Comment by bpodgursky
6 hours ago
There's sort of no winning here!
AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
6 hours ago
There's sort of no winning here!
AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.
And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.
That's pretty disingenuous.
The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.
As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!
However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.
As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
What cheap labour? Tradespeople are not cheap (especially if you factor in the quality of the work). This just makes them even more expensive. Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive. Pretty important
>Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive.
Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.
"Those people" who? Homebuilders? You're saying you think the cost of homebuilding should be much higher? When I listen to some of you guys it's not hard for me to see why these DCs are so unpopular
Everyone should just compete with the trillions of dollars of capital floating around for AI? And it's their fault for suddenly being 'poor'?
Sounds like you're assuming people are paying pennies for labour. I don't think that's true at all
While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?
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And in time AI robots will reduce the need for these blue collar workers who are presently helping replace the white collar workers.
Just learned of a new acronym today "NILF," not in the labor force with over one million supposed NILFs out there -- dropped out and gave up.
Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.
Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)
Ummmm in time it's inevitable as in 2026 you do not need any skill to be a computer programmer. AI has replaced that once valuable skill and will continue it's way through ever white collar job til the robots (5 to 10 years) start taking the blue collar jobs away.
The blue collar job boom is great present day, but what they are helping build is their machine driven replacement.
Maybe this all sounds hyperbolic, but it's what Musk and all the AI overlords have said as far back as a 2013 or prior. Musk and Altman have noted the need for everyone to be on welfare (Universal Basic Income) since then. And no doubt we see this taking shape now within white collar jobs that once we held in high regard like programming being replaced by AI. I just created a whole startup web design, front-end, back-end development, native iPhone app, Android app and more using Codex (previously i hired others to help me a UI Design Front End guy).
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That's correct! AI is a negative for society no matter how you look at it. That's the entire idea!
> There's sort of no winning here!
> AI unemploys middle-class workers: AI is stealing jobs from the middle class!
> AI employs unionized middle-class workers: AI is stealing cheap labor from the rest of us!
Come on, you've got to know it's not going to employ those "unionized middle-class workers" for long. Their jobs are sort of like these jobs: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-... ("people participat[ing] in feeding their own careers into the A.I. wood chipper...Many people who contract for these companies understand that this is a short-term opportunity...before they themselves are automated out of the job").
And yeah, there's "sort of no winning" when you're gobbling up resources to build stuff people don't like.
I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.
> Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"
Not more "revealed choice" BS. There's no free choice: even if someone doesn't want to use ChatGPT, they may not be allowed to avoid it. I'm literally forced to use it at work, for instance. Others may be forced to use it due to market or other pressures.
Personally, I wouldn't mind of someone dropped a couple cluster bombs on each of these AI data centers, after construction is complete, and LLMs just disappeared as a practical technology.
> I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...
See my reply to the other guy who made the same point before you did.
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But that's true of most carpentry and electrical jobs. In-house carpenters and electricians are a minority.
I was responding to the implied symmetry in the GP: the "employs" does not balance out the "unemploys", because the unemployment is likely permanent and the employment temporary.
And then there's the fucked up resource allocation: throwing around insane amounts of money, driving up the prices of things the people actually want, to build hated things for investors and billionaires, which is a separate issue.
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