a few years now. The idea that mass unemployment is somehow going to happen in the next decade is a bit laughable. The sheer effort to implement AI properly for businesses, plus the extremely high costs involved undercuts that argument. Data centers being built for AI usage takes decades to run a profit due to high upfront costs, and narrow operating margins. Open AI has a looming solvency issue, and many of the major tech companies have slowly shifted resources away from an all out push for AI implementation.
Is AI transforming business operations? absolutely. Is it going to replace jobs en masse any time soon? It’s pretty unlikely. decades ago many people were alarmists about the PC revolution was going to make the workforce redundant, or the internet was going to end the workforce as offshoring happened. It led to a fundamental redefinition of the workforce and some jobs transitioned into new roles, but overall we didn’t see mass unemployment. Just like the automobile didn’t lead to a mass unemployment by making horses obsolete.
AI is a double edged sword generally speaking it makes work more efficient, but it can stifle creativity, critical thinking skills, and understanding of the material produced by AI. We see that in the workforce, and in schools. The biggest issue I see in the next few years is a misappropriation of what AI can do. It’s a tool and not a replacement for true conscious thinking. Companies that overemphasis AI in their workflows and try to run too lean with their workforce will sooner or later run into massive issues when AI makes huge errors. In my opinion we will see a dot com style bust in the next 5 years, not massive transformative shift leaving have the world unemployed.
The real danger in my view right now is the weakness of the labor movement and the alienation of most workers from labor. The lack of class consciousness among the working class will lead to a continued decline in living standards without a strong movement to galvanize workers to fight for better outcomes.
Well at least we’ll also have some of the worst, least compassionate people on the planet in charge when it happens.
They are prepared with giving jobs to India I am sure about that!
Who the fuck is going to pay for the UBI?
Big corps like Walmart and Amazon already have half their low-paid workers on welfare and food stamps that the taxpayers pay for. Where’s the money going to come from when the taxpayers have no income because they lost their jobs?
Gregory Hinton spends his life researching and developing artificial intelligence. Now that’s it’s about to be unleashed on an unwitting public, he’s warning us of the dangers of…artificial intelligence. Thanks Greg. Enjoy your retirement and the piles of cash.
A huge number of people who discover that their college degree is useless are going to have very rough retirements that start much earlier than they thought they would.
Nah, ai in its current state is nowhere close to being able to replace humans. Several companies have already tried it. its failed and they are back to Human workers.
I get this, but I don’t get this.
So, is the unemployment rate gonna be like 10% to 20% by next year? That seems unlikely….
I have some sympathy for what is happening to white collar workers .
I have to ask though where was there concern when blue collar workers like myself were being outsourced by the millions by nafta and cheap imports made by slave labor? They always mocked blue collar workers and said we all should have went to college to get a degree so it was our own fault.
Now they are facing the same crisis we did . I guess they will have to retrain for the manual labor jobs blue collar workers have been doing.
That is why society needs to value all work not just the “educated” as they like to call themselves.
Anyone who works should be paid enough to live in a decent home,plenty of food,utilitiles,clothing,education,medical and money foe leisure.
Ice is prepared. The immigrants are practice for when they come for the rest of us.
If anything is going to lead to mass unemployment, it’s going to be the AI bubble popping when people realize it’s not going to replace workers en masse like these articles are hand wringing about.
Even the hill has a garbage ad covered website. I get it, but it’s too much.
I am on social security it is survivors , for the same reason u
You say we are headed for mass unemployment I’m pretty sure.benefits fo r my deceased spouse. My youngest daughter says I do not get enough to live on its survival not life. I would love to be able to work I just turned 69 , have lupus andd.unable to work. I miss being active but I am not unhappy.i also do not feel I can depend on always getting my little ssi.
Work is not the only way to find meaning in life. This guy watches way too much Faux news.
They just want to sweep away all the homeless that keep building up and forget about them and continue on with adding new policies or move on with their lives like it’s nothing.
You can’t just try to throw away problems in the trash. I say, and people will hate me for this because they’re against it, they should have their homeless people in their cities that they came from so politicians and businesses see the BS they’re creating.
Oh, they’re being paid less? “They Gotta work hard and they will get somewhere”, yet they don’t want to pay a better rate. They have the “someone else can pay them better, but not me” attitude.
People are living in their cars or bunching up 8 to a home. Neighborhood Parking crisis. Its bad.
There’s going to be a massive amount of people hired to sanitize the garbage data that AI generates, as well as fixing/undoing the terrible code that it writes.
Im so fucking prepared if we get that UI benefit like we did during Covid
That was the best time being on unemployment.
Getting an extra 600 every week ontop of my unemployment benefits and my boss still had us coming in paying us in cash under the table so he could claim his business was shut down.
Got myself a brand new truck during this
The US is headed for a lot of problems for the next foreseeable future and no one is prepared and not enough even care