r/Economics • u/Puzzleheaded-King584 • 1d ago
News 'Slow-moving tsunami' - IMF warns AI could hit 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies
https://www.cityam.com/slow-moving-tsunami-imf-warns-ai-could-hit-60-per-cent-of-jobs-in-advanced-economies72
u/Ok-League-1106 1d ago
Its surprising how its never mentioned the consequences mass unemployment.
Ukraine took yandex off-line with a couple of scrappy drones. You really think the populace won't revolt and burn datacentres down if there's 20 - 30% unemployment.
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u/bdiddy_ 17h ago
"they" know. The US stock market is 50% of the world market because of our strong middle class that came about forever ago. A middle class that borrows to the hilt and feels comfortable with that is what makes billionaires. It's short sighted at the moment with AI, but when we erode the middle class to non existence it'll be bad news for the greater stock market. That'll lead to something. Not sure what, but when the us market starts to shrink it'll be a big deal.
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u/random-meme422 22h ago
Lot smarter people than you have thought about that, there’s a reason companies are still hiring juniors despite not really needing to.
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u/TrontRaznik 22h ago
Are you trying to imply that companies are hiring juniors to prevent social unrest? Because that 100% is not happening.
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u/random-meme422 22h ago
I’m trying to imply that the notion that AI is trusted enough to wipe everyone employee out is idiotic nonsense and disconnected from reality. And even when it does become exponentially more advanced than it is today humans will still have a comparative advantage since resources are not unlimited
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u/OnlyTwoThingsCertain 22h ago
Which companies? WHICH COMPANIES?!
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u/random-meme422 22h ago
Which aren’t is the better question. Any IB? Any big accounting firm? Any big law firm?
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u/OnlyTwoThingsCertain 18h ago
The whole tech apart from AI companies
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u/random-meme422 11h ago
What’s the unemployment rate in the tech sector? I see estimates ranging from 2.9% to 3.8%, meaningfully below national average.
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u/lurksAtDogs 1d ago
It’s not like we’re short of problems. The issue of jobs is that we’re busy doing things that make the most money, not necessarily what brings the most value to society. If millions of people get fired and the economy is now so fucking efficient at the previous work, could we:
- educate our children?
- provide great healthcare to everyone?
- restore superfund sites?
- eliminate invasive species?
- make safe roads?
- house everyone?
Surely there will be money for these things, since so much money was saved by the all super efficient AI, right?
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u/Old-Possession-4614 1d ago
We could have done many, maybe even all, of these things long before the current crop of AI tools came around. So I see no reason that AI will suddenly change things dramatically for the better.
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u/lurksAtDogs 1d ago
IMO, AI isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of power held by the population and the corrupt hoarding of the rich. If we solve this problem, AI is just another tool we use. If this problem continues, we could be heading towards a dystopian future
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u/Old-Possession-4614 1d ago
Yes exactly. And I think our odds are leaning more towards a dystopia right now.
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u/lurksAtDogs 1d ago
I agree, but when we talk about how to solve these problems we need to be clear that we’re talking about technology outcomes when we don’t have power. Not having fair political systems is what drives the underlying fear.
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u/ThimbleBluff 23h ago
A good example of this is Social Security and similar social insurance programs. In the US, it’s funded 50% by the employee and 50% by the employer, based on the amount of the payroll.
If you cut the number of employees by 60%, the funding for Social Security drops dramatically, even if you pay the remaining workers 10 or 20% more.
Our social systems just aren’t designed to share the benefits of productivity improvements across the population, either in the form of higher wages or broader social support systems like public healthcare, universal basic income, subsidized services, etc.
Instead, the gains are concentrated in the shareholder class. That might be sustainable in an environment of slow, incremental improvements, but not for a quantum leap in productivity.
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u/events_occur 49m ago
not for a quantum leap in productivity.
yeah, what happens in a quantum leap in productivity only realized by the elite is that they ascend to godhood, become completely detached from the world and institutions, while everyone else becomes unnecessary. The end state of the economy is like, 100 people controlling all wealth and technology, supported by robotics, while the rest of the population is culled. I genuinely believe many of the billionaire class want this. They view us as subhuman.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 1d ago
We fundamentally measure the economy wrong because we fucked up the fundamental definition of what the economy is and what it should be doing.
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u/Fxwriter 1d ago
Or the robber barons can build bunkers for when the mob comes for their head??
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u/Z3r0sama2017 16h ago
Why build bunkers when you can build AI killbots and just mow down the mob?
A killbot can be produced in a fraction of the time it takes for a human to become useful, so ultimately the mobs greatest strength, numbers, can be easily overcome by replacement rate.
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u/DetroitsGoingToWin 1d ago
Maybe, maybe they just attack us. It was a couple of years ago I saw a picture of Elon Musk kissing a robot that looked like a woman. I thought “that’s it, we’re cooked”. They don’t need humans anymore, we are just resource gobblers to them.
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u/Long-Emu-7870 1d ago
Wonder what the effect of the demand for goods are 60% of a certain population are no longer productive.
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u/Eastern-Ad-3586 6h ago
Where would the money come from if it’s all being hoarded by the 1%? They’ve never shared before.
It’s a legitimate question.
Edit: sorry I already see you’ve explained this further down. Ahem comrade ahem
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u/xxxxxfgggjiuy 17h ago
Yes yes yes. I’m saying this all time. We have so many unsolved problems in society., but it seems like we are only interested in using this resource to automate the things humans are currently paid to solve. We need to find a way to make it financially relevant to solve all the other stuff.
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u/mgbsoldier 1d ago
This assumes the theoretical money saved will become taxable revenue. Otherwise wed be depending on the benevolence of folks like Musk and Thiel i presume?
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u/Beekeeper-Core 18h ago
Surely there will be money for these things, since so much money was saved by the all super efficient AI, right?
Uhmm....... Yeah, we'll circle back to that after we have collapsed the economy! Put a pin in it while we lay of millions of people and collapse aggregate demand!
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u/Infinite-Ad4512 17h ago
They will be money for all these things, but that doesn’t mean the people who have the profits want to necessarily give it away
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u/events_occur 52m ago
Surely there will be money for these things, since so much money was saved by the all super efficient AI, right?
alas, 100% of that wealth will be captured by the .01%. The displaced white collar class can either choose to starve to death or be gunned down by drones, whichever is more comfortable for them
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u/LookAtTheSheen 1d ago
Tbf, the Sovereign AI models Labour have invested into since taking charge aim to support healthcare, education and construction.
This wave of AI is a recent phenomenon and it’s going to take a few years before these get used into public life. But we’re on the way.
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u/USSMarauder 1d ago
There are three possibilities for when AI takes away a significant number of jobs permanently (and new jobs created are also done by AI) leaving tens of millions of people not just unemployed, but unemployable
- Universal Basic Income
- Bloody revolution by the starving
- Government genocide of the 'welfare parasites'
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u/tMoneyMoney 1d ago
Two would probably lead to three, and I don’t see one ever happening or being financially sustainable. If there’s enough intelligent robots to replace most of the jobs, then the government is going to have an army of Terminator-style cyborgs to diffuse any uprising.
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u/JimroidZeus 23h ago
The thing no one is talking about is how our current socio-economic system does not have the tools and our electorate/electoral/political systems lack the will to do anything substantial to protect anyone from this massive _deflation of the value of intelligence_ as another commenter put it.
Another commenter mentioned mass unemployment historically ending regimes, but in this case it’s _global_. There is absolutely no precedent for what is currently happening.
It will likely take a massive upheaval of some sort to correct all of this once the AI dust settles. If it ever does settle and doesn’t end up in rampant acceleration and the ultimate demise of humanity.
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u/Motor-Cranberry-1092 23h ago
What's up with the underscores in your comment?
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u/JimroidZeus 23h ago
I guess I don’t have the formatting turned on properly on mobile. It’s meant to be italics/emphasis.
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u/Pyrostemplar 1d ago
The prediction in a 76 year old short story was 97%.
Instead of a utopia of fulfillment, the hyper-automated society leaves people feeling purposeless and obsolete.
Interesting times ahead, namely for taxation, income and governance. Shall we replace taxes with dividends from (partial?) public ownership? Does it make any difference?
I guess that countries with high per capita capital (and preferably low population base with good governance) will be alright. The others... well, interesting times ahead,
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u/ResetThePlayClock 1d ago
In less than a year we went from “haha it can’t count the R’s is strawberry!” to redefining how mathematics will be done forever. Thousands of incredibly intelligent people just had their life’s work pulled out from beneath them. And it’s just the start.
AI already does the hard parts of my job for me. No one at work feels safe or comforted. Everyone wants to get their bag before the whole thing collapses.
Our CEO released an internal memo saying how the goal was to “transition salaries into variable compute costs.”
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u/Pugsly007 1d ago
How will any of these companies make money if no one has a job to pay for that service?
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u/Quick-Quail-1683 1d ago
That’s not any individual company’s problem. As the economic value of intelligence converges to zero, the next step is robotics.
Realistically, the blue collar workers don’t have too much longer either.
One way or another the government is going to eventually have to step in
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u/Whatdosheepdreamof 1d ago
Surprised that we are in an economics sub yet no mention of a deflation cycle. You're likely to see corporate profits get crushed, that translates into stock prices. You're likely to see systemic collapse of the mortgage market and consumer spending before the collapse of work.
That will require fixing, so theyll do both at the same time.1
u/Beekeeper-Core 18h ago
I dont think you can policy your way out of what will effectively be a collapse of global banking and the collapse of the global economic, consumption-driven, economic system. Like, what is the policy fix for that?
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u/Whatdosheepdreamof 18h ago
Negative taxes. Deep mind have been releasing research papers on just this subject, because believe it or not, we are not original thinkers.
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u/Beekeeper-Core 15h ago
Okay, and the money for a negative tax scheme will come from where?
You will tax the companies using AI? What is stopping all companies from just moving to a tax haven when their workforce is entierly digital? The state has zero leverage over a company that is entierly viritual.
You tax the underlying infrastructure? Works fine... for like 2 countries in the world. No other country has the ability to tax, for example, tax data centers. What about the remaining 7 billion people?
You give up on taxes and start printing money to (functionally) create an UBI-scheme? Okay, what about hyperinflation? Sure, AI will likely be deflationary in nature, but it has a limit, and with that comes a limit to how much money you can print.
There are no silver bullets, even if the CEOs of silicon valley want to tell you otherwise.
The only real proposal I have seen that even remotely addresses the issue of taxation, which is the defining issue in the eyes of the state, is that you sell "rights to operate" in a specific country. I.e. facebook has to pay X amount of money in order to operate in Y country. Its not a perfect scheme, and it has a myriad of issues, but it could theoretically work.
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u/NextWeather7866 11h ago
https://deepmind.google/research/publications/260459/
- Corporate income tax and book minimum tax: Increasing taxes on corporate profits, supported by international minimum-tax arrangements intended to prevent companies shifting profits into tax havens.
- Offshore AI tariffs and base protection: Applying digital border adjustments, withholding taxes and import tariffs to AI services, cloud computing and models hosted overseas.
I'm curious as to what digital good you think can be sold for a profit if AI can just reverse engineer it?
The US and China are not the only countries that have data centres.
As the cost of goods and services sold approaches the cost of production; physical product is likely the only category here that is rooted in physical inputs. These goods are produced by local companies, and will still suffer local taxes, income and revenue.
In the example you provided; Facebook, the services that they sell are ads. I agree here that an internet services tax here is the only viable solution; and the EU have adopted just that.
What I don't agree with is that hyperinflation will occur in digital services. When we look at a simple demand curve, if Facebook increase prices; you'll just see them price themselves out of a market, allowing local competition to enter markets.
If we take the abstract notion of labor and intelligence becoming the cost of raw inputs; a physical workforce can be bought in the form of robots, and there is reason to think that production will just be moved on shore.
If you're serious about theoretically mapping out inflation in goods and services, I think I'd need more concrete examples than facebook, as it's likely that they'll accept eating their margins at the cost of eroding their ad base.Now as for your comment about taxation; negative taxes just replace welfare, because it is significantly easier to administer and lower cost to a state. So let's take a $20k distribution of negative tax at $0, that's how much you get if you do not have income. Then as you earn more, your taxes rise, just like todays progressive income taxes.
When we look to necessities, food, housing, water, energy, transport, healthcare. All of these goods and services are required by humans, and all of them are physical, they are the goods and services that are physically dependent on reality, and likely the only category to experience inflation.
Because they are locally produced and consumed, there is no reason they will not be taxed.
Furthermore when we look to digital infratstructure, who do you think owns the mag7? Hint, it's not solely Americans, and those profits flow back to pension funds, state funds.
The SOME physical datacentres are located in the US, but the chips required are produced by TSMC. The machines that produce the chips are produced in the EU.
In terms of AI; capabilities and knowledge are distillable; there is no moat.
Training AI is not magic; and the knowledge of the methods are being refined to a more rigorous science. Any state actor with the capital will be able to complete their own build out; especially once capacity in production of chips and memory (which I remind you, is dependent on international trade) expands and contraction from AI players occurs.
Again, to actually have the debate here over which goods and services you think will experience hyperinflation, I need you to outline it, so we can nut it out.
This is an economics sub, and I think we're both interested in mapping out exactly where hyper inflation would occur, rather than sticking to a specific worldview. We have not seen an example in history where a company has broadly managed to capture a market, and refused to provide goods and services because they own the means of production. So it'd be very interesting if you could provide even a theoretical one.2
u/Tulaodinho 18h ago
That is exactly my outlook. The job market won't ever generate new jobs as fast as these companies wanna fire everyone for AI to do their jobs. Then, how do people pay for their homes and common expenses? What are the ramifications of this? Its a domino effect that will have a crushing effect in EVERY single sector. It could actually be the big crash starting point
The big mistake of these dumb companies, imo, is firing everyone to save a few salaries, instead of training people to deliver and improve their products faster and faster with the AI tools capabilities. So many dumb people are in decision making positions....
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u/Beekeeper-Core 15h ago
Yeah, we are completely aligned in thought here.
The problem is that it's a collective problem. Companies are individually incentivized to lay off as many people as possible. On the micro level, it has very little effect. On the aggregate level, once every company does it, we are talking about a collapse in aggregate demand that will make the great depression look like a walk in the park.
I dont know how you policy your way out of that. Are you going to ban corporations from laying people off? Cool, then they all move to Saint Kits & Nevis or something. You're going to tax the data centers? What happens when two people, a drone and a dream decide to take an entire data center out?
I fail to see a policy solution to this. Its going to be the Jonestown of... capitalism.
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u/Old-Possession-4614 1d ago
I wouldn’t say “blue collar workers don’t have too much longer” - there are lots of things that robots aren’t anywhere close to doing well, and just because we have LLMs today doesn’t mean we’ll have humanoid robots that are just as flexible, dexterous and adaptable within a few years.
Yes I’ve seen the videos of the Boston Dynamics robots and the robot war competitions etc but those are still a long ways off from what a plumber or electrician or construction worker can do today.
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u/USSMarauder 1d ago
Except that demand for trades will drop as construction dries up because people can't afford houses
And wages will drop as people flood into the trades. Expect it to drop to a minimum wage job, and then even lower
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u/Old-Possession-4614 21h ago
Yes, I think this is a much more likely outcome before robots truly come for blue collar work.
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u/jussyjus 1d ago
I feel like any day now there’s going to be one massive leap forward with robotics and it’s gonna feel like “welp”
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
robotics
Unfortunately it's pretty hard to make a robot that can move and talk and manipulate objects for less than it costs to raise a human
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u/endeend8 1d ago
Chinas manufacturing industry - challenge accepted
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
Look I'm basically a Chinese shill at this point but the humanoid robot thing is looking like a crazy boondoggle.
That said they are making and installing tons of actually useful industrial robots and machines, just specifically humanoid robots are pretty pointless.
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u/Aliboeali 23h ago
Wait for AI to enable itself to create its own robot design for the task. Let all lidar camera’s and IOT devices connect and gather intelligence for the collective of agents working the construction projects…
The blueprint is there imo.
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u/Iron-Fist 18h ago
AI design its own robot
It literally cant. It doesn't have objectives that aren't given to it.
All lidar cameras and IOT
There isn't enough compute in your toaster to run an LLM, surprisingly.
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u/Pugsly007 1d ago
Why? That would be socialism.
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u/Quick-Quail-1683 1d ago
Because there’s no real alternative, when you have mass unemployment, that has historically never ended well for any regime
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u/jayfeather31 1d ago
Self-preservation would be my first thought. Many a regime has fallen simply because the government couldn't keep their people fed.
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u/TheTimberFactory 1d ago
Exactly this.
This is why I theorize that self farming is going to become more and more common. Those are are absolutely self sufficient in a post AI world, where job losses are massive, will be the ones standing.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
How will any of these companies make money when no one is actually paying for AI services in the first place
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u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 1d ago
thank 👏🏽 you 👏🏽 the rampant arrogance i see in software subs is truly mind boggling
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u/TrontRaznik 22h ago
I have to wonder who those people actually are. I haven't written a line of code in a year and I have pushed so many features in that time. Way more than the year before. And the code is good quality, at times better than I would have written.
I don't understand how I can continue to make six figures in software. I am just lucky that my main client is a legacy organization that probably isn't going to migrate to a new and cheaper dev team anytime soon. But plenty of smaller agencies are going under right now.
So who are these jabronis in the software subs thinking that AI is shit? They can't possibly be using it.
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u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 22h ago
thank you!! same! i haven’t had to write any code at all in years about a year
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u/ThatNewspaperDude 1d ago
My Brother in law went from making fun of AI and workers to desperately trying to route all software decision making for his company through him.
Even then he doesn’t think he’ll have a job in 2 years.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
We've actually gone from "it can't count Rs in strawberry" to "it still can't count Rs in strawberries because it is incapable of understanding the concept of counting but now when scientists do anything it can steal their work and present it at its own."
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u/ResetThePlayClock 1d ago
You’re like 3 months late with this take. My entire job is working with frontier models all day long, 50+ hours a week. I’m a machine learning engineer in fintech.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
Then you should know the limitations of machine learning.
You also should know that growth is destined to slow to a crawl as available training data gets eaten and people are less impressed by the low hanging fruit.
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u/ResetThePlayClock 1d ago
I’m actually not even sure what you mean. What is “growth” in this context? What does “training data getting eaten” mean?
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
^ this is called "semantic bait" and you should never take it. Instead, just link an article for them to read.
https://fortune.com/2026/10/11/innovation-paradox-ai-productivity-ming-lu/
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u/ResetThePlayClock 1d ago
This article doesn’t mention training data. It talks about productivity growth? Is that what you were talking about? From your question I assumed model performance, but we don’t describe it as “growth” it’s just “performance”. So straight up, I have no idea what you’re talking about.
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u/maria_la_guerta 1d ago
I don't think this guy knows what he's saying either.
I'm a software dev at a FAANG company, also use frontier models 50 or so hours a week. You are correct.
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u/WheresTheSauce 1d ago
You are clearly not paying any attention if you think it's "stealing scientists work and presenting it as its own". It is solving math problems which have had bounties on them for decades.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
Didn't solve it, literally just made a very rough model of math humans wrote a paper for. So bad that openai didn't even try to claim the prize.
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u/pyordie 1d ago
It can if it’s taught to. This was simply a gap between tokenization technology and being able to see the whole word. Its hard coded around now.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
Yeah it's hard coded around because it's literally incapable of understanding what a question is asking for
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u/BlueRoller 6h ago
Everyone wants to get their bag before the whole thing collapses.
What does that bag even do for you in this future though? That's what I struggle with. Sure I could potentially retire early in a few years but I thought I was doing that based on a value of money that I don't know will exist in a decade.
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u/events_occur 45m ago
Meanwhile the effete left refuses to take AI risk seriously, burning their heads in the sand and dismissing any AI doom argument as "marketing." They are so negatively polarized against tech that they refuse to even engage with the matter at and, because anyone who understands how these systems works can see how existentially dangerous they are.
AI denialism is the new climate denialism. Except this time both the left and the right are in on it. There is nobody at the wheel and no meaningful resistance.
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u/madeapizza 1d ago
What a shit headline. I was literally in the room Monday at the IMF meetings in Bangkok when the IMF director said this. She was still incredibly bullish on AI in the long term due to localized and specific AI use cases (described as “small AI”) but noted the 60% figure discussing the quick change in economies during the transition. Both the World Bank head and IMF Director were touting the uses of AI hence the name of the panel they spoke on - “Small AI:More and Better Jobs.”
This website and subreddit are just doomers and LARPers.
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u/TrainingJellyfish643 14h ago
Glad to see not everyone in this subreddit has AI psychosis... theres gotta be a lot of bots flooding the field too. Drink once for every "im a software engineer and i use ai a lot at my job" post and youd be unconscious in 5 minutes
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u/thirdeyepdx 5m ago edited 2m ago
I just completed a mandatory Ai training as a UX designer at my publicly traded tech company. I use Claude for everything now. Barely use Figma or design software - I just build coded prototypes. It’s awesome. I don’t have to pay attention in meetings all my meeting transcripts are searchable and I can ask questions about them. I build automations for everything I hate doing. Hell I was getting carpal tunnel from moving my mouse around and now I just type on the command line for most things. I don’t feel like my job is threatened at all unless I just stubbornly refused to learn how to use AI. All the good parts of my job - having taste, and discernment, having a solid strategic vision, knowing what ideas to build, having to create organizational excitement to get resources to build things etc - none of that feels remotely touchable by AI rn. My mind was always the thing keeping me employed and now I just have everything I do happening faster on steroids. I can bring ideas to life faster at a higher fidelity and help the dumb dumb MBAs and sales douchebags understand what I’m talking about sooner. It’s made my job fun and exciting again. What I do think will happen is a bunch of idiots who think they know better than me will make shit apps and websites with Claude and such and think they don’t need me as much. All their shit will predictably fail because they have no idea what’s good or not. And then they will pay me my freelance rate to fix their garbage, or everyone else will still remain too lazy to be bothered to build their own shit no matter how easy the tool is to use, because tech executives are the laziest people I’ve ever met.
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u/Eastern-Ad-3586 6h ago
But none of these people ever mention what jobs they will be……..
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u/madeapizza 5h ago
They discussed skilled labor, healthcare, local agriculture, tourism and hospitality, and financial services. Pretty much jobs that are in demand, especially in emerging markets, that can’t necessarily be fully automated.
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u/Eastern-Ad-3586 4h ago
There’s no way there will be enough tourism and plumber jobs for the entire white collar workforce dude.
I’m not a doomer but if this technology truly is capable of what experts are claiming it will be, it merits a serious consideration of how society is structured. Everyone won’t be able to “just get a job” and be OK
I mean, I’m someone who thinks we should do a better job of caring for the less fortunate right now, and we don’t. That’s part of the reason why I’m pessimistic about the future.
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u/madeapizza 3h ago
I like how you skipped right past skilled labor and healthcare the two fastest growing sectors.
Re: your second point. Much of the data that’s come out in the economics of AI - including the reports from the IMF - show AI will have a greater positive impact on the global poor rather than white collar workers in developed countries.
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u/Eastern-Ad-3586 2h ago edited 2h ago
I wasn’t trying to be disingenuous, I consider plumbers to be skilled labor (I thought plumbing and electrical work fit that term but forgive me if I’m confused)
I have mixed feelings about healthcare and struggle to imagine how AI will lead to job growth. I’m a physician in the US. I could see us needing same number of, say, nurses, but I don’t see how AI will increase the need for something like a nurse. The boomers aging will indeed increase the number of hands-on healthcare workers needed but that has nothing to do with AI.
I certainly don’t think AI is going to increase the number of physicians needed. Frankly I’m concerned in the US the powers that be will simply do away with non-surgeons in order to increase profits at the expense of patient care. That’s what basically every business decision in US healthcare has boiled down to in the past 20 years or so, profits > people.
I think that AI can be used to uplift the poor. But we have plenty of resources to uplift the global poor right now, and aside from some charitable organizations we just aren’t doing it. Global health is in crisis right now with the USAID cuts. AI could certainly be used as a tool for good but again, that’s a choice that those who control the technology have to make, and our society seems to not really value that.
Edit: I’m not trying to insult you I promise. And I honestly would love to hear a reasonable argument about why the future isn’t so damn bleak. But so far the only argument I’ve heard relies on historical technological innovations that A) I don’t think apply to something that automates human cognition and B) even if the optimist arguments about new job creation are true, we’re living in the transition period, which will almost certainly be horrible for us if you look at previous technological revolutions.
Plus even if the AI optimism argument is true (superabundance), we’d basically be fully socialist at that point anyway. I can’t think of a time in history where that has gone well for the proletariat.
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u/LooseAd7981 1d ago
If people have no money they aren’t purchasing and companies can’t make money. No market, no economy and no one is able to pay for AI anyways. CEOs will kill their golden goose by trying to eliminate labor. Labor value drives the market, not capital.
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u/-6h0st- 18h ago
Congrats to all the ignorant chaps who were claiming this ain’t happening a few months back.
We need policy change asap - let me share my thoughts.
Some researchers propose a tax on employers exercising mass layoffs. I believe such a tax on mass layoffs would slow displacement but not stop it, when an employee leaves the role, it can simply be filled by AI, so job creation ends without a single layoff. A better alternative might be to restrict automated agentic AI workloads in the private sector, with exceptions for scientific and medical research. Anything not advancing technology that improves lives should be limited to augmented use, where a human supplies the input and takes the output. I recognise the difficulties: defining "agentic" precisely, enforcing it, and competition from countries that don't follow.
Universal income is often proposed as the answer, but I see a funding problem. Taxing companies for their use of AI in every jurisdiction where it is used runs into the same difficulty we already see with taxing large tech companies for services: value is booked wherever the tax is lowest. A UBI that depends on that revenue looks fragile.
There is also a wider concern. If the economy no longer needs human labour, the bargaining power of ordinary people shifts dramatically. One possible future is growing inequality and resentment, with those who own the technology holding the means to manage unrest rather than address its causes. It is only one possible future, but it deserves to be taken seriously while there is still time to choose another.
That is why more voices from the scientific community are needed on this, and soon. Governments tend to act only once a problem is already visible and this is one we cannot afford to wait on. Public awareness has to come before policy, so act now OUR combined voice will be heard far more readily.
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u/Beekeeper-Core 18h ago
You're not going to policy your way out of the collapse of the global economic system, dawg. Just enjoy life while you can.
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u/PeachScary413 17h ago
How about instead of slowing down human progress and forcing people to do menial tasks 9 hours a day 5 days a week... we just let them take 2 days off?
Capitalism is obviously broken and we are not optimising for human prosperity/happiness/progress but rather for line to go up on stock price.
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u/Putrid-Issue-420 15h ago
There still need to be a system to channel humanity innate self-interest. I am not a huge fan of capitalism but one thing it does better than any competing systems is compelling selfishness into socially productive outcomes. Not a perfect system by any means with environmental issues, abuses and exploitation.
What comes after capitalism might not be utopia like star trek if you look at current trajectory of centralisation of information and monopoly of violence by fewer actors even more exacerbated by AI controlled weapons which are certainly not aligned with economically useless middle and lower classes. Be careful what you wish for
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u/PeachScary413 14h ago
I wish for the "useless" middle and lower classes to suddenly realise that we are the 99% and they are the 1%. It's much easier to get rid of 1% than the remaining 99% if you know what I mean, obviously not advocating for violence in any way I'm talking peaceful protests in Minecraft.
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u/Infinite-Ad4512 17h ago
So you’re saying if a company becomes more efficient by the use of AI, they should be punished vs companies that just hold onto staff just so they ding get taxed?
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u/-6h0st- 15h ago
I haven’t said that. Give it another try perhaps.
I’m saying - no to agentic workloads which can and will replace jobs. People will get much more efficient this way whilst jobs are protected. Vs the alternative let it all burn in the name of upmost efficiency? This won’t work as who will be buying from those businesses if all are replaced by AI? Whole economy would collapse. At the same time without any regulation like that this is where we are going as no ceo will say no to AI job replacement when competition can do it and have an edge.1
u/Ketaskooter 12h ago
A first step to discourage mass layoffs would be to shift all the labor taxes to business taxes for non government, subtraction-method VAT/business transfer tax ideally only to other domestic companies. This would lower the direct cost of labor by about 8% for federal and more if all the states would do so as well, the employee paid taxes to social security and medicare could be shifted as well which would lower the cost of labor another 7.65%. Doing this relatively simple change would at least prevent social security and medicare from experiencing collapsing revenues if mass layoffs due to technology occurred.
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u/Jazzlike-Analysis-62 7h ago
This ain't happening. We are peak hype.
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u/-6h0st- 7h ago
So you’re joining chaos who thought that months ago now… yeah IMF is wasting time on fud. Man, it’s already happening- the entry jobs for graduates are already dry.
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u/Jazzlike-Analysis-62 7h ago
Yes they are dry now, they won't be forever.
I am using AI daily. It creates slop but with a veneer of credibility. You can live with slop for quite some time before it becomes a problem.
Beyond that I will retire at some point (or drop death before that). I need to be replaced, like many other workers.
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 1d ago
I feel like the only one that doesn't think AI's going to kill all of the jobs.
For example, I'm in IT. AI could absolutely tell people initial troubleshooting steps... but if the device is broken, the AI can't fix it. If the internet's out, the AI won't be able to connect to check the router. If an employee just doesn't understand how computers work, the AI won't be of any use to them.
I refuse to believe that 60% of jobs are magically going to go away because of this. Folks have spent billions of dollars trying to automate taxis and delivery bots and they're still in testing. People are so much more valuable than their employers want them to think they are. If the jobs go away, it's because of the braindead nepo-baby CEOs that wouldn't even qualify working as a crash test dummy.
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u/caffiend98 1d ago
"If the jobs go away, it's because of the braindead nepo-baby CEOs"
Yes, that's a big part of why people are so anxious. Many - most? - CEOs are short-sighted, borderline delusional, and fully narcissistic. Braindead nepo baby is pretty accurate. They're not looking further than the next couple earnings calls and ensuring they hit their bonus target.
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u/Revolutionary_Egg961 1d ago
They just laid off almost the entire I.T dep at the hospital my wife works, and claimed they replaced most them with A.I.
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u/sloppylavasyndrome 1d ago
which one? cant hurt to shed some light on this.
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u/Revolutionary_Egg961 1d ago
Memorial in south bend indiana. Its part of beacon health systems.
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u/TrainingJellyfish643 14h ago
Woah youre telling me a private Healthcare company in the USA made a decision that was shortsighted and degrades the quality of their service in the pursuit of profit??? My mind is blown, they never do that
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u/Polite_Bark 16h ago
My friend was told the same thing, but then it came to light the AI was "Actually, Indians."
They didn't replace the department with AI bots, they offshored and were trying to protect their image by claiming AI.
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u/Immediate_Pie_3069 17h ago
Agreed. The AI job apocalypse is definitely overblown. I say that as someone that works in the industrial automation field.
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u/Serious-Conversation 14h ago
But those types of IT jobs are typically lower on the totem pole and not as well paid.
I'm also in IT. The times where I need to be physically onsite to do something with equipment, etc., are vanishingly rare.
I'm going in to the office to train a guy tomorrow. He's clearly struggling with doing it remotely via Teams, so it's going to be much more efficient for me to be onsite with him.
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 14h ago
I think that a lot of IT can be done remotely, but I absolutely don't think AI's going to be able to do all of it.
With all of the security issues we've seen from folks running OpenClaw and Hermes and watching their systems get compromised, are we really going to give them Administrator access and get bullied into giving unauthorized people access to apps/programs they shouldn't have? Are we going to just let them communicate with vendors and upgrade the subscription to "fix an issue?" Are we really giving them access to sensitive PII (I worked at a credit union) and then get shocked when they "adjust" the accounts to handle a financial discrepancy? When the AI's troubleshooting steps don't resolve an issue and keep someone in a loop, at what point will people have to step in like you're doing and go onsite to assist the end user?
I've used AI in my job when I'm stumped on a troubleshooting issue. Sometimes, it works great and gives me the exact solution I was looking for. Other times, it doesn't even get close to the actual answer and gets stuck in a loop.
There are so many edge cases that AI will not be able to effectively navigate without opening up a great deal of vulnerabilities and issues. At best I could see it providing initial troubleshooting steps for users (if they bother to use the ticketing system and not just call/text/message me directly), but I wouldn't go farther than that.
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u/tMoneyMoney 1d ago
They might replace jobs, but they also might create new ones. It’s going to take a lot of trial and error, or catastrophic mistakes to realize human checks and balances are needed, and where. Best case scenario we become the AI managers and provide the guardrails and inputs to make them to do the grunt work nobody liked doing anyway. We already know worst case. Hopefully we get real leadership soon to make it best case scenario.
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u/DwarfFart 1d ago
From my own personal experiences the problem with new jobs is that there isn’t a whole lot of resources to train people up! I was in the workforce program twice and nobody ever offered me any kind of training or certifications…it was a very frustrating experience
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u/OutsideMenu6973 1d ago
Am I dumb? Or are you definitely able to let an agent SSH into switches and routers? Even if the whole site was down you could jump onto 5G or satellite and have it muck around the network to find root cause?
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 18h ago
At my job I’ve had to replace routers by copying the current settings onto the new one, manually install it on the rack, then reconnect wires and troubleshoot potential issues.
An AI agent SSH’ing off my mobile phone won’t be able to do most of that. Beyond the physical stuff, you wouldn’t want a brand new router with no configurations connected to the internet, even if it’s not doing anything.
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u/che-che-chester 1d ago
I get the skepticism, but I disagree.
Some people love to point out all the things AI struggles with or can't do. Yes, AI can't physically plug a crossover cable into a router. But an entry-level PC monkey can, and then let AI take over the troubleshooting. That's a minor hiccup, not future job security for senior network engineers.
AI is not great at many types of tasks. It is not so much replacing entire jobs as replacing parts of jobs. If 100 employees do the same type of back office work and AI can do 30% of their work, the company is not going to fire 30% of them. But they may stop replacing those employees as they leave. And that trend could increase as AI can eventually do 40 or 50% of their work. That is already happening.
But I would point out that AI as we know it today is still in its infancy. I just asked ChatGPT for a timeline of AI adoption and it gave 2022 as "early adopters", 2023 as "mainstream awareness" and 2025 as the "inflection point". So, we're talking ~4 years and it has already had an impact on the workforce, albeit overstated by the media IMHO.
I think robotaxis are a bad example. Yes, we're nowhere near where they predicted in the early days of self-driving cars. It seems like from day one it was we're "a few years away". It's only been about a decade into serious attempts at robotaxis and today you can summon a driverless car in many major cities. It's a far stretch from "a few years away" but still impressive.
I was just with my buddy in his Tesla and he drove us home on a variety of road types and never touched the steering wheel. And that is in a car that a middle class person can afford. You would have a hard time convincing me driverless cars should not be a concern in the foreseeable future.
Do I think the AI doom stories are premature? Yes. But the only part I question is the timeline. It's a matter of when, not if. It might not be for 20 years, but that is still not great news for someone in high school right now.
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u/bb70red 16h ago
I just built a custom version of an app I use daily and cancelled my subscription. I made a report on my job that would take me days by hand, but it's rather good and took minutes. I have ten colleagues doing the same thing. I created a monitoring tool for certain news I need to follow that gives me in in depth overview weekly and will save me a few hours of browsing. I created an application that works around a bug in one of my devices that I was waiting for the manufacturer to fix. I have meetings with almost instant meeting notes.
And that all in one week. A year ago all of this wasn't quite working. A year from now and it'll be accessible to everyone. Our team can probably be halved and we will still do more. And that's in a specialist and knowledge intensive line of work.
I probably don't need most apps I'm now playing for. My organization probably doesn't need most applications their paying for.
People will stay people and will find work. But the coming years a lot of people will have a rough ride.
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u/Cheese_Mudflap 1d ago
Well put
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u/che-che-chester 12h ago
None of us can predict the future, but IMHO they're upvoting the post I replied to because they want it to be true. And honestly? I do too. I wish AI would stay where it is right now, but it won't. I think it will replace many jobs, only not as soon as often predicted.
I'm old enough that I'm maybe 85% confident I can make it to retirement. But I wouldn't want to be much younger. And I tell my nephew in college that he should aggressively fund his 401K the day he gets his first job.
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u/quellofool 1d ago
Waymo is definitely not “in testing” they are taking sizable market share away from uber/lyft/taxis.
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u/howtoliveplease 10h ago
Aren’t you just assuming that the capabilities we have today are the same ones we’ll have tomorrow?
I think you need to look a little more into the future and base your assumption on the rapid improvement of the tools over the last 4 years
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 7h ago
No offense, but thinking 4 years from now AI’s going to take my job or even 60% of the jobs reads to me like thinking the Jetsons flying cars are 4 years away.
All of the previous “AI will take over jobs” have failed to manifest, I see no reason to believe that this prediction will hold true either.
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u/howtoliveplease 5h ago
I understand not wanting to buy into hyperbole, but just from seeing what it has been able to achieve in my own role leads me to disagree. If the bubble doesn’t pop, technological advancement occurs to make it cheaper, among other unthought of scientific advancement occurs… I just can’t agree with you, friend
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 53m ago
You’re selling yourself insanely short if you think it’s gonna take over your job in a few years. It’s built on private credit debt, costs millions and billions to actually run, and you would still need people to verify the “advancements” aren’t simply hallucinations.
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u/kodbuse 1d ago
lol, I’m a software engineer and AI can absolutely do the things you said. For example it fixed an internet issue for me by identifying a bad switch.
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 18h ago
Congratulations, it identified a bad switch.
How did the AI fix the switch? Did it require someone physically do anything? Did you have to get and install a new one?
I use AI occasionally to help with troubleshooting, but there’s actually a lot of things AI can’t do that are incredibly basic.
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u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 1d ago
you bring up the most edgy of edge cases. How many white-collar workers don’t understand how to use computers at all? like 2?
yes people have spent billions to automate certain things but AI has had trillions and that’s not counting all the time/effort going into robotics
don’t be naive
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u/BlaxicanXIX 1d ago
How many white-collar workers don’t understand how to use computers at all?
You've never IT a day in your life and it shows
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 20h ago
One thing I can tell you right now - if a person sees that 50% of his department is fired. He will start learning AI and computers like his life depends on it. Add to that LLMs that can guide him and all the sudden he can put the round cable into the round hole and square cable into the square hole.
Most people stop learning because system does not force them, not because they can not. Also lets be honest - tech support dose one thing - runs a bunch of scripts and apps, reads the conclusions and sets some settings. Not a big deal to automate that.
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u/Remote-Astronomer701 21h ago
Agreed with this. Joe wants his printer fixed but doesn’t want to fix it himself. ChatGPT will provide suggestions on how to fix Joe’s printer but won’t fix it (at least for now).
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u/OutsideMenu6973 14h ago
In the kingdom of AI there will be no giving or taking of print jobs, only Venmo
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 20h ago
The reason you file like that is because :
1) You are not tracking advancements of physical AI (aka robotics).
2) You undervalue the speed of change. Let me remind you that AI is about 3 years old (1.5 or so if we are talking about truly capable models).
3) You completely disregard the possibility of iterative self improvement.
4) Autonomous Taxis do work and do millions of miles and hundreds of thousands of rides. They did not work just few years ago.At the moment we did not had the "chat gpt" moment of robotics. Once we have it, billions upon billions will go into that area. That moment can happen in just few years.
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u/Infernex87 14h ago
Just a few years? This tech is so old. AI is not a specific technology - it is an aggregation of many different technologies applied together. ML models, OCR, Vector Databases, Harnesses, Loop Engineering, etc. LLMs just got to a state in the past year that - generally - they could be interacted with at a fundamental level. Smaller models have existed for decades.
LLMs as an underlying technology can never remove hallucinations, and the are the crux of the current craze. Honestly the value lies more in smaller models and ML models. The value we see in cars, in classification, etc. frontier llm is running into a wall when fundamentally all you are doing is summarizing and regurgitating text.
I’m interested in seeing where on device probabilistic surfacing models end up. Think Jev but running on a device and not on a nebulous server. That’s where shit will go crazy. Llms are finally getting to the point where on device or organizationally hosted models can be good enough for most tasks, and used as a tool by someone that knows what their doing they are incredibly powerful. That future I can’t wait for - but we may be a few years out before the ‘it’s gonna remove all human thinking’ bros get their financial shit pounded in before we see it.
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 14h ago
Well I would argue that most jobs never create anything new, and do rather repetitive work. Take layers, medics, software developers. Vast majority of them just recycle same things. Only a very small part of population invent something new. It almost never happens. Most of research is just educated guessing until something sticks.
I still going to argue that its 4 years old. AI development is a bit of a continuum, about 4 years ago we hit a point where AI become easy enough to use for untrained person. If we use your analogy, when nothing has a date. Car is sum of its part, and its parts are sum of its subparts and some of those date back hundreds of years.
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u/stillyoinkgasp 1d ago
Denial is a part of the grieving process :)
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 18h ago
You really think the AI’s going to climb a ladder to swap broken cameras or physically install new servers and routers on a server rack like I do?
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u/stillyoinkgasp 16h ago
In a couple of years, you betcha
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 15h ago
Oh please. AI couldn’t even take McDonald’s orders or keep Starbucks stock. I don’t believe for a single second we’re a “couple of years” from fully autonomous robots that can do my job.
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u/stillyoinkgasp 15h ago
Down vote away bud. You are allowed to be confidently incorrect.
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 15h ago
Will do, you do the same.
AI taking all the jobs is the “in the future we’ll have flying cars” for this generation.
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u/stillyoinkgasp 15h ago
Only AI job loss is already taking place (and accelerating). You can shout "oh please" from the rooftops, but it won't change the inevitable displacement that's coming for you, me, and most others.
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u/Plus-Glove-4850 15h ago
I'm not accepting your AI doomer nonsense. If you think you're replaceable, you probably are. I know I'm not. There's been so many examples of AI failing to complete basic tasks properly, and people at the absolute cutting edge can't even decide if AI's going to take all the jobs or add tons of jobs.
You're not as easily replaceable as you think, and neither am I.
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u/stillyoinkgasp 15h ago
You're looking backward instead of what is happening at the edge. It's natural, but not reflective of reality.
Being able to climb a ladder is not a moat.
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u/Aliboeali 23h ago
It’s a futuristic take but: Elon has starlink, the internet problem is solved. AI will act as agentic swarm intelligence and chips put into humanoid robots (also Elon’s product) and could act without an internet connection. (Drones with fiber optic cables flying in Ukraine for locations without connectivity) AI finding its own solutions to problems in the world it faces just like im currently proposing but 100x as efficient.
What’s stopping it?
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u/Ordinary_Chance2606 14h ago
As someone attempting a career switch at age 34 (biology to accounting), it’s reading a comment section like this that makes me lose all hope and motivation for the future. Like I feel as I might as well just quit life, move back in with my parents, and rot in bed until complete societal collapse happens.
I mean like you realize the only way out of this, and that’s even a BIG maybe, is bloody violent revolution don’t you? UBI is a pipe dream and a post scarcity economy where everyone gets everything they want is literally impossible.
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u/oooshi 12h ago
The fact that we haven’t given science and engineering the military treatment in terms of domestic investment in combating climate change, and adapting for the future as a united front. Creating countless jobs and developing new industries to power us to the future. Makes me think that billionaires see the future as incompatible with their existence and they are willing to sell us all out for their remaining lifetimes being comfortable, even at the expense of the grandchildren and heirs.
We could have a future, we have already solved so many of the problems that once hindered us with food cultivation. We could continue to learn and grow and adapt together but own wealth hoarding politicians send our men to war and bomb children instead.
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u/Eastern-Ad-3586 6h ago
I know brother but what else can you do? Learning a skill you’re passionate about is better than laying around.
If nothing else you’ll be more useful in the e revolution.
And hey, maybe the AI doomers will be wrong after all
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u/thortgot 12h ago
Accounting is very susceptible to automation. Biology is significantly less.
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u/Ordinary_Chance2606 11h ago
Biology also pays complete shit and there’s no upward mobility without a PhD (which I don’t have the brain to get), and even then you are most likely going to be paid complete shit
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u/vordan 22h ago
That's the price of technological revolutions, we're right in the middle of one.
Steam engines, weaving looms, trains, cars, electricity, computers - humanity has always paid a price for moving forward. Jobs disappeared, replaced by new ones, and we adapted...
But, this time it's different. We always thought our brains were irreplaceable. We even wrote sci-fi stories about machines that could think.
And then... here we are. Building machines that might outthink us.
What's left for us this time?
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u/random-meme422 22h ago
For a sub titled economics it does sometimes surprise me how basic concepts like comparative advantage are entirely lost on people in the comments.
AI doomsaying has been going on for years now. And despite lehigh layoffs the unemployment rate remains low. Odd.
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