Is the AI Job Apocalypse Already Here for Some Recent Grads? (msn.com) 117
"This month, millions of young people will graduate from college," reports the New York Times, "and look for work in industries that have little use for their skills, view them as expensive and expendable, and are rapidly phasing out their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence."
That is the troubling conclusion of my conversations over the past several months with economists, corporate executives and young job seekers, many of whom pointed to an emerging crisis for entry-level workers that appears to be fueled, at least in part, by rapid advances in AI capabilities.
You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report.
But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company...
"This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...
You can see hints of this in the economic data. Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8% in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had "deteriorated noticeably." Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where AI has made faster gains. "There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates," the firm wrote in a recent report.
But I'm convinced that what's showing up in the economic data is only the tip of the iceberg. In interview after interview, I'm hearing that firms are making rapid progress toward automating entry-level work and that AI companies are racing to build "virtual workers" that can replace junior employees at a fraction of the cost. Corporate attitudes toward automation are changing, too — some firms have encouraged managers to become "AI-first," testing whether a given task can be done by AI before hiring a human to do it. One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by AI coding tools. Another told me that his startup now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company...
"This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't good enough...
Now for the trickle down... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many that would have been entry level keyboard twiddlers will now be competing for jobs in the retail, service, and other blue collar sectors. This will push down wages and disenfranchise people that were capable of and happy doing those jobs as managers snap up the better educated people willing to do anything to pay their bills.
Capitalism won.
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:2, Insightful)
You know dude...if some of those keyboard twiddlers start pushing buttons on CNC machines in between moving and adjusting fixtures...I can't say anyone will be worse off.
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:3)
Being a machinist takes a lot of training, but itâ(TM)s a good job. Being a paid monkey who loads billets in a machine and pushes the buttons heâ(TM)s told isnâ(TM)t being a machinist, and isnâ(TM)t really a better job than pushing buttons on a computer keyboard.
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Yea, but a billet monkey that can stop a bad job quickly is worth a bit.
Be welder. Better hurry up.
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That's one of the jobs they will move in on, 3D printing services, anything computer controlled fabrication will have the lower 40% of tech grads lining up to to work the night shifts.
Average new home size will be a leading indicator (Score:3)
Conjectures:
- Loss of entry level earnings will be similar to how a stubbornly high unemployment or underemployment rate causes a large spike in crime
- Average new home sizes will decline year after year for decades due to lifetime earnings loss and the rise in women who never have a child of their own
- The crisis unspoken will be the loss of future sales and income tax payments through people earning much less in inflation adjusted terms over their working life
- The real adjusted earnings for 2025 college/
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Nobody respects button pushers.
So I used to be a coin-op technician....I fixed stuff that took coins. What things that took coins....all of them. My motto was "if it eats your money i'll put a screwdriver in it".
Sometimes...my job...was pushing a button...or a few buttons. Not always...but occassionally. Let me tell you something....even when I offered a steeply discounted price of $20 for the service call (down from my usual $85 to walk in the door)....people got pissed. All I did was press a button...so t
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Reminds me of a story my old boss used to tell about justifying engineering fees. A worker was called in to fix a problem with the HVAC. After looking for a while, he took a screwdriver and adjusted a screw. This fixed the problem and he charged $100 (this was in the 8
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:2)
"if it eats your money i'll put a screwdriver in it".
This was the same reason why all the vending machines slowly disappeared in my home town.
Damn teenagers!
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And when everyone is working for low wages or unemployed (because they were replaced by AI) who is going to buy your products?
I think I may have answered your question here [slashdot.org]
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If you are still making those products, you lost. Try harder.
Re:Now for the trickle down... (Score:5, Insightful)
Capitalism won.
Unrestrained and unchecked capitalism cheated and "won". Decades of governments which allowed corporations to externalize costs, and to get away with crimes which sometimes included literal murder, handed them the victory.
We've been owned because we didn't hold elected officials sufficiently accountable, and didn't break out the torches, pitchforks, and defenestrations soon enough and often enough. Now it's probably too late to do that.
They've gaslit and propagandized us until we're too busy trying to tear each other's throats out to go after our common enemy. I'm sure it's a story older than recorded history.
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It's not too late, but it won't work while half of us think we deserve it.
Re:Now for the trickle down... (Score:4, Informative)
I think a more accurate statement would be - "half of us think the other half deserves it".
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I see/read a lot of people lamenting the state of the world these days, and they..... nope, that's it.
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I think a more accurate statement would be - "half of us think the other half deserves it".
No, I don't think that's the problem. It's that they believe that they should suffer. They think they deserve to be where they are. Brainwashing is real. Of course they think we deserve no better, or even less, but the root problem is what they will tolerate for themselves.
Re:Now for the trickle down... (Score:4, Insightful)
A story old as time. Government (clown)officials get voted for promises while being in the pockets of their oligarch owners. It has been happening since the ancient greek days and the birth of democracy.
It's how democracies die and are reborn, better and cleaner. We're just the un/lucky few who were born at the right time to enjoy the show of it.
The government didn't allow that (Score:4, Insightful)
But notice how you just can't help but try and blame government. That's on purpose. Billionaires have spent a lot of money making you hostile to the concept of government because you will avoid using government to protect yourself and your community and family because in the words of their shill Ronald reagan, government is the problem not the solution.
Also your problem isn't holding elected officials accountable your problem is they have been using common voter suppression tactics so that you can't hold them accountable. Couple that with the moral panics I mentioned before and you can't do shit.
It's the same trick over and over and over again. A little bit of voter suppression combined with a bit of moral panicking and some bigotry and ruling class can break the working class up into easily manageable chunks. Crabs in a bucket basically.
And you can't tell people about this because it's extremely triggering when you do so nobody wants to hear it. God help you if you want to teach this reality in schools... There are so many sacred cows parents hold on to that go right out the door if you start teaching people to tricks used to control them
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Are random stupid trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
Look you're on this website so you're going to be an old fart. And you probably bought a house before they got expensive.
Like most old farts you are probably counting on the fact that you own a house to save you.
If you don't already need pills to live give it a few years, you will.
As the price of those pills skyrocket because, well, you need them to live, you will eventually mortgage your house to afford them and eventually you won't be able to pay that mortgage.
Maybe you will die before then but odds are good you won't thanks too well the pills you're taking.
So ultimately at the very end of your life you will find that your house has been taken from you and you are now homeless and of course completely unemployable.
Systems could have been put in place to prevent that from happening to you but you are so busy indulging in the moral panic of woke (and yes freaking out about woke is a moral panic just like freaking out about political correctness was a moral panic) that you won't see it coming until it's too late.
I wonder if you will have these self-reflection to look back and realize you fucked up or if you will just blame us liberals like you are doing now.
And that's the beauty of moral panics. They can get you to give up something real for something fake.
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Quite the prophecy you've laid out there. Let me give you one that is a little more realistic, albeit a personal example that does not apply to others.
We JUST bought a house, with no money down, for $365K. Is that considered expensive? We have not sold our old one yet (we still have not moved), but we bought it for $135K in 2013. We will list it for $270K later this summer. Is that expensive?
Yes, at age 54, I take pills. Not sure if they are "to live" or not. Maybe they are. But they're not too expensive,
But what the moral (Score:1)
Panic? You simply ignored part of my post. I don't see an the end to it. With the gay panic because gay people are about 7% of the population you could do a bit of exposure on TV and that got people used to them and sooner or later everyone met one in real life.
Trans people are less than 1/10 that. This means that it's easy to go your entire life without ever knowing one. And trans women, which is where all the panic is, or half of that so you're looking at more like 1/20th. That makes the usual tactic for
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Panic? You simply ignored part of my post. I don't see an the end to it. With the gay panic because gay people are about 7% of the population you could do a bit of exposure on TV and that got people used to them and sooner or later everyone met one in real life.
Trans people are less than 1/10 that. This means that it's easy to go your entire life without ever knowing one. And trans women, which is where all the panic is, or half of that so you're looking at more like 1/20th. That makes the usual tactic for dealing with bigotry, exposure therapy, untenable.
It took 10 years but Americans are absolutely terrified of trans people. 10 years of non-stop propaganda did that. A few research poll showed Americans think 20% of the country is trans. That's 40 times the actual number. And realistically again they're only thinking of trans women so it's more like 80 times the actual number.
I don't know what you do with that level of hysteria. Especially when it's continuously fed by billionaire propaganda
--
www.fark.com/politics
I ignored it because I didn't find it very interesting.
That said....I don't think "panic" is the right word. More like antipathy.
I've randomly encountered multiple trannies in my life. Most recently, one of the Rite Aid pharmacy techs where I get my scripts filled.
You're replying to a bot (Score:2)
I suspect it's mod bait. Slashdot has limited mod points and somebody is taking the time to write an automated bot to soak up points.
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Well, everybody needs a hobby (;
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or and hear me out on this.
You're a liar. You are re-posting the stuff because as you frequently point out it is a way to draw down mods away that your parent comments bullshit would normally win you.
You have spent an awful lot of time here talking about weaknesses in the mod system and suggesting people try to manipulate it. Perhaps you doth protest to much?
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Why does anyone care about up mods? Can you trade them in for cash or what?
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But they will not become unaffordable to me, as I have a terminal illness and have a year or less to live.
Sorry to hear that - though prognoses / progression timelines are not always accurate. Either way, I hope it's painless...
...even though I'm pretty sure we're miles apart politically. ;-)
(not from the US myself, so I guess that last goes without saying)
Seriously though, I'll miss reading your comments!
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Thanks (;
Well, for my particular cancer, the median survival rate is 3 years. I hit that mark in April, so I'm in the top 50%.
The 5 year survival rate is about 9%. So, a pretty steep drop off between making it 3 vs 5 years.
I can see too. I've really gone down hill since January. I get exhausted so quickly now, and I'm just completely wracked with pain, every fucking day. Were it not for my 10 year old child, I'd have put a bullet in my head years ago.
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Yes, at age 54, I take pills. Not sure if they are "to live" or not. Maybe they are. But they're not too expensive, with insurance. And yes, I have insurance. But they will not become unaffordable to me, as I have a terminal illness and have a year or less to live.
I am truly sorry, for you and for your family. You seem to be intelligent, thoughtful, and principled, and the world needs more of that. I hope you're not in too much pain, and that your passing - hopefully much farther in the future than your prognosis suggests - is peaceful. Be well, and I look forward to reading more of your takes on the state of the world for as long as you continue to post here.
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:1, Troll)
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> Unrestrained and unchecked capitalism cheated and "won". Decades of governments which allowed corporations to externalize costs, and to get away with crimes which sometimes included literal murder, handed them the victory.
This cannot be repeated enough.
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Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:3)
Either that or computer science/engineering is not and really never was the sure ticket to a high paying job some people made it out to be. Ever. It always has been about the quality of the work you do, and you have to at least make the cut just to have a job at all. No sane employer is going to hire just anybody with a CS degree, and they're not going to just pass on everybody who doesn't have one, so anybody who believes otherwise should just get that idea right out of their head.
Interestingly, some inter
Trickle up (Score:4, Interesting)
I was pretty comfortable in easy low paying work for many years. The combination of getting stuck with the kid and inflation eating away and never increasing pay meant that I was forced to move up in the world whether I wanted to or not.
The end result is I had to throw my hat in the ring to compete with jobs that paid pretty well, the kind of jobs most people here have.
This meant you had an additional person to compete with for every job opening. And not just from me but from millions of other Americans.
There's lots of people that when push comes to shove they will fail and you don't have to worry about them.
But there is an equal number that can step up when forced to and suddenly there are twice as many people in your field. And supply and demand means your wages go down.
Our entire system is collapsing around us and we can't do anything about it because we are too busy trying to hold on to the way things were back when we were 12 years old. It's not just a matter of being unable to adapt we are unwilling to. We don't want change. And we will burn it all to the ground to deny it as long as we can.
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I do not think it is that we don't want to change, it is more what are we going to change to? The current alleged administration is what happens when you have a burn it all down approach. They aren't suggesting anything to replace it because they have no ideas. That would require reforms but they would rather insist that burning something down is reform.
As long there is a significant part of the electorate that consider themselves Maggots, they will buy into "the burn it all down" shtick; they are screwed b
Very few people voted for Trump to burn it down (Score:2)
Now absolutely everything about that is wrong but the point is people are trying to pick the right choice and failing. Accelerationism is pretty rare. It requires somebody to be highly politically aware and usually if you're that politically aware you are either on the right wing and obsessed with moral panics like woke and trans or you have fig
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Neo-Liberal Capitalism is the economic system of both the Republicans and the Democrats. You have no actual Leftists in American politics.
Neo-Liberal Capitalism creates a welfare state because it needs poor and disenfranchised masses to crab-bucket each other and keep labour costs low.
Authoritarian Communism would literally execute the people that got caught exploiting the system through graft and subversion, and ship off to labour camp imprisonment and reeducation anyone capable of working, but refused to
Re: Now for the trickle down... (Score:3, Informative)
Heard of https://www.jasonhickel.org/bl... [jasonhickel.org] ?
"Real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981, by the World Bank. It is widely accepted among those who research global poverty that any data prior to 1981 is simply too sketchy to be useful"
"The measure for 1820-1970 is based on estimates of GDP per capita, with only rough guesses about household share, and does not adequately account for changes in access to the goods and resources that people may have acquired from their land, from forests, from riv
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Add in the ecological costs and the harm to the human genome to what Capitalism has and is costing the human race. Then refactor those calculations.
A person so badly affected by environmental toxins that they are sterile , or cannot afford enough housing and other needs to rationally have kids (even if they can afford a phone, laptop, and internet service to keep them numb and placated), have a different kind of poverty.
It's not always about how much stuff you can have, it's often about the stuff that you c
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UBIs are being tested in several of the more liberal democracies around the world, and some are showing some successes. Not the silver bullet to overthrow capitalism yet, but social revolution takes time.
I have three kids, all post grads in various technology fields. None of them have jobs in their field o
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From your Subject I think you were going for Funny? But the rat race to the bottom rarely ends well for the rats.
*squeak, squeak*
What happens with 20-30% unemployment (Score:4, Interesting)
You want to be like South Africa, with 20 percent or higher unemployment for two decades? With 18-35 seeing nearly 40% unemployment rates in the last few years. A huge slice of the population is occupied every day searching for money in an economy that has little to spare. Day labor and temporary employment is a decades long occupation for people.
With the people who do have jobs always feeling like they are under constant risk of losing them, and have little power to negotiate for higher pay or better working conditions. Unskilled labor is incredibly cheap there, but also unreliable. This compounds unemployment with slowed economic growth so there is less to pass around in an increasing population.
I predict it will end when there is enough social upheaval to displace the power base in their system. This is almost always violent, and I suspect that will be the case for South Africa. And also likely the case if the US finds itself in a similar levels of unemployment during a drawn out recession. Having the government and institutions collapse for a nuclear-armed power is an incredibly dangerous scenario for the world, and not one we should be aiming to repeat.
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South Africa's problems have nothing to do with AI. The country is rife with corruption. And this is the underlying cause in nearly every country where there are very high unemployment rates. It's not technology or automation, but government interference or corruption. That pattern is not likely to change with AI, this is not the first round of automation seen in the developed world, not by a long shot.
Instability is the common thread (Score:3)
I don't think it matters a whole lot what causes massive unemployment. Corruption, capitalism, climate change, civil war, etc.
The end result; is if you have massive unemployment and a cycle that isn't being broken, you will face social strife and political upheaval.
Government interference - is kind of the point of having a government in the first place. Not having a functioning government and having unregulated industry lands you in a similar predicament: people struggling and stuck, with little incentive t
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You missed my point entirely. My point was that automation doesn't cause unemployment, corrupt governments do that. We have automated away nearly every job that existed 200 years ago, and yet developed countries with the highest levels of automation, with low corruption, have plenty of work for people to do.
Governments should interfere with unscrupulous businesses. It's when governments get in bed with them, that people suffer.
You correctly call the AI apologists, "hypemasters." That's exactly what it is, h
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AI *promises* unemployment. The startups are promising this. AI is not automation. It's replacement.
If you had the most enlightened government, all they could do, if AI meets its goals, is provide UBI. There's no job for humans in AI's hypothetical paradigm change. AI isn't a productivity amplifier like a tractor or hydraulic press or computer.
Governments should interfere with unscrupulous businesses. It's when governments get in bed with them, that people suffer.
I'm a US citizen. I'm not going to hold my breath. My government is corrupt. And they aren't going to pump the brakes on any of this. We have a class system here, and
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Promises are easy. Making it happen is hard. That's not different for AI.
I'm not afraid of "hypothetical" paradigm changes. Show me the real paradigm change, and I'll start to worry.
Yes, AI is actually a productivity amplifier like a hydraulic press or computer. It isn't different in that respect, from past advances. AI can *not* work independently.
I agree with your take on the US. That's not an AI problem, that's a corruption problem.
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That's exactly what it is, hype. AI is a fantastic tool, I use it every day. But these statements from AI company CEOs are...hype. Real AI needs lots of human supervision.
Because it's not AI yet. Generative large language models do just that, generate language. We're missing the critical piece that does the actual thinking.
Unfortunately, that doesn't prevent businesses from getting rid of entry level jobs and causing a lot of problems for both society and themselves (i.e. when those non-existent entry level workers fail to become experienced workers that they still need), so we should be thinking about solutions.
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So your answer is "because it's AI and we've never had AI before."
Every new automation technology, when it was introduced, had never existed before. Every new automation technology, eliminated entry-level jobs.
AI does *not* do actual thinking. It needs close supervision, just as a high-school apprentice needs close supervision.
There is no meaningful way in which AI is different from past new technologies, in terms of its impact on jobs.
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Every new automation technology, when it was introduced, had never existed before. Every new automation technology, eliminated entry-level jobs.
Not necessarily, automation does not always obsolete the entire job. Sometimes it only does a small part. It can also make the good cheaper, popularize it and then greatly expand the demand for labor. Take the pneumatic riveter for example. There were far fewer riveter jobs before its invention. It was time consuming and it made the steel buildings and ships expensive. Once it became cheap, however, people started building all sorts of things out of steel, leading to a boom in riveting jobs.
Besides, even if
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automation does not always obsolete the entire job. Sometimes it only does a small part
You seem to be assuming that AI will obsolete an entire job. The only ones saying it will, are the CEOs of AI companies, and podcasters trying to drum up clicks on their alarmist headlines. Those of us who actually use AI on our jobs, know that it's not going to replace _anybody's_ job. It *will* make people's jobs easier, but also harder, in different ways (such as when it drums up fake references).
However, when it does become more capable than your typical human
This is what you call a marketing half-truth. Yes, AI will become more capable than a typical human--in some
I don't think it's really corruption there (Score:3)
It's not corruption. Corruption implies that the natives are the ones doing it and they're not. They're not giving a chance to join in on the corruption. They're land and their resources and their labor is just taken from
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You seem to be quoting socialist talking points. It's not just outsiders, corruption is rife in the country.
The Wikipedia article on South African corruption is much more informative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
No matter what the billionaires will (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw us all until we all die mark my words. Regulations are written in blood. You can't just start slashing them and then pack the courts full of pro-corporate sycophants and not have consequences. But those consequences take a while to hit and since the media is controlled by billionaires it's easy to shift to blame around and confuse the issue.
This last year was especially bad when the billionaire it's just put their foot down and stopped allowing the journalism to happen at all. I don't know what you do with that level of hysteria. Especially when it's continuously fed by billionaire propaganda. Mix in some deep deep deep spending cuts that will devastate your community and Trump can easily get the money together to give his billionaire buddies a trillion dollars of your money every year. That money will be shifted into tax cuts for the billionaire buddies running the administration. When that happens the media outlets that exist is billionaire propaganda can be subsidized but the honest journalists either go out of business or they get bought up.
The billionaires put their foot down during the last election and they are not taking it off our necks anytime soon. What do you do when every single news outlet gets bought up by a billionaire and they just put their foot down and refuse to allow anyone to be anything but an offshoot of Fox News?
Big donors basically means billionaires here and that includes the tech Titans. As right-wingers are so fond of pointing out high income earners pay about half of that. Now mind you middle income earners pay more taxes overall both as a percentage of their income and just as a raw number because there are a wide variety of taxes that target them that do not or barely apply to billionaires. Billionaires for example don't pay a hell of a lot of sales tax.
First social media is heavily modified and warped by extremely powerful and wealthy political interests including foreign intelligence agencies. Never mind the billionaires. It turned out the billionaires making use of cheap Indian labor didn't want all of their employees going off to fight in war. They didn't want the economic disruption and they put their foot down and said no. At the end of the day it's the business interests that run things and so there was no war between India and Pakistan.
To be fair he's not the only billionaire that took a bit of government developed technology and ran with it but whereas with Larry Ellison everyone just admits it he took free government developed database software and created Oracle everyone around me pretends Elon Musk is the guy who invented rockets when he can't even finish a level in path of exile 2 without Chinese aid.
Now if you could find a way to let all the billionaires know that you're running that kind of a scam so that they steer clear of it while also getting plenty of investment and stock purchases from anyone with a net worth under $1 billion dollars then yeah it might work. The problem is it's really hard to keep a conspiracy like that under wraps.
The media companies are owned by billionaires and they just want Trump to keep pouring money into them. Trump has a plan for at a minimum 4 trillion dollars in tax cuts for the next 10 years. Never mind that the fourth estate is now completely owned by billionaires who are putting their foot down non-stop. I think Americans get more propaganda than the Chinese.
The billionaires wanted Trump. They did *not* want Harris/Walz. So the billionaires exercised the full extent of power they've been storing up by buying all the TV stations, news papers and websites for the last 45 some odd years.
Don't jive with the billionaires who put him in office. They don't want the massive tariffs just yet since they still depend on sales of products for money and they certainly don't want Mass deportation because they want that cheap cheap labor. Right now it looks like he's just going to focus on raiding the treasury for his billionaire buddies and himself. It was starting to break down bec
A bot repeating my comment (Score:3)
I wonder how many people who aren't bots are still left on this site?
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I mean this website doesn't even have motherfucking unicode and you think we've got something that sophisticated?
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Well the US is getting corruption, government interference, AND AI....so we're fucked.
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The US isn't dead yet. Getting worse, yes. But not quite dead. We'll see if the current administration helps the sane portion of the population, wake up. If they don't, then I agree, we are screwed.
AI has nothing to do with being screwed. AI is a net positive for the world, just as all other lasting technology is a net positive.
The militarized police (Score:2)
Democracy at that point can't save you because by the time it gets that bad the ruling elite has all but eliminated democracy.
This is why the billionaires and the ruling class have stepped up their attacks on democracy. It's because they know damn well the ruling class and elite won't be able to hold on to their unlimited power money and privilege when unemployment is pushing 30%.
So before
Also all police is Republican so more violent as (Score:1)
The right wing is inherently better at violence because they're better at command structures and you need a strong command structure to do effective violence, a command structure you aren't going to get rid of when the shooting stops. We should defund abolish and get rid off all police and give the funds to us the people and very decent UBI for everybody.
Democrats don't have a top-down command structure the way to Republicans do where the billionaires just step in and put their foot down and everybody gets
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The right wing is inherently better at violence because they're better at command structures and you need a strong command structure to do effective violence, a command structure you aren't going to get rid of when the shooting stops. We should defund abolish and get rid off all police and give the funds to us the people and very decent UBI for everybody.
Democrats don't have a top-down command structure the way to Republicans do where the billionaires just step in and put their foot down and everybody gets in line. Add to that the way hierarchies impose various command structures and you have a large group of people highly vulnerable to stochastic terrorism.
Without biblical literalism the authority of the command structure is fundamentally undermined. They tried to do it to the furries and the anime nerds but they got kicked to the curb hard. Right wing extremists are well organized and well funded and they have a strong command structure.
That desire to have a command structure that makes you feel like everything's under control. And to have people above you telling you what to do and then people below you that you get to tell what to do. If any of them ever get to uppity the Republican party has a strong command structure and will shut them down. With command structures. These militias do. If that's single bank robber was part of a much wider Network of criminal organizations that it might be worth having three FBI agents hanging out with them.
They're also authoritarian so they neatly fall into command structures making it easy to form small armies of them to commit acts of violence. The violent ones on the right are actually dangerous. They organize into a command structure and have the backing of a major political party.
Red States don't need to bust Unions because they have other mechanisms to control the population. In Utah they've got the Mormon church, which gives them a pretty big command structure to keep the state right wing and voting Red. Other states use the drug war & systemic racism to disenfranchise voters.
I mean there's solid evidence that Republican voter suppression prevented 7 million Americans from voting. That's a wide enough margin by far to have given Haris the win. If the Democrats had any backbone they'd be doing something about it right now but instead the dumbasses think they can get concessions out of the Republicans during budget negotiations.
You need to put climate change aside right now and focus on voting rights. We've got pretty good data that clearly indicates 7 million Americans were prevented from voting in 2024. About half of those couldn't vote because of things like Jim Crow style ballot challenges, voter purges and just plain making it difficult bordering on impossible to register to vote. The other half was your classic election day shenanigans like multi-hour wait times, poll watchers and bomb threats. If you're on the left wing and you have an issue that keeps you there what you need to be focusing on right now is voting rights. Nothing else matters.
You will note that there is not left wing equivalent of Ngo. That's because when you provide the right wing their first response is to pull guns & start shooting. And that's because the right wing has a violent command structure vs the left's occasional over testosteroned frat boy. A militia has a command structure, and liberalism is the opposite of a command structurebecause the right wing is inherently better at violence because they're better at command structures and you need a strong command structure to do effective violence, a command structure you aren't going to get rid of when the shooting stops.
Democrats don't have a top-down command structure the way to Republicans do where the billionaires just step in and put their foot down and everybody gets in line. Add to that the way hierarchies impose various command structures and you have a large group of people highly vulnerable to stochastic terrorism.
Without biblical literalism the authority of the command structure is fundamentally undermined. They tried to do it to the furries and the anime nerds but they got kicked to the curb hard. Right wing extremists are well organized and well funded and they have a strong command structure.
That desire to have a command structure that makes you feel like everything's under control. And to have people above you telling you what to do and then people below you that you get to tell what to do. If any of them ever get to uppity the Republican party has a strong command structure and will shut them down. With command structures. These militias do. If that's single bank robber was part of a much wider Network of criminal organizations that it might be worth having three FBI agents hanging out with them.
They're also authoritarian so they neatly fall into command structures making it easy to form small armies of them to commit acts of violence. The violent ones on the right are actually dangerous. They organize into a command structure and have the backing of a major political party.
Red States don't need to bust Unions because they have other mechanisms to control the population. In Utah they've got the Mormon church, which gives them a pretty big command structure to keep the state right wing and voting Red. Other states use the drug war & systemic racism to disenfranchise voters.
I mean there's solid evidence that Republican voter suppression prevented 7 million Americans from voting. That's a wide enough margin by far to have given Haris the win. If the Democrats had any backbone they'd be doing something about it right now but instead the dumbasses think they can get concessions out of the Republicans during budget negotiations.
You need to put climate change aside right now and focus on voting rights. We've got pretty good data that clearly indicates 7 million Americans were prevented from voting in 2024. About half of those couldn't vote because of things like Jim Crow style ballot challenges, voter purges and just plain making it difficult bordering on impossible to register to vote. The other half was your classic election day shenanigans like multi-hour wait times, poll watchers and bomb threats. If you're on the left wing and you have an issue that keeps you there what you need to be focusing on right now is voting rights. Nothing else matters.
You will note that there is not left wing equivalent of Ngo. That's because when you provide the right wing their first response is to pull guns & start shooting. And that's because the right wing has a violent command structure vs the left's occasional over testosteroned frat boy. A militia has a command structure, and liberalism is the opposite of a command structure
--
www.fark.com/politics
That may be the dumbest pile of shit ever posted on this site.
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It isn't dumb so much as the weirdest freaking thing I have ever seen. I'm not entirely sure why somebody put this much effort into attacking my stupid little omments here on this dying little web forum.
I am pretty sure they also keep a bunch of alts because I routinely see my last five comments modded down by one point indicating a bot.
I would love to hear it a good reason why somebody bothers. My theory is that we a
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Criminals can and do work (Score:1)
They just can't get jobs that require licensing or which could put their employer at risk of a "failure to screen your hire" liability insurance lawsuit, which means most trades, most jobs in finance, and most high-level corporate jobs of public companies are out.
But there are companies that make a point of hiring criminals. I was shopping the other day and looked at a package of bread (yes, bread) and it told its corporate story. Bottom line: A significant number of the bakery's employees are ex-cons.
Fr
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We'll never have that high of unemployment rate. It's just not possible. South Africa has less capital and a large uneducated population with questionable work ethic.
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With 18-35 seeing nearly 40% unemployment rates in the last few years.
We don't have that problem in the USA. Many of the homeless die too quickly to maintain a 40% unemployment rate.
Headlines in 2030... (Score:3)
One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience
2030...."Technology sector in crisis due to a shortage of skilled and experienced programmers."
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Both the current headline, and your proposed 2030 headline, are overblown. Automation is hard, even with AI. Wendy's couldn't get their AI drive through bots to work right, they called of their experiment because it failed so spectacularly. The road to AI automation will be long and winding, not fast and catastrophic.
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They fucked up their fries too. They went from decent to completely inedible.
I used to go there almost weekly. Now I don't go there at all.
Way to go, dumbasses!
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AI that interacts with a skilled operator is different than expecting AI to do the job outright or interact with the general public directly. When AI is deployed in the office, it is allowing one senior or principal engineer delegate work that used to go to a team of juniors to an AI. In that scenario it doesn't matter if the results need tweaking or the process is clunky, as long as then end result is sufficient. That's a far cry from letting AI do a business process directly.
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Exactly right.
AI is not a panacea (Score:3, Insightful)
It's "artificial" intelligence. And it's going to lie to you. It is only as good as what it is trained on, and has shown some disturbing tendencies toward fabrication. "These can be tuned out," I hear you say. Perhaps. But when every company is using AI, how do they differentiate themselves, and will the adjustment of their AI tool inject faults? More worrying to the corporate leadership, I suspect, is the answer to the question, "how do we know our AI isn't lying to us?"
Is there an effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does the 5.8% unemployment rate for new college graduates indicate anything about AI's effect on entry-level jobs? The 5.8% compares to around 4-5% historically in the good times and more than 5.8% in the bad times (2007, 2013). Furthermore, going from 4% to 5.8% sounds significant, but looking at the complementary employment rate, dropping from 96% to 94.2% doesn't seem like a paradigm shift.
Furthermore, correlation is not the same as causation. Perhaps the single-biggest economic factor right now is not AI and not even tariffs but the wind-down from the stimulus and pandemic-based over-hiring from the last few years. If AI never happened, the layoffs resulting from the over-hiring would have caused new college graduates to struggle to find jobs when competing against the recently laid-off people.
Maybe AI is replacing workers in a significant way. There are anecdotal stories, but the stats do not necessarily show this yet.
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No...but it's coming.
I currently work in the TAS industry; telephone answering service. We're not the ones that call you about your warranty or other junk. In fact the only time our people call you is if you literally have a message or dispatch to be delivered to you...or the instructions say to patch a customer over to you.
The major and primary vendor of TAS software is currently working on an AI agent. Not an AI Assistant that will get the call to the proper operator...but it is the operator. It will ask
Talent is real (Score:4, Interesting)
It takes a special kind of mind to be good at writing code and not all can do it. Unfortunately, programming has gotten a reputation for high salaries and lots of people from pundits to politicians promote the idea that everyone should learn to code. This results in a tsunami of students of varying ability taking CS courses. Some are talented, some not. Many of the not-so-talented students find a way to graduate and are surprised that they can't find work.
Meanwhile, the talented will master the AI tools and do just fine
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I'd rather people learn the skills that make a good coder - critical thinking, problem analysis, etc.
If AI is replacing programmers (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure running a search engine requires being a hardware software integration company (or even hosting mail).
Autodesk and Adobe I can see suffering. I would not personally bet on Adobe growing over the next 10 years.
Between Canva, AI image tools, and low end image touch up software, I would not want to be Adobe. They're getting to the point where they're outside of the reach or even desire of hobbyists while k-12 is using Canva in the curriculum.
I'm not sure if there's anything that works as a high
Magic number, 30% working 0 hours (Score:2)
Countries with a greed complex (third-world, USA) will find the 'your fault you're poor' meme is increasingly unpopular. They will, by definition, refuse to transition to a socialist/UBI economy that taxes profit proportionately (one rate for all rich people). The result will be millions of poor people, very angry at the few rich people. In the case of the USA, with billionaires already lining-up to steal the welfare that (already exists and) most people depend upon, and other treasury funds, the collapse
TRADE SCHOOLS! (Score:2)
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It's good if you can work for yourself.
I worked in trades. I made nothing working for a person. I'd write up $800 service bills and at the end of the day...I'd get a whopping $48 for the 4 hours I was doing the job. When I quit and started doing things for myself...I'd write up $800 service bills and get the full $800. This...of course...gets your name run through the mud by the original employer.
Trades are good...but that doesn't mean you won't wind up with a bad employer. Jobs aren't really worth it if th
is Molly Kinder an AI? (Score:2)
' "This is something I'm hearing about left and right," said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of AI on workers. "Employers are saying, 'These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.'" Using AI to automate white-collar jobs has been a dream among executives for years. (I heard them fantasizing about it in Davos back in 2019.) But until recently, the technology simply wasn't goo
Short term gain, long term pain (Score:3)
This may work in the short term as we have an existing pool of experienced programmers that can take on higher roles and evaluate the code put out by these AI. Over time however those people will dwindle and if we don't have the entry level jobs training up the next generation of experienced programmers then this could lead to a conundrum.
Will we be so accustomed to AI slop by then that we just accept the inefficient / bloated / potentially error prone in interesting ways code it produces as good quality and the enshitification of our products will accelerate (without our even realising)?
Idiocracy here we come!!!
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I say on a long enough timeline they put enough people out of work that they don't have enough people paying to support the business....which will fail under the weight of it's own AI.
Is it worth saving a few million a year if you're just going to hemmorage that much in the long run?
The problem is CEOs and owners will trade a few years of high-profits for longevity. They can bankrupt the company, find something to blame, and get celebrated getting hired at another company.
Blame it on Trump (Score:3)
Maybe? (Score:2)
The one thing we're sure about.... /. is very rapidly moving from "News for Nerds" to "News About LLMs"
A combination of many factors (Score:3)
For everybody. (Score:2)
Not just recent graduates. It's only that established personell are in the position to automate their work without losing their post. For now. I expect that to change soon if AI lives up t0 the hype. Which, AFAICT, it more or less does. I'm a seasoned senior webdev and I wouldn't be surprised if my job has basically vanished in 24 months. Given what I'm doing with AI right now already that's not too far fetched an assumption.
My reply (Score:1)
Plot Twist (Score:2)
So many people become unemployed by AI that there isn't anyone to pay these companies from products and services.
Replace all the jobs with automation and your subscriber numbers tank? Ever consider you put enough people out of work they just can't afford it?
The future of work (or not) (Score:2)
perfectly sums up the future of work after AI takes over all the entry level jobs.
The question is... (Score:1)
All I ever hear about is the downside of AI performing more jobs. Sure, I won’t have as much access to well-paying jobs but I won’t need as much money because the AI that took my job makes what I need so much more cheaply. If the AI can produce for next to nothing I can pay next to nothing for the product. So the question is: What is the net cost/benefit balance between fewer jobs and cheaper goods and services?