Posted on 10/29/2025 8:24:10 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
There has been much wallowing over news that Amazon and UPS have each just cut 14,000 jobs. Some Amazon employees report of being fired with all the heartlessness you might expect in a world where tech has taken over: by automated email. Maybe it was even AI which handpicked them to be de-emphasized, to use that dreaded 1990s expression. This, then, seems to be the future: where an elite of AI entrepreneurs grow rich while the rest of us slop off into idleness and unemployment. So much for those who have been gleefully predicting the implosion of the AI boom. Nvidia has just been revealed to be the world’s first $5 trillion company, with a market capitalization greater than the whole of Germany.
There is just one thing wrong with this analysis – and not just because it is hazardous to treat Amazon as if it were the entire economy (even if it seems sometimes to be so). If there are job losses in some areas, it doesn’t show up in the overall employment figures. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that the number of payrolled positions was up another 22,000 in August.
While job-creation has been a little on the quiet side since April, employment is up 1.466 million over the past 12 months – and this following on from a few thumping years of job-creation. This is a remarkably dry bloodbath.
It has become a received wisdom in recent years that AI is the industrial revolution of the white collar classes. Where agricultural workers saw their jobs ravaged by the development of threshing machines and later factory workers saw themselves made redundant by more efficient machinery, now it is the turn of the professional classes. Lawyers, accountants, marketing people; all will be swept aside as AI romps through their professions. Yet take a look at the employment figures and they show a more nuanced story. “Professional and business services” show a fall, down 55,000 payrolled positions over the past year.
Yet there has been a huge expansion in jobs in “private education and health services” – both of them industries which have been slated for mass job losses thanks to AI but which have grown 862,000 jobs over the past 12 months. If we are using AI to do our accounts we do not, at least yet, seem to be using it to educate our children or to take a look at our dodgy knees.
The biggest source of job losses over the past 12 months has been in manufacturing, where 78,000 jobs have been lost – continuing a tale of the past few decades as rustbelt industries shed jobs. Whether or not AI is responsible for some of that, the figure certainly doesn’t say much for Donald Trump’s trade wars. Wasn’t that the whole point of the tariffs, to protect US manufacturing jobs?
If AI does go on to lead to a mass net destruction of jobs it would be the first technology in history to do so. Similar claims have been made about all labor-saving technologies in history, from ploughs, to power looms to robotics. Yet for every job they destroyed, they provoked the creation of more than one new job in some other industry. They freed up labor to be used elsewhere, enriching society in the process. Why should we expect AI to be any different?
There is just one way in which AI is a bit different, though: it has a habit of consuming its own children. Among the jobs being lost at the moment is reported to be a large number of coding jobs as their jobs start to be done by… AI. The technology is taking over from the very people who have been creating it. Unless you are right at the forefront of the coding profession, you should be watching your back – or rather your phone for an automated redundancy notice.
I wish I could get replaced by AI. Maybe I could get a sweet severance package.
Impossible!!! Everyone knows that AI is DOOOMED!
One distinct possibility is that AI will revive the whole 1970s/1980s/early 1990s mall retailing experience.
😆
BTW, after one of my old girlfriends, I don’t like to see “severance” and “package” used in the same sentence. 😁
This sounds like gloom and doom...but consider what happened after we were promised roses and diamonds...all we needed was ELECTRIC AUTOMOBILES.
How’d that work out for us?
One just does not KNOW EXACTLY what will happen.
When you dig deeper these jobs aren’t being replaced by AI. AI is just telling them what jobs weren’t needed at all. It’s restructuring.
learn to code AI
There’s a great book called ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber.
learn to code AI“
A shrinking environment. AI will write its own code as time passes. In fact IT will be handled more and more by AI.
IIRC, “human resources” is one of the top 5 “BS” jobs
Nope. they said the same about robots, fuzzy logic and computers. Each created new billionaires and millions of jobs. Just the amount of powerful computing platforms needed, not to mention the facilities and HVAC and electricity.....ALL are good jobs.
Most likely these positions were on the fringe if they were worth continuing, apparently not...
btw, it is not artificial intelligence. It’s super powerful search engines with the ability to cobble shit together to form cohesive results.
They’re going to be woefully sorry to have done so. I was talking to my financial adviser yesterday and she said everyone is waiting for the AI bubble to burst and it will eventually. It’s great for research but anything else? The flaws are insane.
-SB
Nah. I’m old enough to remember all the previous “it will eliminate all the jobs” hysterics.
Another “disaster” veteran! It’s an honor to serve beside you then.
Damn, I’m still waiting for the robot/AI that can do my designs for me. I’ll put it to work and then smoke cigars and scratch my balls all day.
I’m told that soon the robot can take care of that as well.
AI will code AI
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