As it fucking should.

And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:

Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:

•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),

•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),

•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),

•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).

Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.

Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”

That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.

Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.

EDIT: for people who didn’t pay attention to my “think about Appalachia” comment.

Just because you can manage your own structure, community, and identity without a job doesn’t mean the people around you can too.

Especially older people who have spent their lives in the American capitalist system, which tells you over and over you are defined by the job you do and the things you buy with the money from that job. Hell, any of you with older relatives probably know somebody who retired, didn’t know what to do with themselves, declined and died a few years after.

And especially teenagers and young adults who were raised with the expectation of “grow up, go to college, get a job, raise a family” - and who suddenly won’t be able to get a job, as is already happening with the death of entry-level jobs and the increasing uselessness of college degrees - and have to define themselves and their future without ever having learned the tools to do so.

And when people lose the structure that gave their lives meaning, a lot of them find new meaning in their race, sex, or religion. And that’s how you get nationalist / fascist uprisings.

Because, going back to Appalachia, the reason Vance country is so deep fucking red is because “free trade” and neoliberalism sent all their jobs overseas and let Big Pharma addict their communities to opioids for profit, and because Democrats did two things about it, jack and shit.

You do not want to see what America turns into when half our jobs disappear into data centers and MAGA influencers convince millions of young men to blame immigrants and the left for their lack of a future. But I’m afraid you’re going to.

  • salacious_coaster@infosec.pubEnglish
    22·
    3 days ago

    There are some good points in there somewhere about how losing one’s job affects the mind. I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday. They’re not. We’re already reaching the limit of how much power and silicon we can throw at this, and LLMs still can’t actually replace a thinking person. Also the post completely misses the reason billionaires are pushing LLMs so hard, and ignores the water and electricity resource limitations we’re already up against.

    • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netOP
      14·
      3 days ago

      I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday.

      I share your concern with that point, to some degree. On the other hand, Cory Doctorow makes a great point: an AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money:

      The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

      And even if AI is shit at your job, the cost savings from not paying humans means corporations will still make more money providing a shitty AI product than a good human product, just like corporations make more money now selling shitty mass produced plastic crap than they do quality products from skilled workers.

      And from there you get mass unemployment and all the social and cultural impacts therefrom.

      (What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI? I think it’s a combination of “number go up” and an excuse to build the data centers the surveillance state needs for mass real time facial recognition, travel monitoring, and conversation recording/sentiment analysis, but that’s just me.)

      • salacious_coaster@infosec.pubEnglish
        10·
        3 days ago

        AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money

        Agreed, exactly. In the short term, at least. The LLM industry is the world’s biggest ponzi scheme right now though. If they had to start charging people enough to float themselves without borrowing from investors, the whole thing would collapse overnight because no one would pay for it. The endgame is not a profitable product to bring to market, because that’s not possible with this technology.

        What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI?

        They’re trying to race as fast as possible to the closest they can get to AGI (a delusion) for their own use before climate change starts killing off billions of people in the near future. They know that humanity is near-term fucked, and they’re feathering their nests and ripping the copper out of the walls at our expense. Some of them, like Musk and Yavin, are deluded though to think they can actually rule over a scaled-down human population (only the ones they can’t replace with AI) in a dystopian techno-feudal system. Either way, we’re expendable assets to be shoveled into their furnace.