Posted on 10/25/2025 6:42:22 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Good news: U.S. tech companies are attacking the AI race like a modern Manhattan Project — spending unfathomable money and time to beat China to superintelligence.
Why it matters: The gap between the AI giants, employees and investors and ordinary Americans is growing by the month. This gap, if it persists, will increasingly define American political debate in the coming months and years.
"This is an enormously transformational moment," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Axios' Alex Thompson on "The Axios Show."
Elon Musk, an AI architect and optimist, and Sanders, an AI skeptic, agree about little. But both are warning that AI-powered robots could soon take so many jobs, America might need to pay U.S. workers not to work.
Between the lines: This isn't a hypothetical fear. Amazon, in a board meeting last year, discussed using robots instead of adding humans as sales rise — which could translate to 600,000+ people Amazon won't need to hire, the New York Times reports.
The big picture: Yes, robots, superintelligence and paying people not to work are all hypotheticals right now. But all three are hot topics: AI companies are burning through unprecedented sums of investment in order to will human-exceeding intelligence into quick existence.
But most Americans aren't big investors in the stock market, and definitely aren't privy to secondary investments in private AI companies like OpenAI. Those outside of AI are experiencing higher prices for staples like energy and tougher times finding jobs, especially entry-level ones for college grads.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs could be wiped away in five years, and unemployment could hit 20%. Trump's AI czar, David Sacks, hit back at "Doomer narratives." Congress shrugged.
Go deeper ... "Behind the Curtain: America's energy jam."
World coming to an end; Black & women hardest hit.
You have to know how to use AI as you do with any tool.
Without knowing what to ask it can give answers that you’re not looking for.
You also have to understand the output. You have to be “skilled in the art” as patent attorneys say, to be able to use what’s generated.
In my small business I am budgeting 5% of my gross income for adopting AI tools.
I have spent hours teasing out fine points related to how AI makes mistakes or is incomplete.
Advice from Axios? HaHaHaHa....
I have often asked Grok4 which is the product of one of Elon Musk’s companies, technical questions that it has gotten completely wrong. When you point this out it will argue over and over again that it is not wrong until you provide URLs demonstrating that it is wrong and even then, it often does not accept the correction very well.
Grok is a very useful tool, but using it has made me realize that it’s actual “intelligence” as opposed to knowledge is still nothing in comparison to the mind of an intelligent person. We still have a long, long way to go before AI will be replacing people even in highly technical jobs.
And this is said by someone who has recently put together and configured a computer to run and serve AI models. The models are amazing enough that I want to be ahead of the curve, but even the so-called “experts” often do not know what they are talking about because of lack of actual experience working with AI models. We are not at a point yet where AI has become a problem in reality, but the fear and big companies pouring huge sums into questionable pursuits is already a problem.
It’s only going to get better. Concepts like COCONUT (Chain of Continuous Thought) where AI does more reasoning in latent space rather than “thinking with words” as humans must do will accelerate the process. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
The article on AI is a more than a little off base.
The low & average human’s future with no worthwhile work for the majority of people? TV, drugs, porn, mindless online games...?
Dystopian society, here we come!
AI, like non-synthetic intelligence, tends to discriminate against certain... groups.
Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron is worth a mention here.
Btw, all this chatter about “No jobs, robots will do it all” only applies to the top of the 1st world economies, if it ever materializes at all.
Just finding ways to concentrate more wealth into fewer hands. It doesn’t exactly raise your confidence in capitalism. Seems like much, much higher corporate taxes will be needed so that the government can pay people not to work. Trusting government with all that money can’t be good either. They’ll just give it away to foreigners and to themselves or their political causes.
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