Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner. If you can employ an AI "employee" for $50 per month that works 24/7, the AI can be pretty lousy while still being totally worth it. People that know how to properly apply this new tool are going to be valuable and sought after - a new career option that didn't exist 5 years ago.

 

Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner. If you can employ an AI "employee" for $50 per month that works 24/7, the AI can be pretty lousy while still being totally worth it. People that know how to properly apply this new tool are going to be valuable and sought after - a new career option that didn't exist 5 years ago.

The whole appeal of AI to large corporations is that it facilitates the elimination of salaried workers, how can someone enthusiastically "apply" a technology designed to eliminate enthusiastic technologists?

Do you believe that AI is a way to improve the human condition? sooner or later you'll reach out to something and find the people are gone, AI will decide when and if you see a doctor, AI will screen Police 911 calls, AI will decide the school curriculum...

Put yourself in the shoes of a worker, who studied and got an education and is now facing the grim reality, burger flipping - both US parties support big investors, neither Democrat nor Republican represent the needs or concerns of like 95% of the people who vote for them.

This is comparable to the Russian revolution.

 

Right now I would rate chatgpt or any other LLM at best a 1/2 decent assistant. They can find things very fast do a lot of research grunt work for you leaving you still with a list of articles and papers to read. I hear it does code fairly fast. How good that code is I can't say I steer away from code if I can but if I must I can just not well.

 

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...-help-openai-infringe-copyrights-nyt-alleged/

For the NYT, outputs shared during discovery—including a huge chunk of users’ ChatGPT sessions—remain some of the strongest evidence that OpenAI and Microsoft built tools that allegedly replaced the NYT by producing near-verbatim excerpts of its copyrighted works.

In some cases, users told ChatGPT they were trying to skirt paywalls and were able to see significant chunks of articles by requesting to see the “next paragraph.” In other cases, “models simply spit out several paragraphs” without such finagling. To prove market harms caused by substitution, they shared examples in their complaints of side-by-side comparisons, as well as screenshots of allegedly infringing outputs:
...
Microsoft and OpenAI are hoping that the court will agree that training AI on NYT articles is fair use. In a statement provided to Ars, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri reiterated the AI firm’s often-repeated claims that AI training on copyrighted works is indisputably fair use.

“Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are grounded in fair use,” Pusateri said.
But the NYT likely expects that its evidence of substitution is strong, and that might not bode well for the tech firms it’s suing. Notably, one of the earliest verdicts finding that AI training was fair use was explicitly granted due to the plaintiffs’ failure to prove market harms. Last June, a federal judge laid out what he thinks could be a winning argument against AI training on copyrighted works, suggesting that the fair use question is far from answered.

In this case, OpenAI has argued that “ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription,” the NYT reported, partly because “they transformed the material for a different use.”

But if NYT manages to convince the court that the ChatGPT use is not so different from the newspaper’s, the most extreme outcome could require OpenAI and Microsoft to wipe models and start over.

 

The problem, IMHO, is not the jobs that AI is beginning to replace/displace. But rather that the change is happening too fast for the market to adapt without it being significantly disrupted.

 

Perhaps we need the return of the Luddites against AI.

 

The problem, IMHO, is not the jobs that AI is beginning to replace/displace. But rather that the change is happening too fast for the market to adapt without it being significantly disrupted.

As has happened numerous times before. As will happen numerous times in future.

It's an easy trap to see today's change as being unprecedented and catastrophic. Yet fifty or a hundred years from now, the changes that history will record as being unprecedented and catastrophic will, like almost all such ones we look back on currently, be the ones that are going virtually unnoticed while they are happening.

 

As has happened numerous times before. As will happen numerous times in future.

It's an easy trap to see today's change as being unprecedented and catastrophic.

On the contrary, it's much easier to see today's changes as just another step in the application of automation. Another step in the improvement of human society, the long promised world of gadgetry, which is precisely what governments and venture capitalists are saying.

Even looking for a job will now put most people squarely in the midst of AI, where your suitability is determined by some algorithm.

Yet fifty or a hundred years from now, the changes that history will record as being unprecedented and catastrophic will, like almost all such ones we look back on currently, be the ones that are going virtually unnoticed while they are happening.

AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs


https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/ai-...s-new-report-what-that-means-for-workers.html

U.S. employers announced just over 97,000 job cuts in May 2026, according to a report released Thursday by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The announced cuts represent the highest May number since 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Challenger’s data. It’s also the third straight month that layoffs have risen this year, up from the 83,387 cuts reported in April, 60,620 in March and 48,307 in February.

 

It's an easy trap to see today's change as being unprecedented and catastrophic

I didn't use those terms for a reason. The situation being experienced today is definitely not unprecedented. And I doubt the word "catastrophic" is applicable either. The problem I'm seeing is that a very large chunk of the job market is going to be (or rather, is already being) affected. But also a bounce effect is becoming clear due to the unrealistic expectations that some market segments have laid on the technology.

As I said, the main issue is the shock being felt in some job markets by the breakneck speed at which the tech is being adopted. I forsee a short period of painful uncertainty, followed by a gradual but steady climb into a new normal. Things ought to work out for the better in the end, I think.

 

When I upgraded one of our operating areas from huge panels with pneumatics, mechanical round chart recorders and electric relay controls to an electronic Distributed Control System with video monitors and keyboards we got a lot of pushback from the operators. "This area operated just fine for xxx years without all that newfangled controls ****." And after completion and a few months of use it was. "Wow! How did we ever get along without this!" Pretty much the same as when we went from an agrarian society to an industrial one or from horse drawn to mechanized transportation. And it won't be too long before the landline telephone system has gone the way of the telegraph system...

 

When I upgraded one of our operating areas from huge panels with pneumatics, mechanical round chart recorders and electric relay controls to an electronic Distributed Control System with video monitors and keyboards we got a lot of pushback from the operators. "This area operated just fine for xxx years without all that newfangled controls ****." And after completion and a few months of use it was. "Wow! How did we ever get along with this!" Pretty much the same as when we went from an agrarian society to an industrial one or from horse drawn to mechanized transportation. And it won't be too long before the landline telephone system has gone the way of the telegraph system...

Well as I pointed out, its easy to characterize this as inevitable and ultimately beneficial, that's what we here day in and day out from those who really benefit, venture capitalists and politicians.

Take a good luck though at the darker reality, look at coal mining communities and manufacturing communities across the rust belt. Huge social damage, huge drop in disposable incomes, increases in alcoholism, drugs, divorces.

I've seen it in Britain, well documented, entire communities transformed from prosperity to destitution, unemployment.

We're discouraged from looking too closely at this, it is minimized, airbrushed out of the narrative, we just look the other way.

 

Change is inevitable. I saw our plant employee numbers drop from over 2,000 to less than 1,200 during my years of automating the operating controls of the plant. Thankfully, most were given early retirement packages that were better for them than if they had continued to work until retirement age. Sure, employment availability decreased for the area however. But I live in an area where that has almost always been a problem unless you were in an education, service, sales, food, or medical field. All of my children upon graduating from college moved to another area for employment and that is how our society has become a more mobile one going where the employment opportunities arise. Where I had a career in industrial automation my son now has his career in business automation and that is being done with AI at the forefront.

 

When AI and robots are building all of the widgets...who is going to buy the widgets?

It's the classic dilemma.

 

When AI and robots are building all of the widgets...who is going to buy the widgets?

Humanoid robots of course! I'll send mine to town to fetch my carry-out.

 

Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner. If you can employ an AI "employee" for $50 per month that works 24/7, the AI can be pretty lousy while still being totally worth it. People that know how to properly apply this new tool are going to be valuable and sought after - a new career option that didn't exist 5 years ago.

Have you ever been an employer?

I was an employer for 28 years and believe me a "pretty lousy" employee brings no value to a business.

(even cheap ones)

 

I did see an article lately about an employee-less store! Was pretty short on information about many questions I had in mind about it. But basically it was all automated with no humans manning it! Wonder just how that works? Reminiscent of the Automat restaurants where it was all vending machines in the dining room. Sure, there are humans behind the scenes, but we are approaching fully automated manufacturing, transportation, and end of sale. That still leaves procurement, stocking, bookkeeping, maintenance, and management hands on at some point. All of which is being streamlined via AI to increase profit per unit sold and to stay in business. Kind of like Costco where you approach the check-out register with your buggy and they have someone to hand scan the items in your buggy instead of having to take each one out and place it on the conveyor to the register scanner. Small incremental steps to increase profitability by reducing labor costs through automation. The scanner alone instead of having to key in the price of each item on the register which was implement almost universally many years ago was a huge savings. AI is finding ways to shortcut many business practices, but it is ultimately a human that makes the decision on whether to implement the advised practice or suggest a better one.

 

Well as I pointed out, its easy to characterize this as inevitable and ultimately beneficial, that's what we here day in and day out from those who really benefit, venture capitalists and politicians.

Take a good luck though at the darker reality, look at coal mining communities and manufacturing communities across the rust belt. Huge social damage, huge drop in disposable incomes, increases in alcoholism, drugs, divorces.

I've seen it in Britain, well documented, entire communities transformed from prosperity to destitution, unemployment.

We're discouraged from looking too closely at this, it is minimized, airbrushed out of the narrative, we just look the other way.

You haven't presented any alternatives, just complained. What would you do?

In the 1950 time frame there were close to 100,000 elevator operators in the U.S., in about a decade, that went to nearly zero as it became a rare niche position and most labor tracking tables had removed it as a job category as automated elevators eliminated the need for them. Should elevators still require a human to open and close the door, take requests from each passenger as to destination, control the speed and direction, and announce what is on each floor? There were major strikes by elevator workers in several large cities demanding just that.

Countless thousands of jobs as street sweepers were eliminated as automation replaced them with a single worker driving a specialized street sweeping truck.

In 1900, something like 40% of the U.S. work force worked in agriculture. Today is it under 2% yet they produce far more food thanks to technology.

Computers have eliminated jobs right and left across society.

Throughout much of the 1800's, many towns relied on harvesting natural ice from lakes, storing it in large ice houses, and shipping it around the world the throughout the year. Of course, they had such a global market because evil capitalists built ice ships to take that ice all around the world. Then along came more evil capitalists that used refrigeration to make ice locally, year round and despite the climate (which also made ice available to large portions of the world that couldn't be profitably reached by the ice traders) and within about a decade the natural ice trade disappeared and many of those small towns became ghost towns in short order.

Would YOU give up your refrigerator and freezer and buy ice delivered every few days to keep your food fresh in order to resurrect those jobs and towns? Or do you think it's possible that you, a non-venture capitalist and non-politician, might have benefited from those evil capitalists that sought to use a new technology to make money.