AI will replace routine — freeing people for creativity.
That’s what technological optimists have been saying for decades. But today, the reality is far more mundane: the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) is replacing people. The world of human labor is fading faster and more ruthlessly than we’re used to. The problem is no longer just unemployment as a temporary phenomenon, but a system in which people, once laid off, have nowhere to go.
According to data from the world’s largest job board, Indeed, demand for IT jobs is rapidly declining. Backend development, testing, technical analysis — all of this is being automated faster than education systems can adapt. Since the end of 2022, global tech corporations have laid off more than 635,000 employees. Behind this figure are engineers, designers, analysts, UX specialists — people who, until recently, were considered the elite of the digital world.
These layoffs are not temporary. They reflect a structural shift in the logic of labor. GPT platforms, code generators, and automated data processing pipelines are making the traditional employment architecture obsolete. The key change is the speed. Technology is replacing people faster than governments, societies, and families can adapt.
This is precisely why the issue of universal basic income (UBI) is resurfacing — not as a utopian idea from leftist manifestos, but as a political mechanism to prevent the collapse of the social structure. In a world where even highly skilled labor is losing its uniqueness, a new question emerges: how can we ensure people have basic agency in a world where there’s no work for them?
Another paradox arises: layoffs are most common in sectors that were, until recently, considered the flagships of the “new economy.” Technological progress, built by the hands of thousands of engineers, has become the very force pushing them out. In this sense, neural networks are not just changing the market — they are transforming the very notion of human usefulness. Right now — while replacement is happening in the upper tiers of professions — society must ask: who will be needed? And what will be the status of the rest?
Source – citation
The problem is that even those supposedly “freed for creativity” are now being squeezed by modern neural networks. After all, why pay a mid-level artisan-artist if a neural net can generate a more-or-less decent image with minimal cost? Voice actors encountered this same issue when it became clear that neural networks could already deliver passable voiceovers that closely resemble the original. No, it’s not perfect yet — but give it a few years, and neural voiceovers will become the norm.
Naturally, in an environment where the state aims to reduce its basic obligations and the service sector is growing, the influx of “valuable creative professionals” into the labor market creates a permanent problem — one that will only worsen as neural networks (and in the future, quasi-AI) continue to evolve, bringing to life the grim forecasts of 1980s cyberpunk. It appears that within the capitalist system, this problem is unsolvable (as, indeed, are many others).
Good. It’s sad and telling to see white-collar workers get angry about being replaced by machines.
You people didn’t care when it was blue-collar workers being replaced.
Hypocrites.
I care about all workers
So you are against having machines do the work of blue collar workers?
We should all be out in the fields with plows instead of using a tractor and assembling everything by hand in factories?
So far, AI has replaced little routine and has tried to replace a lot of art and enjoyment
AI has been able to take over the mediocre work by people who should be ashamed to call themselves creators in the first place.
I, for one, welcome them to get a real job like the rest of us.
You guys are legit delusional.
Bill Gates says this. Bill Gates says AI is doing labor substitution both blue and white collar.
So if Bill Gates says it then it must be true and honest? Yeah, the Billionaire who uses Venture Philanthropy to hide his manipulating of the markets he just happens to also invest in, too?
Whatever man. He also gives tons money to Media outlets so no one ever criticises him. Why would they bite the hand that feeds them? Conflict of interest much?
Revealed: Documents Show Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets](https://www.mintpressnews.com/documents-show-bill-gates-has-given-319-million-to-media-outlets/278943/)
Awards Directly to Media Outlets:
NPR- $24,663,066
The Guardian (including TheGuardian.org)- $12,951,391
Cascade Public Media – $10,895,016
Public Radio International (PRI.org/TheWorld.org)- $7,719,113
The Conversation- $6,664,271
Univision- $5,924,043
Der Spiegel (Germany)- $5,437,294
Project Syndicate- $5,280,186
Education Week – $4,898,240
WETA- $4,529,400
NBCUniversal Media- $4,373,500
Nation Media Group (Kenya) – $4,073,194
Le Monde (France)- $4,014,512
Bhekisisa (South Africa) – $3,990,182
El País – $3,968,184
BBC- $3,668,657
CNN- $3,600,000
KCET- $3,520,703
Population Communications International (population.org) – $3,500,000
The Daily Telegraph – $3,446,801
Chalkbeat – $2,672,491
The Education Post- $2,639,193
Rockhopper Productions (U.K.) – $2,480,392
Corporation for Public Broadcasting – $2,430,949
UpWorthy – $2,339,023
Financial Times – $2,309,845
The 74 Media- $2,275,344
Texas Tribune- $2,317,163
Punch (Nigeria) – $2,175,675
News Deeply – $1,612,122
The Atlantic- $1,403,453
Minnesota Public Radio- $1,290,898
YR Media- $1,125,000
The New Humanitarian- $1,046,457
Sheger FM (Ethiopia) – $1,004,600
Al-Jazeera- $1,000,000
ProPublica- $1,000,000
Crosscut Public Media – $810,000
Grist Magazine- $750,000
Kurzgesagt – $570,000
Educational Broadcasting Corp – $506,504
Classical 98.1 – $500,000
PBS – $499,997
Gannett – $499,651
Mail and Guardian (South Africa)- $492,974
Inside Higher Ed.- $439,910
BusinessDay (Nigeria) – $416,900
Medium.com – $412,000
Nutopia- $350,000
Independent Television Broadcasting Inc. – $300,000
Independent Television Service, Inc. – $300,000
Caixin Media (China) – $250,000
Pacific News Service – $225,000
National Journal – $220,638
Chronicle of Higher Education – $149,994
Belle and Wissell, Co. $100,000
Media Trust – $100,000
New York Public Radio – $77,290
KUOW – Puget Sound Public Radio – $5,310
Together, these donations total $166,216,526.
Completely irrelevant
According to data from the world’s largest job board, Indeed, demand for IT jobs is rapidly declining. Backend development, testing, technical analysis — all of this is being automated faster than education systems can adapt. Since the end of 2022, global tech corporations have laid off more than 635,000 employees. Behind this figure are engineers, designers, analysts, UX specialists — people who, until recently, were considered the elite of the digital world.
This is not because of “AI.” This is because the river of dirt cheap debt dried up and corporations ran out of gambling money to blow in pursuit of the next big thing. I’ve spent a lot of my career working for non-tech companies who have this idea that they have a massive treasure trove of data which they are sure can be monotized. So, they set out creating solutions in search of problems. Every project I’ve worked on in the last 5 years has failed for this exact reason. Rising interest rates brought most of the gambling screeching to a halt.
A good example is UnitedHealthcare’s recent use of AI in their claims system. It wasn’t that integrating AI was a problem so much as it just accelerated the realization that their claims rules are fucked.
The mass lay-offs these days have nothing to do with AI, but every media outlet loves to pretend it does.
It doesn’t have to be as obvious as mass layoffs.
Creators will receive fewer contracts because a lot of the potboiling crap they were making can be done just as well or better by a computer.
Every technological innovation has been described this way in recent history. Some think it utopic navel gazing. The reality is that until capitalism is seriously reigned in, or eliminated, this sort of thinking can never be true.
That said, I agree that AI is a tool for capitalism, it simply will not exist without it. It takes gigantic for profit server farms to function, farms run by big corporate entities with shareholders to appease.
(I read the content of the post)
The problem it’s trying to solve is wages… So yeah that checks out.
No it won’t. You already have things like Visual Basic and Tcl to replace routine. No amount of “prompt engineering” will be faster for a real routine tasks which are necessary to perform.
It does replace bullshit jobs. And jobs which bosses consider bullshit jobs. Thankfully the global economy is still kinda market-based, so it will compensate for the disturbance eventually, killing companies with such bosses.
Just very slowly and painfully.
There’s no single “capitalist system”. Marxists I’ve encountered loved to use the Duhem-Quine thesis, to support Marxist positioning of dialectics, and also to say the “real communism hasn’t been tried” in a smartass way. Well, the Duhem-Quine thesis works just as well for capitalism.
It’s very easy to explain to anybody who worked with computers, you have your actual program and the libraries you’ve used to hack it together. When something doesn’t work, it can be with your own logic or with that of the libraries. It’s hard to be certain which it is.
So - it’s just a new tool. It hurts us in new ways - 1) allows a machine to pretend to be human, 2) makes it even easier for a clueless human to appear understanding and to use tools which had a learning barrier, 3) introduces a Troyan horse which everybody considers necessary, because it’s the new shiny, 4) affects human magic thinking - talking to Elisa chatbot some people with mental conditions could believe things not true, now it’s become a bit more dangerous, 5) complicates any open information exchange and trustworthiness, so basically returns us to the age of rumors and trusted newspapers and just believing TV and radio, but with the social mechanisms of that old time atrophied.
I think it’s easy to see how some points of these 5 are at least partially addressed by “capitalism” whereas for most ideas of “socialism” they are deadly.
You already have things like Visual Basic and Tcl to replace routine.
Are you a time traveller from the 1990s?
VB is obsolete, unmaintainable shite, and Tcl is well-defined but so minimal as to barely be a language at all, and if anyone’s using it for greenfield projects, they should have their heads examined.
and Tcl is well-defined but so minimal as to barely be a language at all, and if anyone’s using it for greenfield projects, they should have their heads examined.
What doesn’t it allow one to do?
One can add Python to that list, with usefulness similar to Tcl (except being more relevant, but uglier).
Ah yes, creativity, the thing that payed the bills after every new innovation that got people fired.
and, besides that… creativity? so you can make art, that will serve as training data for the AIs that will be taking all the creativity jobs.
I mean yeah in a world where UBI is a thing, where food, clothing and basic shelter are a given, working is an extra if you want to live a fancier life… the idea of AI/machinery taking the majority of the jobs and most people just moving to creative pursuits and passion projects is the utopia concept.
So let’s make that world.
I swear, it’s just sad watching how stupid most people are in regards to AI and working.
It’s like, the entire point of getting paid for a job is because it’s something we wouldn’t otherwise do for free. Using machines to do the work that we wouldn’t do unless we got paid for has been the direction we’ve been going in since the invention of the fucking wheel.
This is hypocrisy, greed, and entitlement on full display. Neo-liberal white collar workers are mad they’re now experiencing the same fate blue collar workers experienced decades ago.
Better pick up that acoustic guitar collecting dust since college
let’s see how many people actually read the post and not just a title. 👌
stolen from here: https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9823609.html#cutid1
who stole from here: https://t.me/Taynaya_kantselyariya/12400I read the post, but with this kind of title people actually should just skip the article and ridicule the clickbait title. Because it’s intentionally selling the opposite message of the actual post. And that opposite message is not worth reading in detail.
Anyone who’s used AI for more than about 10 minutes knows that it isn’t ready to replace human workers yet.
It’s always funny when tech companies decide to fire all of their programmers so that they can replace them with AI only to have to rehire them again all of about 2 months later
It’s not necessarily a 1:1 person-replacer. Instead you can squeeze a smaller number of employees to do more work. I suspect artists and animators are losing a lot of work. And we’re still in early days. Even if LLMs don’t improve much, our implementation will.
It literally replaced bunch of jobs at my friend company already.
Such as what?
Sitting around hallucinating?
deleted by creator
I dunno, that’s a lot of reading. I’d rather share what I think than learn what someone else thinks. Can’t I just react to the first impression?
You need a /s, I’ve actually seen people honestly make arguments like this.
Knock yourself out
That you. I don’t feel strongly one way or the other.
