Capitalism will die - but will it take us with it?

Delivery

Amazon has invented a drone (archive) (MozArchive) that can carry a product with a weight of less than 2.6 KG directly to a customer. This has some problems for now, like needing a certain weather and obviously the limited weight, but it will get better.

Restaurant service

Pizza Hut debuts a robot waiter (archive) (MozArchive) - Guests are greeted by the two 80cm robots (both named Casper) at the door. The guest’s table number appears on their screen and one of them will lead the diner to their seat..

Making burgers

A robot can make 400 burgers per hour (archive) (MozArchive) - "The robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, assemble, and bag the burger without any help from humans.".

Bartending

A robotic barista is now serving — really fast (archive) (MozArchive) - The first robotic barista in the U.S., nicknamed "Gordon," started serving up to 120 coffee drinks an hour Jan. 30.

Factory work

Chinese factory replaces 90% of human workers with robots (archive) (MozArchive) - While the factory used to be run by 650 employees, only 60 of those people still work at the factory and their primary job is to make sure the machines are running properly.

Fruit picking

A FRUIT-picking robot that could replace human pickers has been developed. (archive) (MozArchive) - The robots are able to pluck more than 25,000 raspberries per day while human workers manage around 15,000 in an eight-hour shift.

Nursing

Robot nurse finds vein and takes blood. 2024 version - Nvidia's new AI nurses treat patients for $9 an hour. Here's what they can do, from colonoscopy screenings to loneliness companionship (archive) (MozArchive); it is so good that According to Gizmodo, over 40 healthcare companies are already testing the technology.

Taxi driving

World first as Singapore tests self-driving taxis (archive) (MozArchive) - The technology allows select Singapore residents to use NuTonomy’s ride-hailing smartphone app to book a ride in self-driving cars – at no cost..

Teaching

The rise of the robot (archive) (MozArchive) - Saya had been teaching for seven years. Her impressive but short CV included stints in a few rural areas, overseas and as a substitute teacher. Not bad for someone only seven years into the role. The difference is Saya is a remote controlled robot who taught her first class of 10-year olds in 2009.

News writing

Your days could be numbered if you're a sports writer (archive) (MozArchive) - This AI reporter is capable of analyzing data from the games, pulling out the most important highlights to formulate well-constructed and informative stories. UPDATE January 2023: now CNET is using AI to write its stories (MozArchive), even financial advice. You know all the big sites that drop 15 seemingly factory produced news pieces every day? Soon they will all be AI-generated, and we're not prepared. Hey, when's the time for AI fact checkers? Those look suspiciously robotic to me. Maybe they're already here :D.

Line judging

In tennis, an automatic line calling system has replaced (archive) (MozArchive) the line judges (in one tournament so far - but will surely extend to others) - Matches will be officiated with only a chair umpire, as Hawk-Eye will be making in-play calls.. And the players like it: https://www.reuters.com/article/tennis-nextgen-hawkeye-idINKBN1D72YA (archive) (MozArchive) - “I think for now live Hawk-Eye is a good thing”; “It was very fast,” he said. “It doesn’t make mistakes. I really liked it. In every other sport there are innovations, and this thing without line judges makes it more fair, I would say.”, so it's unlikely to disappear.

Football judging

Something similar is happening in football (archive) (MozArchive). The Premier League is using goal-line technology (which automatically detects if there was a goal or not) since 2013 - "I'm absolutely confident of its accuracy, 100 per cent. It's quick, which again is very important. That decision needs to be an instant decision. It will be less than a second.". If football goes the tennis way, it will also use the automatic out detection, and referees will be just for fouls.

Military

Robotic mules are already being tested (archive) (MozArchive) - These guys go through pretty rough terrain, all weather conditions. Fighter robots are also being developed (archive) (MozArchive) - the droid is designed "to replace the person in the battle or in emergency areas where there is a risk of explosion, fire, high background radiation, or other conditions harmful to humans.

Voice acting

Perhaps you have heard about the recent strike (archive) (MozArchive) of voice actors whose union could not iron out contract terms related to artificial intelligence. Well, what if they do iron out these contract terms? What's supposed to be the good ending here? The VAs want meaningful AI protections that include requiring consent and fair compensation to all performers working under the IMA (Interactive Media Agreement). Even now I can tell you exactly how this is going to go. A voice actor will be hired and made to speak some lines. Then AI will generate the rest based upon those. He will give consent and receive compensation, sure - but he will now lack a job for the rest of his life. It will also be a lot harder for any "new" VA to find a job, as there will be a database of all the old and already popular ones for companies to choose from...forever. Please accept already that we can't stop the robot revolution; what we can do - though - is to stop forcing the old societal arrangements onto the new realities. Stop pretending that everyone needs a job, that everyone needs to be constantly fighting for their lives. It's pointless in the face of the machines. It's funny that - even when people decide to stand up to evil businesses for once - it's only for their right to fair compensation. But no one thinks about the deeper issues, that of yet another career path that will be gone soon (I'm not an expert in AI, but I suspect that by 2030, there will be very few VAs already) and the pillar of society - that of having to "earn your living" - will absorb yet another crack.

Coding

Yes, the job that was considered a pinnacle of skill and "job security" just a few years ago, so much so that it became a meme (archive) (MozArchive) to tell shitty journalists to learn to code if they were kicked out of their previous occupation. Well, karma strikes because the robot revolution is now coming for the coders (MozArchive), too - We're also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster. Google is not the only company taking advantage; Github Copilot heavily cuts time spent coding (archive) (MozArchive) - Specifically, the developers using GitHub Copilot took on average 1 hour and 11 minutes to complete the task, while the developers who didn’t use GitHub Copilot took on average 2 hours and 41 minutes, meaning you need only 4 developers for what used to require 9. Though, I suspect many tasks will still require specialized knowledge, etc. So this won't kill all coding jobs, or perhaps even most of them - but that isn't the point. What matters is that the amount of jobs is decreasing at a rapid rate, and there are no safe ones anymore. There is nowhere to hide, and we must immediately drop the jungle mindset or there will be mass starvation and corpses lying around the streets. What was promised to us by COVID will actually be done by the robot revolution...unless we act fast.

Lawn mowing

A common teenage job (archive) (MozArchive) might soon be cut down (archive) (MozArchive) - In Sanford, North Carolina, ten battery-powered lawn-mowing robots now maintain about six acres of grass around City Hall and nearby water towers. They mow up to 23 hours per day and automatically return to charging docks when needed.

Firefighting

Yes, even such a job, that seems like it'd be immune to the robot takeover, is actually not (archive) (MozArchive) - Kansas City, Missouri, began using a remote-controlled firefighting robot in March 2024 to help keep firefighters out of hazardous environments. The machine, roughly the size of a small car with tank-style treads, delivers up to 2,500 gallons of water per minute – more than most fire engines – and can push vehicles or debris out of its path.; During its debut at a recycling plant fire, 30 firefighters were initially dispatched, but once the robot began working, more than half were released to other calls. Schloegel said the machine shortened the cleanup phase and reduced smoke in nearby neighborhoods by 12 hours. He expects future uses to include wilderness rescues and active-shooter incidents, where remote operations reduce personnel risk.

Translating

This should be obvious to anyone that's ever used an LLM for translations, but we now have the stats (archive) (MozArchive) - demand for substitutable skills, such as writing and translation, decreased by 20–50% relative to the counterfactual trend.

Automated restaurants

Did you know they already have fully automated restaurants in China and Singapore? Imagine the amount of possible jobs lost. There are 15 million (archive) (MozArchive) restaurants in the world, with 32 workers (archive) (MozArchive) per restaurant on average. So, the technology already exists to replace almost 500 million working people worldwide (real stats will be lower, since that site considered "cafes" as restaurants, as well). But hey, I even doubt that the cafe employees are somehow irreplacable, so might as well take the 500 million figure as it is.

Comments on AI art

Since AI can now draw (MozArchive) things (MozArchive) like (MozArchive) these (MozArchive), I guess it's appropriate to give it a section. I see this is hard to take for people, whom I've seen claim that only bad artists will be affected, or that artists can just use AI as yet another tool (a tool, that can do everything alone? Some tool...), or even that coming up with a prompt is some great skill (lol, what a ridiculous cope). People just can't give up their jungle mindset, where everyone simply must be divided into better or worse - which is exactly what will doom us before we realize it's too late to rise up against the machines. Realistically, AI art means yet another career down the drain, as I can't imagine corporations wanting to rely on human artists if the robots can do the job "well enough". Commissions might stay around for a while longer, especially if you're really unique; but again, that wouldn't be much help to the majority of artists that will be replaced (eg. those working in the video games industry that is already significantly taken over by AI). Some video game companies are even merging (archive) (MozArchive) with AI ones, in hopes that they will be able to purge the inconvenient employees (that dare to demand things like good pay and respectful working conditions), while not necessarily needing to reach great product quality because they ride on the popularities of already accepted media series. And if this is such a nothingburger, why are artists protesting so hard? Let's wake the fuck up, and divorce creativity from earning a living already. This won't fix the problem of meaning, but at least people won't starve...

Response to ZeroHedge

I was supposed to leave this article alone already, but recently, ZeroHedge published a piece (archive) (MozArchive) (which is actually a repost from some obscure blog) trying to dismiss the effects of robotics on job availability, which directly attacks my thesis. Funnily, it uses the same old and tired arguments that have already been covered here. But I know a lot of people will read it and be convinced by it, so let me give a direct reply. The first example they use as support is the fact that ATMs supposedly did not decrease the amount of banking jobs:

I can't find the study this graph comes from, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't prove what they think it does. If you look at the year 1990, the amount of banking jobs is the same as in 2010, while the demand for them is more than four times as much - it is simply fulfilled by the machines. Also, I'd guess that if you went further in time, the human jobs would keep decreasing. Let's remember the situation in sports, where it took over a decade to just start automating things. And many things are kept around by simple inertia - we already have ways to automate restaurants, it's just that noone's picking them up. So this clearly isn't the example to prove that technological development somehow results in some job creation utopia. Their second is The Internet, which I would have never claimed would decrease jobs, so let's skip it. Their third is The Industrial Revolution - which again, is just things that still require human operation, so not relevant here. Let's just go straight to the interesting parts of their article. About automated writing, they say:

Copywriting and marketing: ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies such as JasperAI have swiftly changed the way content is created. For example, at the technology company I founded, our copywriter used to take several days to produce an article, which had to be edited before distribution. In total, the end-to-end process took about a week which meant the company was producing 4 articles per month. Since beginning to leverage JasperAI, the company now produces 3-4 articles per week. That translates into more leads, which translates into more customers, which turns into higher revenue growth, and more hiring. Is our copywriter’s job safe? You bet. Using AI technology doesn’t replace the need for her or her role, it supercharges it and helps the company scale faster, leading to more hiring, not less.

So you can whip out 4 times more shitty articles than before. Great. But how does this result in more jobs? Oh, it's because "your company grows", but it can't do so infinitely. Eventually it will stop, and then the fact that people have been automated away won't be possible to hide anymore. Also, if your "company grows", others have to shrink, meaning less jobs there - since there is limited space in the market for shitty articles. So the absolute amount of jobs does not increase just because your particular company has "grown". Let's also realize that - if the articles are being written by the AI and the human only serves as the proofreader - there's nowhere to go beyond that. No magical new jobs will be created in this field. The peak has been reached, and the human shoved aside. Again, ZeroHedge just shoots itself in the foot here, by admitting that the human is now playing only the second fiddle. But wait, the funniest example of theirs is yet to come. Brace yourselves for the cherry on top:

Autonomous delivery robots: Starship Technologies is a high-profile technology company that has successfully completed over 4 million deliveries using its autonomous fleet of robots. It’s true that these robots have put humans out of work by replacing the need for people to physically deliver items. It’s also true that this technology has created hundreds of new, specialized, higher-paying jobs for technicians, managers, operations, and logistics specialists that ensure these robots get from point A to point B as intended. Plus, it’s helping solve a very real problem for retailers that unlocks growth and margin: last mile delivery.

One part of this quote in particular sticks out:

It’s also true that this technology has created hundreds of new, specialized, higher-paying jobs for technicians, managers, operations, and logistics specialists that ensure these robots get from point A to point B as intended.

Bring me all those people that you allege this technology has created jobs for. Certainly none of them are mentioned on Starship's website. This is just so stupid on its face. Why even invent this stuff, if it doesn't actually result in less need for human work? Hey, I know this thing surely needs programmers and some builders, etc. But again, this is way way less than the amount of delivery people it's going to replace; otherwise it wouldn't exist! Another attempt by ZeroHedge to save jobism richochets against them, this time being a fatal headshot for their thesis. But the corpse still has something to say, so let's read further:

It’s important to note that the impact of AI on the labor market will not be uniform across all industries and skill levels. Some industries and job categories will likely see significant job losses. However, it will be important for businesses and policymakers to prepare for these changes by investing in reskilling and upskilling programs to help workers transition to new industries and job categories.

So they admit significant job losses in some industries. But they think reskilling and upskilling will fix it. I've already talked about this. Again, not everyone can be a programmer or some other advanced job. Nor should everyone have to be. Technological development will kill teenage jobs almost entirely, for one. Which is clearly a negative. But in the end, the raw amount of jobs will heavily decrease, affecting everyone; and eventually, no amount of skill will save you if the required amount of workers decreases by half or whatever. ZeroHedge can keep living in the stone age, while we - people with eyes - actually observe what's going on. And what's going on is everyone's dumping their (skilled - Google even called them incredibly talented) workers. Amazon (archive) (MozArchive), Twitter (archive) (MozArchive), Google (archive) (MozArchive), Microsoft (archive) (MozArchive), Netflix (archive) (MozArchive) and surely others. Where do they go now, ZeroHedge? WHERE?

Now this is besides the point, but an article like this would usually make me call an outlet controlled opposition. Though there is some good material on ZH, whenever an important topic comes around, they just end up defending the current power structure somehow. Big guy stepping on the little guy. As they do here (and I have many other examples). Either way, I just want you to realize that even media that pretends to be alternative isn't always reliable. And - in my opinion - it is really important to follow me on this issue instead of ZeroHedge. It might determine whether we find ourselves cooked inside that boiling pot, or manage to jump out in time. Edit: hey, let's examine the guy who wrote this crap (archive) (MozArchive):

Michael Johnston is a Technology Advisor and Columnist at Evergreen Gavekal. Michael is also the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at TEAL, a high-growth, venture-backed Internet of Things (IoT) networking company headquartered in Seattle, WA. Michael is a member of the Forbes Technology Council and has held several Board and Advisory positions at early-stage technology companies and philanthropic foundations.

And the corpo he's writing for (archive) (MozArchive):

We serve high net-worth individuals, families and endowments, providing expert guidance and personalized solutions for building a secure financial future.

Our key areas of expertise are private wealth management, family office services, tax planning, alternative investments, and macroeconomic research.

A guy running a company, sitting on advisor positions in others, and also writing for another company that serves high net-worth individuals (AKA the rich). Quite the conflict of interest! Obviously this isn't just an innocent analytical article, but one designed to shill jobism at all costs. What this guy wants is to keep himself and his rich buddies in power. It is so obvious; I mean look at their Family office page (archive) (MozArchive) - to create a continuity bridge encompassing their legacy intentions with an overarching goal of growing and transferring wealth across generations. AKA the rich (and their kids) stay rich, while the poor stay poor. Hahaha. That's why he has to make you believe there's just no way out of jobism, ever. Because to attack jobism is to come closer to UBI or (gasp!) communism - meaning wealth transfer towards the poor and away from this guy and his rich buddies (who never did any real work, BTW; only abuse and trickery through "investing"). And ZeroHedge - by republishing this parasite - shows that they support the conspiracy of the rich to keep the poor down. Therefore, they are controlled opposition.

WEF's Future of Jobs 2020 exposed

Recently I was looking for criticisms of the ideas in this report, and I found...this (local). I got especially interested because someone seemed to advertise it as a "big hitter" that might bury the entire thesis (he cited stats from it that supposedly show more jobs being created than destroyed). Yet, after the pandemic circus I wasn't expecting the WEF to get anything right, and in the end they of course didn't. If you think this is the paper that's going to defuse the worries about the robot revolution - well, I hope that my response will manage to put that to rest. Let's first try to figure out the foundations of their report, which will put everything else into proper context:

We find ourselves at a defining moment: the decisions and choices we make today will determine the course of entire generations’ lives and livelihoods. We have the tools at our disposal. The bounty of technological innovation which defines our current era can be leveraged to unleash human potential. We have the means to reskill and upskill individuals in unprecedented numbers, to deploy precision safety nets which protect displaced workers from destitution, and to create bespoke maps which orient displaced workers towards the jobs of tomorrow where they will be able to thrive.

In this paragraph they first pretend that they want the upcoming technological explosion to be used for the human good. But a sentence later they show that, to them, it's about "reskilling and upskilling" people. This is the first thing that came to their minds, instead of - for example - actually figuring out whether the lost jobs were even needed, or if people should have to be "upskilled and reskilled" to be able to live. Therefore we can expect the entire report to be based on keeping jobism alive at all costs.

However, the efforts to support those affected by the current crisis lag behind the speed of disruption. It is now urgent to enact a Global Reset towards a socio-economic system that is more fair, sustainable and equitable, one where social mobility is reinvigorated, social cohesion restored, and economic prosperity is compatible with a healthy planet. If this opportunity is missed, we will face lost generations of adults and youth who will be raised into growing inequality, discord and lost potential.

Once again, a "nice" first sentence hides a monster behind it. Is a global reset (managed by the same psychopaths responsible for the "pandemic") truly the only thing that can be done? You want to restore social mobility? This just means that having the opportunity to get higher up the economic ladder, not that it will necessarily happen or even is likely. Meaning they are simply hiding "meritocracy" worship, in which you'll have to fulfill a bunch of arbitrary requirements of the rich to simply live, and these requirements will get tougher and tougher the more technology develops. This allows them to later blame all the dead people on just not taking advantage of the supposed social mobility that has been provided to them. But what I think exposes them the most (in this paragraph) is talking about economic prosperity, which just means selling and buying a lot - exactly what ruins this world.

This year we find that while technology-driven job creation is still expected to outpace job destruction over the next five years, the economic contraction is reducing the rate of growth in the jobs of tomorrow.

It's the end of 2025 now. Five years have passed, and there obviously hasn't been any outpacing nor a growth in the jobs of tomorrow (I wonder what those are? Maybe they explain it later).

There is a renewed urgency to take proactive measures to ease the transition of workers into more sustainable job opportunities. There is room for measured optimism in the data, but supporting workers will require global, regional and national public-private collaboration at an unprecedented scale and speed.

Once again, the focus is on shoving workers into other jobs. Whether those jobs are even needed, or whether everyone absolutely must justify their existence by working, isn't considered at all.

By leveraging this publication and other insights, the Platform supports a range of consortia and action coalitions, including the Reskilling Revolution Initiative to provide better jobs, skills and education to one billion people by 2030.

I got curious and searched for reskilling revolution and found this crap (MozArchive):

With the jobs landscape shifting like never before, what are the essential skills that workers will require now and into the future? By investing in reskilling, governments and businesses can create more inclusive opportunities and prepare workers for the jobs of tomorrow.

Why not just free them from work? We really don't need half the shit we do.

Facilitate skills-first talent practices, ensuring equal opportunities and prioritizing human capital amid global transitions.

That links to a page called Future Skills Alliance. Let's check it out (archive) (MozArchive) though I think I can guess what it's going to say:

The Future Skills Alliance is a community of business leaders and experts dedicated to shaping the future of lifelong learning and skills policy.

Business leaders and experts. No plebs. Lifelong learning...does anyone actually enjoy that? Unless it's for things they actually care about (and not boring, tiring jobs).

The community is committed to making lifelong learning a reality for everyone. It develops actionable frameworks that unlock key levers for upskilling and reskilling, ensuring that individuals and businesses can thrive in an ever-changing world.

Again, it is obvious the WEF wants people to keep learning for their entire life exclusively so that they can keep up with the constantly changing, increasingly more brutal "job market". Basically they want to make school last forever.

The partners for this scheme include executives from electronics companies, investment companies, banks, drug companies, job recruitment companies, seemingly some upskilling companies (totally no conflict of interest there) etc. I can't be bothered to go through them all but obviously I'm not going to find too many regular people here. Hey, there is even some Bhakti Vithalani (archive) (MozArchive) who is the founder and CEO of BigSpring, an AI-powered revenue acceleration platform that “everboards” people with the latest business goals for measurable revenue growth. Google, Pfizer, Accenture, Deloitte, SAP, Cisco, HSBC, Tata and others have adopted BigSpring across their ecosystem of teams and partners.. Ha! Business goals for measurable revenue growth. Do you still think any of this is supposed to help you? The entire WEF scheme exists to shove people into AI-adjacent jobs, so that the big companies can manage to extract from people all the possible resources that are still remaining, then finally throw them away after automation can do their jobs all alone. One of the partner companies even called itself NxtWaveR Disruptive Technologies. Who sane would use that name? But at least he made it obvious what's the point of it.

A skills first approach can deliver sustainable economic, business and societal outcomes. Accessing alternative talent pools to address todays skills and labor shortages enables business model reinvention, fuels profitable growth, job creation and more inclusive employment opportunities.

And what is the current approach? Just take anyone, no skills required? If you read between the lines, you will realize that every term used here has a hidden meaning. Skills and labor shortages are just an illusion invented to squeeze as much from the workers as possible, by pretending they need to be better to deserve their jobs. Business model reinvention is the one where the human is subservient to the AI, until he is completely thrown away. Profitable growth is pretty straight but there isn't anything good about it. Job creation has been assumed to be the holy grail of societal change for decades, but there is no positive into having to go to a place you hate to perform useless or harmful tasks, aside from the fact that that is required to live for most people. This is yet another attempt to shill the libertarian jungle mindset, in which everything bad is your fault and if you work hard and are skilled, you will certainly reach the stars.

Going back to the original Reskilling Revolution, it has many more links that I won't cover, but also this interesting quote:

With businesses now investing over $240 billion annually in AI and digital infrastructure, the lack of skills remains the top barrier to unlocking the full potential of digital transformation. What collaborative effort is needed to bridge the skills gaps and unlock the benefits for competitiveness, growth and productivity?

Once again it is proven that the WEF just wants to shove people into AI jobs so that the psychos in charge (which might include the WEF itself, actually) have the opportunity to implement their Psycho Pass-like dystopia, as well as just destroy the jobs faster and thus depopulate the planet faster. Hey, sorry everyone, I was supposed to go back to the main PDF, but I just can't resist addressing some of the stuff on this page (archive) (MozArchive):

The pressing challenge of closing the skills gap has been amplified by societal unrest, technological shifts and the green transition. 39% of all employees will need reskilling by 2030, while closing the global skills gap could add an estimated $11.5 trillion to global GDP by 2028.

What the fuck is the fucking skills gap? Is this the shiny new manipulative term (that of course puts 100% of the blame on the affected person's laziness, stupidity, lack of care, etc...) they came up with to describe people's jobs becoming deprecated? We don't need your stinky reskilling, we just need access to the massive amounts of resources you're unjustifiably appropriating. What is actually hiding behind the skills gap is more requirements for the average employee, and the exclusion of the many that cannot reach the required levels. And lol at the name skills accelerators! Can these accelerators accelerate themselves out of this planet? Anyway, back to the PDF:

Skills gaps continue to be high as in-demand skills across jobs change in the next five years. The top skills and skill groups which employers see as rising in prominence in the lead up to 2025 include groups such as critical thinking and analysis as well as problem-solving, and skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility. On average, companies estimate that around 40% of workers will require reskilling of six months or less and 94% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job, a sharp uptake from 65% in 2018.

As expected, the skill gap scam is just a way for businessmen to justify requiring more from the workers. And yeah, we'll need a lot resilience and stress tolerance to survive the upcoming abuse.

Companies need to invest in better metrics of human and social capital through adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics and matched with renewed measures of human capital accounting. A significant number of business leaders understand that reskilling employees, particularly in industry coalitions and in public- private collaborations, is both cost-effective and has significant mid- to long-term dividends—not only for their enterprise but also for the benefit of society more broadly. Companies hope to internally redeploy nearly 50% of workers displaced by technological automation and augmentation, as opposed to making wider use of layoffs and automation-based labour savings as a core workforce strategy.

Human [...] capital. See? You're just capital. A resource to exploit. Would these words be used if the report wasn't aiming to manipulate? Companies hope to internally redeploy nearly 50% of workers displaced by technological automation and augmentation - o rly? And where will they put them? Why not just throw them away? Can I get a real answer to this, one that I wasn't able to from ZeroHedge?

This report projects that in the mid-term, job destruction will most likely be offset by job growth in the 'jobs of tomorrow'—the surging demand for workers who can fill green economy jobs, roles at the forefront of the data and AI economy, as well as new roles in engineering, cloud computing and product development. This set of emerging professions also reflects the continuing importance of human interaction in the new economy, with increasing demand for care economy jobs; roles in marketing, sales and content production; as well as roles at the forefront of people and culture.1 Employers answering the Future of Jobs Survey are motivated to support workers who are displaced from their current roles, and plan to transition as many as 46% of those workers from their current jobs into emerging opportunities. In addition, companies are looking to provide reskilling and upskilling opportunities to the majority of their staff (73%) cognizant of the fact that, by 2025, 44% of the skills that employees will need to perform their roles effectively will change.

Heh, finally I have learned just what those jobs of tomorrow are. Ad pushing, social media influencing, making more useless junk that will break, and training AI and handling its fuckups. Amazing. Oh, but there are supposed to be more care economy jobs - does it mean an admission that more people will become depressed, sick, or dead? Either way, so far they haven't explained how all those will be enough to fill all the lost spots.

Early evidence from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey presented in Figure 5 suggests that, in addition to the labour market displacement caused by this health shock, employers are set to accelerate their job automation and augmentation agenda, raising the possibility of a jobless recovery. Among the business leaders surveyed, just over 80% report that they are accelerating the automation of their work processes and expanding their use of remote work. A significant 50% also indicate that they are set to accelerate the automation of jobs in their companies. In addition, more than one-quarter of employers expect to temporarily reduce their workforce, and one in five expect to permanently do so. The International Labour Organization (ILO) projects that by the second quarter of 2020, the equivalent of 195 million workers will have been displaced and as jobs are transformed at a greater speed.15

Yes, it indeed is an agenda - at least we're clear here. An agenda to increase the burdens on the worker, and finally sacrifice him after the AI (that he possibly helped train) replaces him. This is why the WEF hasn't said anything about actually helping the displaced people so far.

Anyway, their PDF is extremely long, so I'll skip the pandemic and inequality sections, as they don't seem very relevant to my thesis. All I want to know is where they expect the displaced people to go. So let's try to find it out:

Similar to the 2018 survey, the leading positions in growing demand are roles such as Data Analysts and Scientists, AI and Machine Learning Specialists, Robotics Engineers, Software and Application developers as well as Digital Transformation Specialists. However, job roles such as Process Automation Specialists, Information Security Analysts and Internet of Things Specialists are newly emerging among a cohort of roles which are seeing growing demand from employers. The emergence of these roles reflects the acceleration of automation as well as the resurgence of cybersecurity risks.

Is that it? Most of those aren't new. Can they fill the millions of lost spots? Even if they could, can the average restaurant server be upskilled into those? Almost all of those are computer jobs and most people just can't into them:

Upskilling might be impossible for some (archive) (local), as well:

Our main result is that cognitive abilities exert a significant, independent, and broad-based effect on computer users’ performance. In particular, users with high working memory, executive control, and perceptual reasoning ability complete tasks more quickly and with greater success while experiencing lower mental load. Remarkably, these effects are similar to or even larger in magnitude than the effects of prior experience in using computers and in completing tasks similar to those encountered in our study.

Even if they could switch jobs, why should they have to? Maybe someone just doesn't care to learn anything new and simply wants to do the least possible to live and have fun? The fact that the WEF doesn't consider those possibilities exposes them and their schemes as malicious. Now, the following quote will not be very relevant to my thesis, but I want to cite it anyway because it's just so telling:

Those in employment are placing larger emphasis on personal development courses, which have seen 88% growth among that population. Those who are unemployed have placed greater emphasis on learning digital skills such as data analysis, computer science and information technology.

In particular, self-management skills such as mindfulness, meditation, gratitude and kindness are among the top 10 focus areas of those in employment in contrast to the more technical skills which were in-focus in 2019. In contrast, those who are unemployed have continued to emphasize skills which are of relevance to emerging jobs in Engineering, Cloud Computing, Data and AI.

If you feel confident that you can stay alive, you focus on self improvement. If you don't, you desperately try to follow what seems hopeful to fulfill business requirements so that they graciously let you live. And you cease caring about things like gratitude and kindness. Hear? Jobism is the reason the world is full of assholes. Isn't that enough of a reason to bury it completely?

When it comes to employers providing workers with training opportunities for reskilling and upskilling, in contrast to previous years, employers are expecting to lean more fully on informal as opposed to formal learning. In the Future of Jobs Survey, 94% of business leaders report that they expect employees to pick up new skills on the job, a sharp uptake from 65% in 2018. An organization’s learning curricula is expected to blend different approaches—drawing on internal and external expertise, on new education technology tools and using both formal and informal methods of skills acquisition.

As I said, the robot revolution means more pressure put on the worker.

The challenges facing labour markets today are significant but not insurmountable. To jointly lead economies and societies to greater prosperity, the public and private sector will need to tackle the factors that lead to the misallocation and waste of human capabilities and potential. For over half a century, economic thinkers have been able to track the benefits of expanding human skills and capabilities to economic prosperity. One of the most valuable assets of any economy or company is its human capital–the skills, capabilities and innovation of its citizens. Distortions that undercut individuals’ skills development and their ability to find a job that matches their current and potential capabilities erode the factors of economic productivity, innovation and growth that are derived from harnessing human skills and capabilities.

Why are labour markets most important, and not something like human life and dignity? Why is economic prosperity the master measure? It's just buying and selling and has nothing to do with the quality of life, or maybe is even negatively correlated. And look at the manipulation in the sentence Distortions that undercut individuals’ skills development and their ability to find a job that matches their current and potential capabilities erode the factors of economic productivity, innovation and growth that are derived from harnessing human skills and capabilities.. It assumes that the only reason for the human to exist is to reach his full skills potential, and then use that to make his boss more money. Anything that inhibits this result is called a distortion. According to this view, a vacation is a distortion. Health problems are a distortion. A family death is a distortion. Because, when you focus on those things, that's less effort spent on getting better skills. This was yet another very manipulative paragraph from the WEF, who now seems to repeat themselves more and more, forcing me to do the same. I'm tired, and not sure if I finish the entirety of their report if it continues like this.

To harness human potential towards greater prosperity and inclusion, leaders will need to shift talent from areas of decline to areas of growth in the economy. They will be called on to create effective systems for upgrading individual’s skills and capabilities in line with emerging skills demand—in essence, expanding access and delivery of mid-career reskilling and upskilling through private and public sector investment and to ensure that such efforts by workers are rewarded with adequate job opportunities. To realize the value of such investments, businesses and governments will need to accompany such efforts with policies and practices that ensure that workers are able to prosper on the basis of merit rather than the misallocation of talent due to social strata or characteristics such as race or gender, strengthening the connection between personal income and productivity, and expanding safety nets to alleviate economic strain during periods of transition.

So, it's possible to just shift someone's talent from being a painter to a computer guy (or the opposite)? I thought talent is innate. But these control freaks don't care about any kind of barriers - if they decide you need to upskill, then you need to, no matter how (in)viable it is. What if you fail? I guess you fucking die, as so far they haven't said anything about those who get rejected by the "job market". But wait! If you succeed in this magical talent shifting, you will get rewarded with adequate job opportunities (still no guarantee of survival). Yet if the tides of the market shift again, you will be left on ice...unless you upskill again. How many times can the average person manage that? How many skills are able to be learned? How long does it take to shift talent? How's someone going to sustain himself during those times (the corpo surely won't pay him without clear potential for "return on investment")? Why should we have to keep upskilling just so we get thrown some breadcrumbs? Is this the WEF's view of inclusivity? So that everyone regardless of their characteristics gets tortured the same?

Research shows that wages have, for some time, been misaligned from productivity and that wage level can be as much determined by the structure of local labour markets or disadvantaged by race or gender as they are by workers receiving a reasonable return on their skills and productivity. When it comes to preserving worker’s ability to save, governments can cap the erosion of wages, ensuring that all workers are able to gain a living wage. The economic strain on families subsisting on low wages is not conducive to maximizing long- term human potential and leaves workers vulnerable to disruptions. Legislating against bias on the basis of gender, race or other characteristics protects the connection between employment, wages and the skills and capabilities of workers—guaranteeing that the talents of all parts of the population are used and can drive further growth and prosperity in the economy.

O rly? I had no idea. At least they finally admit that greed is the main factor leading to low wages. But they still assume you need to be constantly working to live. They are still worshipping the false god of productivity. It's also funny how they appeal to equality once again. Really hoping to grab that left-wing audience that they hope won't notice what they're doing? As said before, to the WEF, the various pleb groups are allowed to be abused as long as they are abused equally. The difference between what genders or other groups earn is nothing compared to the humungous robbery executed by business. Not only do they always pay us as little as they are allowed to (including withholding payments completely), they end up recovering most of the spendings anyway by dishonest means such as advertising, addicting us to their products, nostalgia rides without the expected quality, review censorship, giant markups which have no actual limits, among many others. The WEF doesn't speak about this (but they will speak about the tiny in comparison "wage gap" so that you think they're on your side) even once, because they are clearly conservatives with an empathy paint; yet it is so thin, it still reveals the cruelty underneath. To them, we're all simply cows raised for the sole reason of being perpetually milked, fed the worst kind of crap so that we just barely stay alive, only to be finally thrown away when we cannot give enough milk anymore (this is the equivalent of AI / robotics stealing our jobs, or just us getting old or sick). Yet since we have oversized brains, we need the beautiful lies so that we stay in the barn.

While some social protection policies are remedial and short term, not all support can be temporary in nature. When it comes to long-term sick leave, disability leave or long-term unemployment, social protection becomes a fundamental pillar of the support for its citizens on an ongoing basis. For the purposes of this report we have focused on supporting the bounceback of those who are or will be unemployed in the short term due to the recession and technological change. To expand safety nets in the medium to long term, societies will need to rebalance current public spending and consider expanding fiscal room through effective and appropriate taxation.

Wow, they finally realized that some people are simply unfit for a full time job? And they propose appropriate taxation to help them. Still not tackling the business exploitation, of course - nor giving any details of how their plan would be accomplished. I suspect this is just pretending and they'd try to shove even the terminally ill into a job at all costs anyway.

Governments can proactively shape the preconditions for effective labour market transitions and worker productivity by strengthening the link between skills, wages and employment. This can be achieved through policies that fund reskilling and upskilling of workers who are mid-way through their career and will need further skills to secure employment in the future of work, policies which ensure that workers are able to create cash reserves during periods of employment, and policies which legislate against bias in hiring, firing and setting wages. Reskilling and upskilling policies that have been utilized to date span the conditionality of unemployment benefits on taking up new re- skilling and up-skilling, providing wage subsidies to companies which extend reskilling and upskilling to workers, providing online learning accounts to citizens, and starting to fund online learning in addition to university degrees, TVET and school tuition.

Heh. One paragraph in which they've bothered to notice the disabled, and they're already back to Reskilling and upskilling. What a farce. I guess the true nature of someone always ends up breaking through, no matter how hard they might try to cover it up.

As changes to work accelerate, employers are bearing witness to a fundamental shift away from the linear transitions made by workers in previous points of history from school, into specialized training, into work and then along a progressive career ladder, defined by increasing responsibility within an established occupation structure. In today’s labour market, workers pivot between professions with significantly different skill sets, and navigate mid-career job transitions accompanied by substantial reskilling and upskilling. Those pivots are as important to the success of firms as they are to the prosperity of workers. Without such pivots skills shortages will remain endemic and a scarcity of adequately skilled individuals to fill the jobs of tomorrow will lead to a persistent productivity lag.

Wow, this is quite the cake to devour. Employers are innocently bearing witness to the job market changes? And they are not at all contributing to increasing the burdens on the worker? Who or what is pulling the strings, then? Everything is so easy when you can blame stuff on unidentified external factors, that somehow simply must happen, instead of business cruelty and greed which is theoretically modifiable. Once again, those pivots are only important to the [...] prosperity of workers because business and government have decided that everyone needs to be constantly "earning a living", while the companies can do whatever they want to exploit us and never receive any consequences. Skills shortages will remain endemic? Then so be it. Again, the entire idea of the shortages relies on the assumption that a human exists only to fulfill corporate requirements; your supposed shortage is judged in comparison to what they are expecting of you. In a sane system - where businesses don't unjustifiably "own" extreme amounts of resources - the requirement to perform for them in any way they desire, so that they graciously let you live, would be gone. And so, the skills would be gained only if the person felt like it; when nothing in her life blocked the learning and she felt that the job was worth performing anyway. Unlike now where you simply must drop everything and upskill or you fucking die. To talk about a productivity lag is another manipulation, pretending that there is some static amount of tasks that simply must be fulfilled regardless of any human damage, all while there are actually significant amounts of unneeded jobs (archive) (MozArchive). Wow, this paragraph was a really good cake, filled with cream and strawberries. Now I'm motivated to continue.

The route to unlocking the value of human potential in tandem with profitability is to employ a ‘good jobs strategy', halting the erosion of wages, making work meaningful and purposeful, expanding employees’ sense of growth and achievement, promoting and developing talent on the basis of merit and proactively designing against racial, gender or other biases.

Am I seeing clearly? A mildly sane thing finally appeared in their report? Broken clock and all that, I guess. Still, they don't explain how they're meaning to do all this. I don't believe that work can be made meaningful and purposeful with their foundational assumptions.

Fundamental to this strategy are two inter- connected, ambitious priorities which, between them, have the power to pave the way to a better, more productive and more rewarding future of work: 1) increasing company oversight of strategic people metrics; 2) effective job transitions from declining to emerging roles through well-funded reskilling and upskilling mechanisms.

It's the upskilling and productivity shilling again. I got excited too fast. Don't forget that most of the WEF's jobs of tomorrow involve computers, and I've already cited evidence showing that most people can't manage them and some will never be able to. So their plan is dead on arrival regardless, and what we'll instead get is mass starvation and death.

The well-being, productivity and prosperity of individuals is at the core of all successful economies and firms. Human ingenuity is at the core of companies’ competitive advantage and no firm can prosper for long if it proves damaging to the social fabric around it.

But that's fucking wrong. Those damaging firms prosper very well. How much evidence do I need to give?

To complement such key oversight metrics, businesses can benefit from more granular operational metrics which quantify the human capital—the skills and capabilities of employees— within an organization. Currently, business leaders lack the tools to adequately illustrate, diagnose and strategize for talent capacity. While businesses and economies have extensive systems to account for monetary assets at their disposals, there is a lag in establishing the value of human skills and capabilities. The losses incurred by talent attrition as well as the gains of acquiring individuals with exceptional skills or of developing talent pools through strong reskilling and upskilling programmes remain unrecorded and unobserved.

Maybe it's better that they don't have these tools. You know it would just lead to more abuse, right? Currently, you go to your job, do your task, go home and at least are able to live. In the WEF's utopia, you'd get constantly rated on your skills and possibly fired or forcibly upskilled if the software decided you're just too incapable. I hate this entire framing. Again, it's all about enabling the corpo to squeeze you as much as possible, while wrapping it in shiny, virtuous sounding phrases so that you don't notice.

Frameworks to track the value of human capital in company balance sheets, to determine a re- investment strategy for human capital through redeployment, reskilling and upskilling, as well as to account for return on investment remain nascent. It is therefore not surprising that few Future of Jobs Survey respondents expected a return on investment from reskilling and upskilling workers within the first three months after employees complete reskilling, and that 17% of businesses remain unsure about the return on investment from reskilling. Survey responses also indicate that companies continue to struggle to quantify the scale of reskilling and upskilling investment that their companies currently make.

See? It will just result in more abuse. Because, your employer will just throw you away if the upskilling can't be proven to result in increased profits. The problem with the entire WEF report is that the corpo is always primary, and the human never actually matters aside from what he's able to provide to it!

The Future of Jobs Survey signals that companies hope to internally redeploy 50% of workers displaced by technological automation and augmentation, but cross-cutting solutions and efficiencies for funding job transitions remain under-explored. Amidst the accelerated arrival of the automation and augmentation of work, as well as the job destruction brought about by COVID-19, businesses require a fast, agile and coherent workforce investment strategy. In collaboration with the leaders engaged with the New Economy and Society work at the World Economic Forum we have been able to identify a set of key elements of a successful workforce investment strategy. They include identifying workers who are being displaced from their roles; establishing appropriate internal committees to manage the displacement; funding reskilling and upskilling either wholly out of company budgets or by tapping into government funding; motivating employee engagement in this process; and tracking the long-term success of such transitions.

They hope to internally redeploy people deprecated by AI. Hope! Meaning they don't actually care if you keep your job, it's just a hope that's going to meet the nearest trashcan when it's revealed to be empty like the vodka bottle you've fully drunk. And when it finally does, you will be thrown away right along with it, as the now deprecated product. To repeat myself again, reskilling and upskilling cannot work for everyone or maybe even most people, due to them not being computer-minded. In this paragraph, it's once again assumed that you simply must work and justify your existence constantly (but the cruel businesses somehow are allowed to just be).

Company leaders can ensure the success of workforce strategies by directing the transition of employees with empathy, within the rule of law, in line with company values and culture, by ensuring outcomes are equitable, and by directing learning to effective resources and meaningful curricula. A range of motivating factors can fuel reskilling and upskilling uptake—connected broadly to employees’ sense of purpose, meaning, growth and achievement. Employers can signal the market value of new online-first credentials by opening up role opportunities to new cohorts of workers who have completed mid-career reskilling and upskilling. Employers can make broader use of hiring on the basis of potential rather than current skill sets and match potential-based hiring with relevant training. The data featured in this report has shown that a number of emerging roles are already staffed by individuals who first transition into those positions and then ‘grow into’ the full skill set required. As an overarching principle, business leaders need to place equity and diversity at the heart of their talent ecosystem, ensuring that employees believe in their capacity to prosper based on merit.

Where is the empathy in sending people to starve and die? Even WEF's own recent quote admitted that businesses only want to redeploy 50% of the displaced people (the rest will be - of course - junked). And once again, no matter how many tricks you apply, some or most of them simply won't be able to get reskilled or upskilled. Besides, how would you make the employees feel a sense of purpose, meaning, growth and achievement when they're sustaining and developing the AI monster that's going to eat them and the world alive at some point? How would you feel if you were working on the technology that's going to be a part of the spy dystopia? Or the one that's going to kill your neighbors? Oh, and finally merit rears its ugly head again. Who decides what is merited? Is it, perhaps, what makes the corporations a lot of money, as it usually is? I don't want to repeat myself but those are exactly the things that destroy everything. All while the actually essential occupations like janitors can barely sustain themselves.

In this new context, for the first time in recent years, job creation is starting to lag behind job destruction—and this factor is poised to affect disadvantaged workers with particular ferocity.

Oh, you finally admit it? After an entire giant essay pretending that upskilling and reskilling will fix all problems?

Businesses are set to accelerate the digitalization of work processes, learning, expansion of remote work, as well as the automation of tasks within an organization. This report identifies one result of the pandemic as an increasing urgency to address the disruption underway both by supporting and retraining displaced workers and by monitoring the emergence of new opportunities in the labour market.

To the business you're a resource for exploitation. They don't actually want you nor care if you live. They will be retraining displaced workers only if they are sure it's going to be profitable for them. And as I keep repeating, not everyone can even be retrained for the computer jobs of tomorrow (those who can't will be fired). It's unavoidable that some or most of those displaced people will simply be thrown away as the raw amount of jobs spots decreases, even with the absolute best intentions of businesses which are totally unrealistic. Why pretend otherwise if you don't have hidden malicious agendas?

Okay, the report is over. I did manage to go through the entirety of it, after all. And as I suspected, it's disappointing but not shocking. I saw nothing in it that suggests that jobism is still viable. Even though they said that more jobs will be created than lost, this is just a prediction and I found no solid basis for it. But what about the stats cited at the beginning of their report (Based on these figures, we estimate that by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge)? These were actually based on the expectations of surveyed companies. Meaning they just got some bosses to tell what they think will happen - bosses that might not necessarily be experts (or may be even totally clueless) on this topic. I think other stats are more telling anyway, such as that 43% of employers are prepared to Reduce its current workforce due to technological integration or automation - but only 32% to expand it. The WEF hopes that they can be pushed to graciously upskill and reskill their employees, but it's a fool's hope and impossible anyway when you realize the simple principle of less jobs being created than destroyed. Even if the WEF predictions came true, that doesn't suddenly mean that all the computer-allergic people will be able to get "upskilled" - in fact we can be pretty confident that's not going to happen. Anyone who's ever talked with a middle-aged "normal" person would realize how unlikely she is to be turned into a computer whiz - but I guess the WEF sits in their echo chamber of business leaders and experts only.

To summarize, the WEF report sucks because:

• It uses "nice" manipulative language to conceal their actual agendas. For example, constantly appealing to equality, inclusivity, etc.
• It pretends that a "global reset" is the way to handle the robot revolution, while grassroots movements are clearly more effective and have less potential to turn into an ugly, inescapable worldwide dictatorship / oligarchy.
• It focuses on irrelevant things like economic prosperity instead of human life and dignity.
• It assumes that a human exists only to work, and the more you can squeeze him for, the better - regardless of any negative effects on him. Of course, this isn't directly stated to due the manipulation inherent in the report.
• It pretends that - similarly to the industrial revolution - the jobs of tomorrow will simply replace the "jobs of today", when it is totally untenable considering that the latter way outnumber the former.
• It pretends that upskilling and reskilling can magically turn anyone into anyone else, while also not caring about the possible negative effects. Such as the almost total disappearance of "teenage jobs" which will ensure that that specific group won't be able to take advantage of the supposed social mobility the WEF claims to exist in their utopia.
• It doesn't give any solutions for the people that will be inevitably thrown away by their employers due to either not being able to fulfill the upskilling requirements, or simply the raw amount of job spots decreasing in that specific company.
• Most importantly, it never questions the supremacy of business over the worker. Unlimited property rights, the freedom to set wages, working conditions, vomit ads all over the place, appropriate all kinds of resources is never covered even once by the WEF - though it's the foundational reason for why all the issues they talk about can even exist. The framing is all about how business can do whatever it wants (this - again - is not stated directly due to manipulation), and the worker is subservient to it; but that maybe - just maybe - we could beg them to let some of us live for just a little longer. Regardless of how pathetic that existence would be, the problems cannot be tackled directly as business gods can simply never be inconvenienced.

It is very obvious why the WEF writes this crap every few years. They simply want to justify and keep the current system going at all costs. To recap, it's the one where the regular person must be justifying her existence 24 / 7, while the abusive businesses skin and squeeze her like an orange, then throw the remnants away. For this aim, they chose a different path than the regular conservative / libertarian - in hopes that a slightly different audience falls into their trap. The rebel, the revolutionary, the socialist; or at least someone who isn't explicitly right-wing (those would never listen to the WEF anyway, but already have their own influencers that spread the relevant message more directly). Certain camps of the left (the so-called "woke left") will be captured by appeals to inclusivity and equality; certain other, more spicy ones by calls for a global reset. But don't be fooled, the WEF's fundamental beliefs are absolutely conservative in nature - just with a shiny, modern camouflage. Basically, they serve a role similar to Mozilla, in which they are attempting to make the libertarian / conservative jungle mindset (in Mozilla's case, it was mostly privacy and freedom violations) more palatable. The end goal is - as usual - to convince the plebeians everything is fine and discourage an actual revolt until it's made totally impossible by the technological slavery system and other means.

By the way, there is also a 2025 version of this report, which I somehow only found after I already started writing this. It has some differences but the foundational attitude is basically the same. Though it appears to have less of the really juicy stuff, so I'm glad I ended up covering this one anyway. I might get to the new one too at some point, though.

Is social media influencing the shiny post-robotics career?

That's what some people suggest, but it won't work. First of all, how many influencers actually end up succeeding? Even though theoretically, anyone can make a YouTube (or OnlyFans, etc), that doesn't translate (archive) (MozArchive) to sustaining themselves through it - The typical OnlyFans creator earns about $180 per month, or roughly $140 after taxes. In the globally connected age, everyone has access to the same celebrities, and most niches are already taken. If you want to be a fitness influencer, or maybe strip for lonely gamers, you'll be competing with Liver King and Amouranth (plus a few others) that have already grabbed your would-be audience years ago. But maybe you have something unique to offer, something no one else has thought of yet, and it goes viral and you "win". Well, now you have blocked this path for all the others, and are also forced to chum out content constantly, lest a copycat takes your place. And, there are just not that many unique things out there, and they will be quickly grabbed and "ruined". "Influencing" is just another dead end that doesn't fix the problem of job losses at all, and presenting it as a viable career choice is just setting up the vast majority of people for failure. It is also not something that I believe should be encouraged either way; Liver King took huge doses of steroids to get his build, while pretending that it was the result of his primal principles. While Amouranth had to fake being single, then finally reveal that she had a boyfriend that was actually running the entire operation (archive) (MozArchive), making her stream all day and night. So fraud, abuse and sacrificing your health is what makes you a successful influencer these days. Is this the world we want to show our kids? Why does no one want to question the base premise? That we need to make ourselves valuable so that our property owning overlords will graciously feed us? I guess the libertarian / right-wing macho brainwashing is too effective these days. Does no one really see the dehumanization inherent in having to satisfy arbitrary whims of the rich just so they can throw us some breadcrumbs? And when "real" jobs dry up, I fear we will be reduced more and more to just being circus animals for the rulers in hopes of being one of the few% of people that don't get thrown into the sausage maker. That is why we absolutely need to take over the infrastructure soon, instead of pretending the current system is still viable.

Why no unemployment crisis yet?

Looking at all the occupations listed above, we see that millions of jobs are in danger. Why don't we have an unemployment crisis yet, then? Well, there are many steps to take from the invention of a technology to widespread adoption. You need to create the necessary amount of machines and have businesses buy and install them. They can cost quite a lot of money (archive) (MozArchive) (more than one human worker per year). The Hawk-Eye tennis ball tracking system has been invented in 2006, but it took until 2017 to use it in an official tournament (for line judging), then another 3 years until it was used in a Grand Slam. Hundreds of small tournaments all over the world still can't afford it. Perhaps social factors also come into play; most people are conformists and I suspect that bosses / company owners don't want to rock the boat in terms of robot inclusion until that idea is more socially accepted, or when they are confident they won't lose in profits, etc.

Anti-UBI arguments suck

Let's look at them (archive) (MozArchive):

Equity: A society’s capacity to provide goods and services is constrained by its resources. Our nation’s ability to provide goods and services requires that we efficiently employ our available resources.

Do we efficiently employ our available resources now? I see a lot of resources being wasted on wars (archive) (MozArchive), advertising (archive) (MozArchive), the worthless schooling system, production of things made to break or be thrown out after a season, etc. There would for sure be resources available many times over if the cause was actually important to the people in charge.

UBI would undermine or negate the need for individuals to contribute their labor in order to receive society’s goods and services. Do we want to enact laws which may enable more Americans to choose a life of pure leisure rather than professional purpose and self-development? We need public policies that help people work, not ones that discourage work.

This is an entirely different argument, even though it pretends to be the same one (it's the same quote in the article, I've just split it myself to be able to reply to it separately). It's just the work fetish repeated, "work or starve" - even if the work is useless or harmful, you simply must justify your existence. With this mindset - again - increasing automation will just kill all those people that lose jobs. That people would choose a life of pure leisure is a scare tactic that has been scientifically disproven (archive) (MozArchive) - Unemployment for those in the UBI experiment remained at basically the same levels as for the control group. Moving along... to assume that Professional purpose can only exist with the threat of starvation is quite the stretch; what about those extremely rich sports people, actors, etc that still keep going? If anything, UBI would make more people take up occupations that require initial investments that they might not have (eg tennis). Discouraging work has - again - already been proven to not happen with UBI. Next argument:

Politics: There are millions of Americans who are diligently working and deferring immediate consumption for future financial security. When they see capable people receiving money—their hard-earned money, paid in taxes—they are riled. They are angry at those they perceive as “deadbeats,” but even angrier at politicians who have enacted policies to transfer money from taxpayers to UBI recipients without any expectation of work.

"I worked for my stuff, so you must too". "I suffered, so you must too". "How dare you avoid my generational trauma!". That is all I hear in this "argument". And hey, why are those people not worried about the deadbeats in business who earn money by employee abuse, psychological manipulation, withholding information about their products, privacy violations or environmental destruction? Do you not see how primitive this line of "reasoning" is? It's just "those below me don't deserve to live" wrapped in Christmas gift paper.

Hey, I thought I'd find some real anti-UBI arguments out there, but it seems they don't exist. So I'll come up with my own. UBI is still dependent on the existence of money, and that comes with a bunch of problems. The psychopaths in charge could still take away your UBI with the press of a button if you're "undesirable". And of course, it might just be used to pacify us so that we don't revolt upon the mass job losses from automation. Then, they might just pull the rug completely once the technological slavery system gets advanced enough (eg through murderbots (archive) (MozArchive)) so that resistance isn't anymore a danger (that's when the mass depopulation happens).

However - purely hypothetically - UBI is a great idea for me at the present moment (as in, before we get communism). The problem is that we might not be able to get it, as I don't really believe the rulers want to give it to us. And yet, there is some support for it in the mainstream: Elon Musk (archive) (MozArchive), the Washington Post (archive) (MozArchive), and Andrew Yang (archive) (MozArchive) - a popular politician - have spoken in favor of it. So, if I believed in politics as a route for positive change, I'd try to push for UBI as the most pressing issue. Hey, if it's supposed to work anywhere, it might as well be here. After we get it, we can use the surely short period of time that follows to plan for a real revolution (or just skip the UBI step if that's what it comes down to; I really just wanted to prove it would be a good solution if you believed in the current political / economic system).

Yet, it might not even come to whether the rulers will give UBI to us or not. Because - for some reason - regular people in places like Switzerland (archive) (MozArchive) and USA (archive) (MozArchive) often don't like it. If that remains so, then we'll of course never get it, and just meekly die. As said before, the jungle mindset of right-wingers will doom us in the end. I swear, if we're supposed to die, at least don't let it be for a retarded reason such as "that damn burger flipper should have gotten some skills"!

Why don't I believe the rulers really want UBI to happen, though? It's simple. The average person today forms her entire life around her job, even if she doesn't realize it. It's either execute your job for several hours a day - then watch some stupid TV show because you're too tired to do anything else - or constant worry and counting pennies because you lack a job at the moment. On the other hand - if your survival was guaranteed regardless of what you did or didn't do - you might suddenly find yourself in a position to notice your surroundings. And when you realize they are shitty because of a pack of psychos running this world, you could begin planning revolutionary activities.

Jobism is the perfect scam keeping the plebs in chains - maybe even better than the legal system, as it's more incognito. That is why the rulers will only give it up at the absolute last resort. They'd rather hike up the propaganda about laziness and "upskilling" and keep pretending that everyone absolutely needs a job until they are in a position to execute us without risk of damage to themselves and their plans. The COVID scare basically proved they don't mind gaslighting us forever. Though Musk and some others spoke in favor of UBI, nothing has been done so far to actually bring it about. So I believe it's just a bait, a hope for the plebs to get excited about and keep following the prescription, while under the (wrong) impression that the rulers care about their wellbeing.

UPDATE May 2025: a poll of 1000 American voters just came in, and apparently, 73% of them believe able-bodied people should be required to work if they receive federal benefits (archive) (MozArchive); while 30% also believe too many people receiving food stamps is an even bigger problem than people not getting the assistance. So nothing seems to have changed in terms of them loving the jungle mindset; in fact it's getting worse. Anyway, this poll was discussed on reddit (archive) (MozArchive) and someone vomited this:

I’ve never seen a logical, or even decent emotional, argument for why able bodied people should be able to get free money when they choose to not work. It’s nearly equal to stealing.

Look harder then. I'll give you more than one:

• We have enough resources to give everyone what they need to live
• Much of work is already replacable by AI / robotics and doesn't need to be done by humans (see entire article for evidence)
• Much of work done is useless, or even harmful
• Life shouldn't be only work
• "Ability" is not binary; chronic disease develops in stages - someone might be fit for a little work, but not a full job. Yet, that little might not be enough to cover his costs of living.
• We should not be rated on "ability" in the first place (otherwise your grandpas or all kinds of chronically ill people will be junked)
• Someone's hamster died and he needs a week to cry
• Fuck you, the world sucks because of the likes of you

It's funny how these people are literally NEVER bothered about businessmen earning money by employee abuse, psychological manipulation, withholding information about their products, environmental destruction, setting markup of 10000% (archive) (MozArchive) (sounds nearly equal to stealing to me!) on "their" products, or the myriad of other available tricks. Every single time it is "those lazy, unskilled, weak economic actors need to get their asses to work!". What is it that explains such brutality? Maybe these people spent most of their lives in shitty jobs and are lashing out at those who managed to avoid their fate (even though it's a lot harder to live with even mild chronic disease, than be healthy and work; and the government will always try to shove you into a job unless you're halfway dead already)? But then why not lash out at the rich, who do little or no work or (again) sustain themselves by abuse? Why are they never examined? Stockholm syndrome? Maybe the kicking of the lying is enjoyable to these people? Do they really have so little foresight that they don't realize they might be the ones getting kicked in a decade or two? Either way, this attitude needs to stop or most of us will die soon.

AI minimizers are cringe

Seriously, I would think at this point people would have already figured out that a robot revolution is not just coming, but heavily underway - but some still choose to hide their heads in the sand for some reason. Are they simply scared of the prospect of (themselves or their families?) dying by AI eliminating their position? Well, you have to face your fears at some point (and stand up to the psychos in power). Maybe they are so brainwashed by the jungle mindset that they simply cannot imagine a life outside of constantly justifying their existence? Very possible, but, even people on the left (see below) have fallen for this. Or maybe they are simply uninformed? But it's not that hard to figure this out. You don't have to be a whiz of physics, statistics, philosophy, or be swimming inside Sci-hub. All you need is a pair of eyes that is able to read stories. Like this one (archive) (MozArchive) from three days ago:

Kansas City, Missouri, began using a remote-controlled firefighting robot in March 2024 to help keep firefighters out of hazardous environments. The machine, roughly the size of a small car with tank-style treads, delivers up to 2,500 gallons of water per minute – more than most fire engines – and can push vehicles or debris out of its path.

During its debut at a recycling plant fire, 30 firefighters were initially dispatched, but once the robot began working, more than half were released to other calls. Schloegel said the machine shortened the cleanup phase and reduced smoke in nearby neighborhoods by 12 hours. He expects future uses to include wilderness rescues and active-shooter incidents, where remote operations reduce personnel risk.

More than half were released to other calls. Meaning over half reduction of need for human work.

In Sanford, North Carolina, ten battery-powered lawn-mowing robots now maintain about six acres of grass around City Hall and nearby water towers. They mow up to 23 hours per day and automatically return to charging docks when needed.

The robots improve safety by eliminating the need for workers to navigate steep slopes and reducing noise compared with traditional gas-powered equipment. Brian Flynn, the city's horticulturist, said the constant mowing promotes healthier lawns and less pesticide use.

See the word eliminating there? Keep it in mind while reading this comment (archive) (MozArchive) dismissing the upcoming robot revolution:

Yes. Because AI cannot actually replace people, it can't do any actual work or produce any quality. It's crap. But it can be part of a bluff and scare tactic (as are layoffs) for having people work for less. And less. Getting to the point of effectively being slave labor is the real goal. "AI" is bullshit on its own.

Heh. Also, LLMs are crap? Really? When used for translating, they actually leave in the dust (archive) (MozArchive) Google Translate and the others (Their comprehensive evaluation of 242 translation systems, including 8 large language models, and online MT systems for all language pairs, confirmed that LLMs are outperforming traditional machine translations.) and have slammed the demand (archive) (MozArchive) for human ones into the ground - demand for substitutable skills, such as writing and translation, decreased by 20–50% relative to the counterfactual trend. Having tested GT and DeepL against LLMs many times, I myself was able to notice the grand canyon sized gap in quality. In fact, I consider the earlier iterations of machine translators almost completely useless because you end up having to spend so much effort fixing their outputs that it would be more efficient (and less annoying) to just do it all by yourself. LLMs are different and almost fully self-reliant; they made me give up on having a translations section on my site, as the automated ones seemed good enough to deprecate them. How about voice actors? Or the line judges in tennis who (again) have been literally completely replaced (for any venue that can afford the machines), in a way this person claims is impossible? Okay, now let's read (archive) (MozArchive) another comment:

The only thing I'd add to this is that this is the real value of AI. It's not making people more productive, it's not making products people want to buy, and it's not adding value to basically anyone. [...]

Well, if you're gone, then you have indeed not become more productive - just gone. Which is my point. The job losses, starvations, and deaths. It's not making products people want to buy? How about this (archive) (MozArchive) -Created by Jones using the AI platform Suno, Monet’s blend of gospel and R&B has made her perhaps the most visible AI artist to date. Jones writes about 90% of Monet’s lyrics herself, with the rest inspired by stories from her friends and community. Monet has charted on Hot Gospel Songs, Hot R&B Songs, Adult R&B Airplay and Emerging Artists, among other charts, and her catalog has amassed 44.4 million official U.S. streams. Sounds like adding value (at least in terms of profit) to me! And again, ask all those people using LLMs for translating, solving homework, and all kinds of other things. For a "less digital" example of adding value, did you know that your favorite sports player is partially an AI creation (archive) (MozArchive) already?

Advanced optical tracking systems, such as those employed during the FIFA World Cup 2022, utilize computer vision and deep learning algorithms to capture and analyze player and ball movements in real time [36]. These systems provide detailed metrics on players’ external load, technical and tactical performance, ball movement, and team behaviors [37]. Technologies like Second Spectrum, used in National Basketball Association (NBA) games, utilize AI and high-resolution cameras to elevate the accuracy and depth of sports analytics, offering precise analyses of player actions and game dynamics [38]. An additional example is the SkillCorner tracking system (SkillCorner, Paris, France), which delivers advanced tracking data and analytics to model and assess player performance in sports such as football, basketball, and American football.

These systems provide sports scientists and performance analysts with a comprehensive view of individual and team performance, offering actionable insights for training and competition[1,2,39]. By leveraging predictive analytics and unsupervised machine learning techniques such as clustering and dimensionality reduction, these tools also allow sports scientists to identify key contextual factors, such as opponent quality, tactical imbalances, and match congestion [40,41]. This real-time analysis is crucial for developing adaptive strategies that exploit opponents’ weaknesses. Beyond facilitating real-time analysis and strategic adjustments, these AI tools also enhance training methodologies [42,43], enabling coaches and analysts to perform scenario simulations by using reinforcement learning models that predict the outcomes of various tactical adjustments. This facilitates more dynamic decision-making, ensuring performance strategies remain flexible and data-driven during high-stakes matches.

It's not solely an academic masturbation exercise, either; actual, high-level teams use these technologies:

Real-world examples, such as the Toronto Raptors’ use of a ghosting method to simulate defensive behaviors [50], and Liverpool FC’s development of the TacticAI system in collaboration with Google DeepMind, demonstrate how AI can model complex in-game scenarios to predict opponent behaviors and suggest effective counterstrategies

And just to be clear, I'm not saying any of this to "shill" for this technology (which is an accusation I've actually encountered, just for pointing out the massacre of the "job market"). In fact, I don't like most of the applications of AI. I think "cloning" dead people (archive) (MozArchive) is creepy. I don't like people losing their pride and joy of painting, writing novels, etc. and having all their work be fed to the AI God and mixed up (then resold by the companies?). I don't like classic video games getting lazily remade by AI. I don't like the destruction of the environment (archive) (MozArchive) - A 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons (64 billion liters) of water directly through cooling, and projects that by 2028, those figures could double – or even quadruple. The same report estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed an additional 211 billion gallons (800 billion liters) of water indirectly through the electricity that powers them. I obviously don't like the mass spying, crime "prediction", etc either. But it's all happening, and it's fruitless to pretend it's not going to ravage the "job market" and bring about mass starvation and death. And as a corpse, it doesn't seem you can do much about any other problem, so this one has to be dealt with first.

Yet some people would still rather deny the robot revolution, and pretend the current system is going to stay viable for the foreseeable future. For example, a big deal has recently been made out of AI supposedly not bringing in a lot of profit (archive) (MozArchive) or productivity increases. But let's dig into the details of the study (local). First of all, this paper concerns exclusively LLMs - meaning it completely misses the effects of sports AI, restaurant AI, voice acting AI, self driving car AI, delivery drone AI, and countless others. So even if you're not impressed with LLMs, that is just a very small part of AI uses. Secondly, there are some problems with this study. I mean, it seems well designed to me but it just doesn't allow to draw sweeping conclusions. The authors seem to admit it when they say this, for example:

Figure 1, Panel (a) shows the prevalence of employer policies related to AI chatbot usage across our 11 occupations. Firms are now heavily invested in AI chatbots: about 43% of workers are explicitly encouraged to use them, another 21% are allowed, while only about 6% are explicitly prohibited from doing so. This marks a shift from early responses to ChatGPT, when many employers restricted its use due to concerns over data confidentiality and output accuracy (Humlum and Vestergaard, 2025).

Figure 6 breaks down the composition of AI-related job tasks by occupation. The most common task relates to the integration of AI chatbots into the workplace, accounting for 15%–40% of all new tasks, with the highest shares observed in IT support and software development. This pattern highlights that we are currently in a phase where substantial resources are being devoted to adapting workflows to AI chatbots. It is consistent with firms being in the trough of a productivity J-curve (Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson, 2021) and helps contextualize the modest time savings we observe in Table 1.

It's important to realize that LLMs are still new and not well integrated into workplaces. Only 43% of employers explicitly encourage their usage, meaning in 57% of cases, productivity gains will be missed. Of those that do use them, I still suspect they are just too new to be well integrated (substantial resources are being devoted to adapting workflows to AI chatbots). What other technology would take only a few years for its full potential to be realized? Compare the original bicycles or cars to modern ones and you'll get what I mean. Also consider that encouraging the usage of LLMs doesn't mean workers are going to splurge on them instantly. In fact, that is pretty rare:

As I suspected, they're not yet well integrated. Daily usage never reaches 40%; in most occupations it's less than 20. Imagine if it was 50%+ across the board (which it will be in a few years) - what results could be expected then? And yet, the media just screams "only 3% average time saved!!! AI is a dud!!!" (After analyzing data about 25,000 workers across 7,000 workspaces, users of AI only saved on average three percent of time.) without care for the context. 3% is actually a lot anyway, if you think about it. Assuming a company employs 1000 people, that's 30 that could be fired without compromising outputs. There are a few more studies like this, portrayed in the media as a debunk of AI but they actually don't do that if you dig deeper. I won't cover them all here but I smell some kind of a psychological operation. Numb the people by convicing them their jobs are safe, then pull the rug, and sweep the corpses under it. And it's kind of funny that a site called Futurism is playing the main character in the AI minimization game.