Posted on 01/16/2024 6:21:29 PM PST by george76
In “The True Believer,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”
We’re about to find out just how right he was.
From the 1970s to roughly now, offshoring and automation gobbled up blue-collar factory-type jobs.
Auto companies laid off workers by the thousands and sent factories to Canada and Mexico.
...
White-collar types were notably unsympathetic, for the most part.
Berkeley professor and Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich declared the future belonged to the “symbolic analysts” — people who, in the words of a Steve Earle song, use their brains and not their hands.
Laid-off coal miners in the last decade were contemptuously told to “learn to code.”
But the worm has turned. Google is looking at laying off 30,000 people it expects to replace with artificial intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reports that large corporations across the board are planning to lay off white-collar workers.
Investor Brian Wang notes ChatGPT is already causing white-collar job loss.
In fact, ChatGPT can even code.
...
Unlike blue-collar workers, who got little sympathy, these laid off white-collar workers will have more clout.
Expect them to create much more of a stink than those laid-off steelworkers managed to back in 1977.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The white collar jobs will be absolutely shut down, because AI can for expand its capabilities until everything white collar it can do.
The leftists in tech will join antifa and torch the country. The antifa I see now are wc execs.
That’s the cornerstone of the Rat Party’s strategy....destroy the middle class and the working class.In succeeding they will have killed the GOP.
“Chat GPT is just doing the jobs that white collar Americans refuse to do!” - G W MORON
You can be sure the H1Bs will be kept on the job.
“White-collar types were notably unsympathetic, for the most part.”
Count me in that group. If the ‘workers’ back then had told their unions to SHOVE IT, rather than listen to those bastards (some, maybe most, mob-controlled) - most of those jobs would still be in the US. After all, Honda opened a non-union plant in Ohio over 40 years ago and it is STILL punching out car after car...and never a strike.
I just watched “Terminator 3” recently, and it brought to mind all the current talk of a black swan cyberattack event.
Well, now that AI is here, guess what? It’s a possibility that “Skynet” is already here, too.
That movie was made in 2003.
Imagine the stink the government workers will make when half of them get laid off. We easily have twice as many gov. workers as is needed.
Twitter laid of 80% of its workforce and ran much better and cleaner even if Elon was foolish enough to leave a Marxist in charge. I don’t know if that could be done with the government but at least half could be let go without significant change to the services it provides. Keep the military and border patrol of course. The FBI could be downsized to 10% of current staff. The IRS staff could largely be replaced by AI so figure a 75% reduction. All woke employees would need to go of course. No way around that.
Looking at the Ticktoks of their day, they mostly won’t be missed.
Bobos with nothing to do.
We’ve seen this movie before.
The federal government could be cut by close to half with no impact without AI; the problem is general legal protections for fed employees and EEO protections. If you are NOT a white male, you will never be fired, even for performance, because you can sue, and the office you work for has to pay legal fees out of budget, which they likely can’t afford. If you are a white male, there is still tons of documentation to go through, and if you are well liked, senior management will likely just try to find a new home for you rather than fire you. AI will just eliminate the dumb white collars (plenty of those today, not so much in 1970s). The smart ones will become more productive and more valuable by incorporating AI tools into their workflow.
The government will not lay off they will “retire them” through early buyouts and retirement. They will still have thier pensions and other local jobs likely they will be hired at minimum pay to work jobs that have experience destroying the local economies. Look to the wage problem of Colorado Springs for hordes of retired taking low pay to keep under the SS cap.
Since they will likely be better workers that are willing to work than the millennials and can understand English the migrants that just arrived likely have minimum or no skill.
Almost all of the people who were sent home to telework during COVID are going to find out that AI can do their jobs.
This is going to be huge, and it’s going to start this year.
No machine could have done my job until it learns how to drink - not just think.
That is a convenient excuse. There are way too many "white collar" jobs which are essentially useless. The executives are discarding people in those jobs so they will have enough cash left to pay themselves large "performance" bonusses.
It is a liquidation system. The throw-away people get their wrath diverted to a computer program which they cannot harm instead of an executive whom they could harm.
There needs to be places for people to go when they have been turned out of the large corporate systems. Some place besides the street.
In fact, ChatGPT can even code.
No, it cannot. That is just another excuse to layoff American workers and ultimately replace them with H1B slave labor brokered through Indian agencies.
Generated code from ChatGPT is like that dog that plays checkers. He doesn't do it very well, but it is an amazing feat that he can do it at all.
ChatGPT code is filled with glosses and references to methods and program libraries which do not exist. You can find better stuff from examples on The Code Project or Stack Overflow, of GeeksForGeeks.org And that is where ChatGPT extracts much of the content it uses to generate code.
ChatGPT can be marginally useful to generate simplified examples of an unfamiliar programming technique for learning purposes. It cannot as yet generate production-grade applications.
But it makes a perfect scapegoat for all kinds of management incompetence.
OMG! I’ve worked for decades doing vertical market database apps. Sooooo many marginally useful office worker could be replaced with AI. People should really be scared because so many of them are impediments to productivity that could be identified with good AI methodologies.
The change that is happening now is no less significant than the change wrought by the internet. Most have little clue and even less ability to adapt.
Yeah, I remember back in the 90s on how CASE tools were going to replace programmers, never happened.
This is nothing new and both sides find cycles where both are not needed.
All of a sudden nobody remembers all the white collar workers laid off not too long ago?
One test for whether a job is real or not is if there would be a black market if it was made illegal.
AI can do fake jobs. It may do some real jobs as well.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.