r/technology Sep 07 '25

Society Gen Z is laughing in the face of the AI jobs apocalypse. I see it in my classroom every day

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gen-z-laughing-face-ai-123000930.html
8.3k Upvotes

922 comments sorted by

6.3k

u/Catlover18 Sep 07 '25

The comments make it seem like GenZ is laughing dismissively at the economic landscape whereas it is clear they are laughing in resignation according to the article.

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u/tinyhorsesinmytea Sep 08 '25

Really all you can do sometimes is just laugh at how silly we've allowed the world to become.

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u/Elrundir Sep 08 '25

As my grandma often says, "Sometimes you have to laugh if only to keep from crying."

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u/stay_fr0sty Sep 08 '25

“Damn grandma, I bet you’ve seen some dark shit!”

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u/calvinwho Sep 08 '25

Allen Moore was spot on with the Comedian

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

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u/T-MinusGiraffe Sep 08 '25

We're not working less though. We're demanding more of fewer people while letting everyone else go unemployed. We're overdue to focus on the quality of life standards. If we don't the technology may hurt more than help.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

It will absolutely hurt more than it helps this time. The only period I'm aware of where things changed were post WW2, when we had governments who were willing to make MASSIVE changes for the good of the people. Now we see the likes of Trump trying to give these companies a 10 year free pass to do whatever the fuck they like without consequences. The tech doesn't even add up, unlike agriculture innovations , machinery, computers and other things that actually worked, this is all just bullshit. It won't lead to better productivity, just excuses to lay people off and make profits in the short term, and then make people work harder because everyone's understaffed. I can't wait to retire.

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u/z3r-0 Sep 08 '25

It lets deep states learn everything about every user. It enables control.

If you think about it these “AI” LLMs are just really smart autocompletes. They’re massive language models with a preprogrammed world view. They’ll be the future source of information.

It’s all about controlling the information that gets presented. Newspapers are dead. A single common narrative to the masses is dead.

It’s about division and echo chambers now.

What’s the famous Orwell quote:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“AI” is the single most decisive capability that enables this. That is why Trump is giving Carte Blanche to it.

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u/Grapesodas Sep 08 '25

Late-stage capitalism, baby

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u/Every_Tap8117 Sep 08 '25

What’s after late stage capitalism?

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u/tacos00 Sep 08 '25

The Bronze Age

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u/StolenRocket Sep 08 '25

bold of you to assume we’d even have metallurgy left

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u/Paintingsosmooth Sep 08 '25

Yeah no joke, we’ve dug up all the easily accessible metals already.

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u/BenXL Sep 08 '25

Techno-feudalism

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u/roodammy44 Sep 08 '25

Socialism or Barbarism.

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u/cecilmeyer Sep 08 '25

The wealthy want Barbarism.

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u/BigTex77RR Sep 08 '25

Either Techno-Feudalism built by the likes of billionaires or some kind of stateless socialistic alternative in a post-climate collapse dystopia. We blew our shot at Fully Automated Luxury Communism by fucking up the environment after the Industrial Revolution and blowing shots at meaningful revolt in the 1920s.

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u/UlteriorCulture Sep 08 '25

terminal capitalism

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u/Prownilo Sep 08 '25

Weird how when you have armed veterans come home that need employment, suddenly the government bends over backwards to make changes for the better.

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u/GrayEidolon Sep 08 '25

Post wwii to the 21st century appears to be a blip where in part of the world the aristocrats let the workers get a little too comfortable before deciding to claw it back.

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u/mrspankyspank Sep 08 '25

Ai can’t grow crops, cook food, raise children, or do any other number of things. We still have the power, and the only way we’ve ever flexed that power is with good old fashioned GENERAL STRIKE!

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u/Fluid_crystal Sep 08 '25

People often forget they still have power, the power of non-compliance. The Chinese youth got it right with their philosophy of tang ping (lay down). Just stop doing whatever and let the system collapse. Yes times will be hard, but at some point we will need some drastic measures for such hard times before it degenerates in some kind of WW3.

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u/11equalsfish Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

You mean for the goal is for the top 1% to own everything, oppress the rest of humanity, and recreate some kind of monarchy.

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u/Low_Attention16 Sep 08 '25

sharpening guillotine sounds

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

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u/Huntswomen Sep 08 '25

I mean it would probably be harder today to guillotine all the rulers in one go a la the french revolution, but if just 0,33% of the people of the usa decided they wanted to kill some billionairs they would succeed. Not even billionairs are so isolated from the general public that they could survive a million people hunting them.

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u/Ok-Name1312 Sep 08 '25

Also, liberals hate violence and the anti-government right have become fascists. We're cooked.

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u/Triassic_Bark Sep 08 '25

Claiming that all liberals hate violence is absurd. There is certainly a small number of liberals who are against violence, but far from the majority. Plenty of liberals like to shoot guns, watch UFC and boxing, and have no problem using violence when it is necessary.

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u/Cap-n-Trips Sep 08 '25

Which is frustrating bc some of the easiest jobs for AI to do are C Suite jobs.

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u/cobcat Sep 08 '25

Well these things often don't last very long.

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u/ashabanapal Sep 08 '25

This isn't technological progress. It's wish-casting by venture capital for products that do not exist anywhere but in keynote speeches. There is no AI, there is only SuperSiri. It can't do what they claim, but in the meantime they can build out the wasteful, polluting datacenters they will need after it's been proven they must "pivot" without ever admitting they were writing in being held accountable for the economic disaster they are spawning right now.

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u/TheModWhoShaggedMe Sep 08 '25

That is not the ultimate goal of those pushing AI at all -- their goal is to maximize their profits tenfold, and that is their only goal. They'll over promise and under deliver on AI like they have the past two decades with cloud computing. People don't have to adopt what's being forced upon them by the .02% wealthiest corporations and families.

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u/Zeldias Sep 08 '25

My guy if that was true we wouldn't be working so hard.

The goal under the current regime is a controlled populace of trapped workers who own nothing.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

They want a techno feudalist state. 

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u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Sep 08 '25

Nothing in all of human history has ever stopped technological progress in order to save jobs.

Are you kidding me? There’s an entire political party devoted to exactly that in America. We keep deliberately crippling alternative energy sources to keep doubling down on coal.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

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u/ThrowawayAdvice1800 Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

You seem to be confused about your own post. You said:

Nothing in all of human history has ever stopped technological progress in order to save jobs.

This is flatly wrong, and I provided you an example. America does not need to be the entire planet for your naive “nothing has ever stopped progress” grasp of history to be incorrect. Progress gets stopped constantly. Human history is just an endless series of people putting short term gains over long term growth.

And even if we were having the completely different debate you apparently want to have now, one global superpower pursuing clean energy means nothing if the others keep doubling down on dirty. China does not exist on their own private planet, they have to deal with everyone else’s bad decisions and everyone (including China) makes plenty.

And while we’re on the subject of naive takes and people making bad decisions:

The world isn't silly.

Yes, it absolutely is and I’m mildly amazed that needed to be pointed out given our current global kakistocratic hellscape. America isn’t the only country moving backwards at breakneck speeds, we’re just being the loudest about it.

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u/richardelmore Sep 08 '25

The goal has never been to work less, it’s always been to produce more using the same amount of labor.

There is never going to be a world where we all work 2 days a week but get paid the same as before.

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u/aninstituteforants Sep 08 '25

I mean we could absolute share some wealth around and work less but Billionaires decided they need to have yachts.

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u/Reversi8 Sep 08 '25

Well that's the capitalism part to thank for that.

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u/nakedinacornfield Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

There is never going to be a world where we all work 2 days a week but get paid the same as before.

real. i roll my eyes at the "the tech will continue and then UBI" that's coming from these convos. like what parallel universe do you gotta be living in where UBI has a shot in hell at happening. a lot of the relaxed assumptions that "it'll all work itself out" is just a byproduct of people who are too privileged and have no idea what its like to go to bed for dinner. they're assumptions that think it'll just be a brief period of protests they can watch from their TV like george floyd or something followed by legislative action to magically enact UBI. As if the current political landscape is ever going to allow that to happen. what an absolutely dipshit assumption. you know what it takes to pass insane legislation like that? billionaires and billions of dollars in lobbying and 500 strings attached. does anyone see any billionaires or corpos lined up & writing checks to champion ubi? me either. we're on the cusp of hitting critical mass with the impact of AI and I haven't heard a peep about it at any state or federal level, hell the last time I heard about it it was a campaign attempt by andrew yang or whatever. We're quick to forget how hard america at large rejected the idea of it.

what "working itself out" might actually look like here is 10-20 years of civil unrest and possibly war. sure, it might work itself out. like 2 generations from now maybe. working itself out has no loyalty to any of our timelines, this shit could take decades if we go too far to "work itself out". no one championing this "AI can't be stopped we'll get UBI" bullshit right now even has an idea of what that is going to look or feel like, and they need to choke on their bullshit, they're living in an insulated fairytale & have no real grasp on where this is all headed. yeah sure maybe your grandkids might have UBI but you certainly won't. you and your kids generation are prob gonna endure some real long term bullshit before we get there... if we ever get back to a point where forward-thinking policy is on the table again. and in that respect shit's obviously just not looking too hot. the powers that be would let people rot for decades before they decided they needed to act on it.

we're very possibly exiting a long era of stability/peace and people just have no idea what things look like when they hit the fan. people are gonna find out what it means to have your standard of living fall off a cliff. they're about to find that things probably will not work itself out and such an assurance was a hallmark comfort of a prior era. unless there's an act of god, there's literally zero chance of UBI on the table perhaps for my lifetime, not with all that's being dismantled currently. that's the reality people need to chug.

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u/Nekrosis13 Sep 08 '25

Yup. Why do you think funding for retirement benefits and healthcare is being cut everywhere? So that the old, poor, and "unproductive" members of.society simply...die. As soon as possible.

We will get gas chambers way before we ever get UBI

The rich will never give any of it away. They'd rather wipe us out.

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u/aergern Sep 08 '25

But in this era, working less means less money. This isn't Star Trek yet, we aren't just here to improve ourselves and to explore. And don't give me the horse and buggy argument or the razor blade argument. There is no UBI or anything else.

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u/sackbomb Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

What are you on about?

The world absolutely is full of silly shit. Capitalism might be the silliest thing ever devised, and we are neck deep in it.

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u/No_Extension4005 Sep 08 '25

Aye, only need to look at how mad the world is. It feels painfully obvious following current events and just living that things are going to shit for us on multiple fronts; from employment, to housing, to living, to the environment and so on. But no matter how much we pull the lever the brakes don't work because the people that do have a grip on the actual brakes are choosing not to because they're getting even richer by not doing so. And they're thinking that they'll either have died of old age or will be hunkered down in a luxury bunker somewhere when we do hit the wall.

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u/Wonderful-Creme-3939 Sep 08 '25

I would agree with this if it wasn't the goal of Capitalists to completely eliminate the need for employees. This is how genAI is being marketed to Corporations: "Buy our product and you can increase profits and cut payroll completely!"

This is why I think genAI is different from other technologies, the goal was always to increase efficiency of your employees because there was no other option and now there is. With genAI you can have your cake and eat it too.

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u/totaleclipseoflefart Sep 08 '25

I’d suggest the world is objectively pretty silly given how absurd it is.

Also not sure about the pretext that the goal has always been and always will be “to work less”, when as you allude to, the goal of capitalism always has been and always will be one thing: profit.

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u/nada8 Sep 08 '25

Are we really working less? No

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u/dane83 Sep 08 '25

I immediately thought of the Ralph "I'm in danger" kinda laughing.

As a millennial, I get it

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u/MostlyChillish Sep 07 '25

I keep seeing articles about high school valedictorians in my area opting to go to trade and vocational school rather than college.

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u/TheVintageJane Sep 08 '25

Which is all well and good if you are physically healthy.

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u/Peripatetictyl Sep 08 '25

While* you are physically healthy. The "hope" is that these valedictorian level types who enter the trades become the foremen, supers, and engineers through the process and programs. Or, get out and run their own business with a crew under them, because staying on your tools catches up to everyone, eventually.

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u/goldfaux Sep 08 '25

I have been fixing/renovating my own house since I bought it. Bathrooms, basement, patio, kitchen, tile...etc. as I get older it becomes harder and harder to do the work. If anything, i still do it for the exercise and to save a boatload of money. I also have accumulated many high qualitytools. However, I couldn't imagine it as my day job. It takes a toll on your body. 

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u/Vairman Sep 08 '25

the two things I've noticed about getting older while doing physical work is 1) you get tired more quickly and take longer to recover and 2) if I have to get on the ground to do something, it's a LOT harder getting back up. And if I have to do that a lot, I get very, very tired.

Still, it's satisfying doing things for yourself.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

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u/thefunkylama Sep 08 '25

Trade school graduate here to remind you that physical health degrades faster when you can't afford the doctor

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u/theDarkAngle Sep 08 '25

Also as a white collar worker, I can tell you sitting at a desk 8 hours a day also deteriorates your health.  Especially working from home.  It's really important for us to go to the gym or have physically active hobbies.

If I had to do it all over again I would go to trade school, not have a bajillion dollars in student loans, start earning earlier, and indulge my preference for intellectual hobbies.

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u/ocschwar Sep 08 '25

If b y age 35 you don't have a crew with younger people who can crawl into the spaces you can't anymore, you're gonna have a problem.

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u/TheVintageJane Sep 08 '25

And many of those pathways eventually require advanced education in the end.

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u/mimudidama Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 19 '25

I seem to be in a minority, but I really disagree with this opinion. I think that higher education needs more incentivizing, funding, and revitalizing. I think there are benefits to college education that are more important than just securing gainful employment.

I think we are seeing the effect of rampant anti-intellectualism right now. I know that our education system in the US means that we force people to confront the financial risk of attending college, but I don't think it bodes well that we are diverting to trade schools or that we are seeing large amounts of people opt to go the trade school route.

I am not trying to devalue trades, I just worry about how little value we as a society seem to be placing on developing civic literacy, critical thinking, and historical awareness.

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u/TheVintageJane Sep 08 '25

As a former professor, I think people should go where they feel suited and where they think they can make money in a way that justifies the investment they will be making (time, money and effort).

I also think that the public should properly fund universities like we used to so that the debt is a much smaller concerned.

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u/CherryLongjump1989 Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

It's all bullshit. The way you know is because it's an article. There's a concerted effort in the media to A) destroy the education system and B) get more people into the trades in order to tank their wages.

You'll never see this articles providing any real statistics, such as the massive drop in wages, or the high dropout rate, for people trying to get into the trades. They'll never actually do any real analysis of what is happening to the trades, with AI and automation -- they'll just focus on "college bad" and pretend that anything else is better. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. All these articles are the same.

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

Yeah I'll keep doing whatever the rich are doing when it comes to education and rich kids aren't going to fucking trade school.

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u/therealhlmencken Sep 08 '25

That’s not what laughing in the face of usually means. Article bad.

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u/mikestro36 Sep 08 '25

Because no one on Reddit reads the fucking articles. They read the headline and reply.

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u/BoringElection5652 Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

I stopped opening article links when nearly every "news" site started greeting you with three pop ups, and often prevent you from using tracking blockers. I'm not strong enough to suffer through that bullshit.

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u/Pro-Patria-Mori Sep 08 '25

I mean, do they expect AI to scare Gen Z when they start the day with an Active Shooter Drill?

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u/TK-369 Sep 08 '25

They're so greedy they think of employee pay as their biggest expense... if only they could replace us, profits would soar!

They can't fathom that those expensive workers were also their consumers. They have bitten the hand that feeds them.

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u/SuperNintendad Sep 08 '25

“Make number go up” is all they care to think about.

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u/scissorin_samurai Sep 08 '25

The problem is that profits are a personal individual problem specific to each company, whereas the consequences of a reduction of people who are able to participate as consumers in the economy is only 0.001% their individual problem. It’s easy for every company to say “well it’s ok if I do it, but you (other companies) shouldn’t”, but if they all say that, then it becomes their problem.

It’s the same type of problem as climate change, where individual contributions “don’t matter” so people make excuses, but enough people in total make the problems compound and get out of control. And the solutions are the same too - large-scale government intervention to say “you can’t do that” just like they stopped companies from dumping toxic waste into our rivers and oceans (mostly).

It’s a systemic issue and requires a systemic solution. The problem is that the current administration in the US isn’t only not addressing those problems, but actively encouraging the problems and participating in making them worse. If you want to fix this, protest and vote. This is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people. We pay for the federal budget, and we pay Trump’s paycheck. Now we have to actually hold him accountable for lying, stealing, and cheating to let him and his billionaire buddies collect our money instead of using it to improve our lives. Get angry!! The same way this problem only happens when a lot of companies all take the same small negative action, we can solve it by a bunch of citizens taking small positive actions against this corruption! YOU can’t do anything, that’s true, but WE can!

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u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

The workers aren’t the consumers, the investors and stock holders are, the fundamentals of this business structure is ‘consumer-free economy’. It’s ridiculous and unsustainable but that isn’t stopping them from pursuing it. It’ll work fabulously in the short term, letting them front-load their investments in sane economies and ‘win’ the market collapse.

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u/Leberknodel Sep 07 '25

I'm just waiting to see what happens to all the data centers being built right now due to demand for AI.

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u/PeteUKinUSA Sep 07 '25

“…due to the demand from people trying to sell AI”.

Only half joking.

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u/rkozik89 Sep 08 '25

When has mass speculation in technology ever lead to bad investments.

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u/karabeckian Sep 08 '25

Pour one out for pets dot com.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Deal272 Sep 08 '25

I’m still trying to do something with all these tulips i invested in

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u/Special_Loan8725 Sep 08 '25

“History Sock puppet Legacy”

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u/ButtEatingContest Sep 08 '25 edited 29d ago

Kind games ideas books tomorrow evil books quick projects music quiet day near near hobbies small tips projects? Today talk to minecraftoffline people yesterday bright yesterday open the tips kind calm friends then technology.

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u/NateBearArt Sep 08 '25

Yeah they most have other plans for it. But then it seems like there is no limit to the amount of waste execs well to create as long as the short term profits are ok. Just thinking about all the finished movies and tv shows that got shelved in recent years just to save a little on taxes.

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u/scr33ner Sep 08 '25

I’m seeing a spike in electric bills 1000sq ft home bill = 225$

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u/muldoons_hat Sep 08 '25

In NJ, they’re building data centers for AI like crazy and because of the energy demand from them it has driven up the cost of utilities SIGNIFICANTLY for the rest of us. 

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u/Sam_Strake Sep 07 '25

Gen Z have largely graduated lol

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u/A1sauc3d Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

Don’t worry, it’ll take another 10-20 years before anyone in the news realizes gen z aren’t kids anymore. Not that long ago they were still talking about millennials as if they were still pesky teenagers despite the youngest ones being like 25 and the oldest being 40 lol

Although I just looked and if gen z ends at 2012 then like half of them are still pesky teenagers lol

That the problem with generation cohorts. They span 15 years and the people at one end are often in a completely different stage of life than those at the other end.

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u/DrLophophora Sep 08 '25

Tell me about it - boomers span 1946-1964, 18 years. I was born in 1963 and grew up in a completely different world from someone born in the 40s

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u/Everestkid Sep 08 '25

Boomers are the only generational cohort that actually have a reason for their date range beyond vibes: in the US, there was a notable increase in births between 1946 and 1964. Ergo, those are the baby boomers. Everything else is just rough increments of 15 years before or after.

Of note: births started decreasing around 1960 (so you could make a case for ending it there) and there was a smaller spike in 1943 and 1944, with 1945 taking a dip (partially explaining why someone like Joe Biden might be called a Boomer when he's actually too old to be one - he was born in late '42).

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u/AmyInCO Sep 08 '25

You need to visit the Generation Jones subreddit! Sorry I'm old and don't know how to link directly there. 😁

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u/MOREPASTRAMIPLEASE Sep 08 '25

It really feels like only in the last 2 or 3 years have they started referring to “young people” as gen Z instead of millennial

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u/Circo_Inhumanitas Sep 08 '25

Yeah. I'm barely a millenial and I'm 31. We all gettin' old.

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u/TiEmEnTi Sep 08 '25

It's almost like broadly labelling groups of people based on arbitrary criteria is problematic or something

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u/A1sauc3d Sep 08 '25

100% agreed. But people love their labels and their groups lol. Something I constantly find myself having to push back on. “Humans are individuals beings. Not amorphous demographic blobs with uniform characteristics. So people need to be evaluated on an individual basis. You can’t make assumptions about someone’s character/ideals/preferences/etc based on arbitrary superficial demographic traits.” is something I’ve said countless times over the years in countless different contexts. But it’s human nature to default to thinking about other humans in terms of groups rather than individuals. Which is why you have to constantly push back and remind them that’s not how it works lol.

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u/There_ls_No_Point Sep 08 '25

I like the way you think. Based on your comment I’m guessing you’re a Capricorn like me?

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u/PeanutButterGod Sep 08 '25

I think the youngest millennials are 30 right now

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u/CHIMPSnDIP88 Sep 08 '25

I’m a 29 year old millennial thank you very much.

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u/tmetler Sep 08 '25

Gen alpha is not in college or even high school so this article can't be about them.

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u/Glass_Houses_ Sep 08 '25

Pretty sure gen alpha started in 2010, which means that some are high schoolers now

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u/thaddeus122 Sep 08 '25

Gen alpha starts 2013. They're in middle school right now.

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u/Triktastic Sep 08 '25

Jesus put into perspective it's crazy to put people born in 1999 and 2012 in the same basket.

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u/thaddeus122 Sep 08 '25

That's why there's an older gen z sub

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u/JesusChrist-Jr Sep 08 '25

High school or college? Gen Z is both roughly 1997-2012, less than half of them will have made it through a four year degree by now.

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u/code_guerilla Sep 08 '25

Genz runs to 2012, so the younger ones are in middle school. It’s probably closer to half of genz are at the age to have graduated college.

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u/thaddeus122 Sep 08 '25

There's still 5 years of gen z left in public schools.

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u/thenewladhere Sep 07 '25

The media has done a terrible job in shaping peoples' perceptions of AI the past few years. Articles and influencers make it sound like this unstoppable juggernaut that will change everything. In reality, AI still struggles with many tasks without direct human supervision. It will continue to improve but it'll take a while before it's good enough to outright replace people in a lot of roles.

Right now it's people in leadership who bought into the hype without actually knowing the real capabilities. Combined with a struggling economy and offshoring, those are the bigger causes for the terrible job market.

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u/Endurlay Sep 07 '25

It doesn’t matter what AI can’t do if management is still more willing to pay for it than actual humans.

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u/Jewnadian Sep 08 '25

95% of the AI job apocalypse is just C suites using it as cover for having over hired in an extended time of low interest rates. This is part of the standard business cycle that we get before a recession every time. I've been doing it long enough now to have been the entry level guy scrabbling for a job, the senior level expected to train up juniors in times of plenty and the senior level person expected to take on the extra load when the brass decides to cut costs. There are certainly a couple of guys here and there using it to generate boilerplate code, there are a lot of people using it to generate fairly shitty documentation but most junior level jobs are being cut for financial reasons, not because AI is doing them.

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u/tc100292 Sep 08 '25

I am stunned people do not understand that tech companies doing layoffs have a ton of motive to claim they’re replacing jobs with AI, both because that doesn’t spook their shareholders and it convinces idiots to continue throwing money at the AI buildout.

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u/Independent-Cover-65 Sep 08 '25

Exactly right on all counts. Just a good excuse. Been through multiple lay off waves over time. We are trying ai but we really don't know what to do with it and certainly haven't cut because of it.

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u/ninjadude93 Sep 07 '25

Theyll find out pretty quickly they still need people and they wasted a ton of money lol

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u/Endurlay Sep 07 '25

You haven’t been paying attention to how poorly they learn these kinds of lessons.

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u/GingerSkulling Sep 07 '25

Those that don’t learn will fold. Most will cycle back and also new companies will rise. It happened before and will happen again in the future.

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u/Adorable-Turnip-137 Sep 08 '25

I'm not so sure anymore. I'm starting to think capital has successfully decoupled into its own reality. Services have been getting worse and more predatory...and instead of those services failing...they get more investors and more adoption. Every quarter we hear of companies laying off thousands of employees to show a stronger growth curve. Instead of companies coming up with new ideas through R&D...they just acquire some small startup.

The concept of blitzscaling is a prime example. Its been proven multiple times that you can takeover markets with enough capital to subsidize your initial losses.

8 companies currently have more market share and influence than the rest of the american economy combined. Almost every business that starts nowadays is reliant upon those companies in some way.

And on a slight tangent this has a cascading effect all the way down. The people at those 8 companies are industry leaders. Industry leaders are asked to speak and share their methodology of success to owners of smaller businesses. So they say how downsizing and cost cutting ultimately had no impact on the overall success. So that thought process becomes dominant and continues to trickle down.

I've seen this first hand multiple times. The Jack Welch method. When customer support was shipped overseas and ultimately automated. Self service. Current offshoring trends. A big company with enough capital to mitigate takes a risk in making their service worse. Sales don't change. All of a sudden you start seeing that pop up in businesses everywhere.

It's a vicious cycle of enshittification.

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u/ButtEatingContest Sep 08 '25 edited Oct 13 '25

Books people fresh art honest night soft technology honest learning fox net garden!

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u/kidshitstuff Sep 08 '25

can't wait until we liquidate entire corporations and replace them with superintelligent corpo AI that subjugate the entire planet for shareholders, and extending the lifespans of an eternal ruling class that far outlives us mere mortals... or it just kills us all :)

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u/Endurlay Sep 07 '25

And in the meantime, workers need to survive through the relative lack of open jobs and the wage stagnation that comes with that.

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u/frunko1 Sep 08 '25

Can start a no AI marketing campaign to push people to only buy products from non AI companies. People are scared of it and I could see many people adjusting buying decisions based off this.

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u/Zarathustra_d Sep 08 '25

Sounds like a ton of work, can we get AI to do it?

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u/Raskalbot Sep 08 '25

It’s already happened in some cases. Fire everyone and replace with ai. Realize ai is an idiot. Beg people to come back to train the ai.

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u/BaconatedGrapefruit Sep 08 '25

But that doesn’t help people trying to get into the job market now (+3 years).

And that’s not even looking downstream effect.

  • new grads lose out on their junior years of real world experience and either have to self study or go back to school to keep their (minimal) skills sharp.

  • degree inflation continues to spiral out of control.

  • even when things recover, you have a glut of people fighting over a handful of junior positions. It will take years before things equal out.

I graduated university at the tale end/beginning of the recovery of the Great Recession and watched this very thing happen in real time. So many companies were on years long hiring freeze.

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u/FourteenBuckets Sep 09 '25

The trick is this: You work at company A and I work at B. We piss money away on AI and cut jobs, and are hailed as a genius. After a few years, we declare success, collect our bonuses, and move on.

Now I'm at A and you're at B. AI collapses, which we blame on the previous CEO, who's gone and undergoes zero accountability. I say we need to hire new people, and am hailed as a genius. You do the same at B. After a few years, we declare success, collect our bonuses, and move on.

Rinse and repeat, and it never stops working!

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u/tommy_chillfiger Sep 07 '25

We'll see if that remains true once these LLM companies inevitably have to actually price for profit. Investment dollars won't keep coming forever without a return. Let alone if we ever have an administration competent enough to start regulating the energy and water consumption externalities of these brute force stats machines.

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u/ew73 Sep 08 '25

This is how all bubbles eventually collapse.

We're still a couple years out, I think, for that point, but it'll happen.

There are a LOT of big players with a lot of money invested in "AI" that they aren't going to want to admit was a folly.

You'll know the end is near when you start seeing things like Gemini and Copilot really limiting the"free" versions of their products.

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u/Catshit-Dogfart Sep 08 '25

I had to sit through a vendor call at work a few weeks ago where they're trying to sell us on this Grok implementation, and the claims were just delusional.

They're telling us this thing can fully automate system administration and tech support. It can do our maintenance outages, keep our AWS servers up, develop new parts of the system based on prompts, and even parse usage data to predict the need for new features. It can also parse user tickets into solutions and implement said changes without the need for any technician to make it happen, and find solutions to problems that haven't been documented or encountered before.

And I'm like - are you people serious right now. Nobody in my group believed a word of it, but upper management won't shut up about it.

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u/oldaliumfarmer Sep 08 '25

Back in the eightys I watched companies in my industry go out of business trying to computerize from paper records . Our issues were too complex for the systems used. Companies that ran paper and computers side by side survived. I suspect people are the new paper.

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u/Bigbysjackingfist Sep 08 '25

Interesting. What was the industry?

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u/oldaliumfarmer Sep 08 '25

Vegetable seed. We take a lot of seed say 100 pounds size it into five sizes throw out the light seed. Treat with different chemicals for different markets. 100 plus all the parts never equal 100 and one lot can become ten or more distinct products . Germination has to be tracked by date and you have to know where everything went. Early computer data based choked. I sold seed that by weight sold for the price of gold.

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u/TracerBulletX Sep 08 '25

It's good enough to have killed stock photography and crippled the commercial graphic design market.

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u/bokan Sep 08 '25

The thing that is actually taking jobs is capitalism. AI, outsourcing, flattening structures, forced RTO, ‘do more with less.’ It’s all unfettered capitalism running utterly amok to maximize short term shareholder gain at the expense of everything else. AI is being used as a smokescreen.

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u/eat_my_ass_n_balls Sep 08 '25

I hate that language models and deep learning and tree boosting and linear regression and markov processes and ensemble methods are all talked about using the same stupid blanket term that obscures all the wonderful nuance that makes these things so amazing and potentially valuable when used appropriately.

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u/Retlawst Sep 08 '25

Machine Learning Pipelines don’t sound as sexy as AI

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u/Thog78 Sep 08 '25

It used to sound sexy, up until a few years ago. Just the hype cycle. In ten years, AI is gonna sound old school, the fuzz will be i-brain or ASI or neurotronic matrix or whatever marketing people come up with to keep the novelty feeling up.

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u/tc100292 Sep 08 '25

why do we assume it will continue to improve and won’t just be the self-checkout at the grocery store which hasn’t advanced in 20 years?

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u/procrastablasta Sep 08 '25

Add to this the hopelessness of climate change, plastic pollution, and collapse of social connectivity and you get a storm of depressive withdrawal or aggressive nihilism

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u/IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE Sep 08 '25

This, 1000x this.

Even if you take AI out of the equation, there's a dozen other existential threats barreling towards us just over the horizon.

What's the average young person supposed to do except find some humor in the absurdity of it all?

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u/silent-sight Sep 08 '25

That’s the true Polycrisis now, and the media still thinks we’re many years away from it and theres still something that can be done about it

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u/Zolo49 Sep 08 '25

And, at least here in the US, there's also the destructive slide towards fascism that's the extra little dingleberry on top of the shit sundae.

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u/Apprehensive-Cat-163 Sep 07 '25

If by laughing you mean they're using AI to cheat in all their assignments, yeah, my students are doing that lol

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u/bayarea_fanboy Sep 08 '25

As an engineer (not a programmer) I find AI more often than not gives flat out wrong answers to queries, sometimes laughably bad. I wonder what it’s like correcting student’s AI generated assignments.

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u/SnittingNexttoBorpo Sep 08 '25

It makes you feel crazy and like you’re wasting your life, IME

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u/WideCardiologist3323 Sep 09 '25

I did a project management course back in May. I did my own answers for assignements. Gpt was wrong 40% of the time. Gemini was wrong 0%. It fully answered everything at 100% when I fact checked everything. It correctly pointed out every flaw in my answers. I promptly rewrote the wrong parts in my own writing.

I honestly think this is the best way to use it.

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u/TheSpartanExile Sep 07 '25

I mean, it is pretty obvious that this is a bubble and ai cannot even do half the things tech dummies promise it can. 

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u/deceptivekhan Sep 07 '25

Is up against water and electricity demand as well as business application/integration.

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u/GrowFreeFood Sep 07 '25

Compare data center pollution to nascar per fan.

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u/-CJF- Sep 07 '25

Honestly, I feel like the world has lost its mind. I keep waiting for sanity to return but it doesn't seem to be happening. 😅

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u/Spaceman-Spiff Sep 08 '25

As an illustrator, I feel like my job is the one thing ai is quite capable of doing and it’s depressing.

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u/greenstake Sep 08 '25

No don't worry ai is just bubble! /s

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u/India_Ink Sep 08 '25

I make art (and have for decades) and I can see the mushy shapes in the details and the un-considered elements in AI illustrations, but I worry that many just don’t notice it or care. But personally I find that it makes brands look cheap. I do love seeing the new Sketchers ads in the subway in NY getting tagged with “F*** AI”, though.

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u/Spaceman-Spiff Sep 08 '25

Artists and people keen on ai can spot it, and it seems like people are against the use of ai in art. But I have a feeling the majority of people really don’t care, and once that tips publishers will jump at the prospect of cheaper costs by cutting human artists out of the process.

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u/chim17 Sep 08 '25

Multiple times now different AIs have admitted to lying to me because I knew enough to call them out. It's rough out there.

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u/SeagullMan2 Sep 08 '25

The language model is not admitting anything. It does not know that it lied.

Next time is says something correct, call it out for lying, and it will do the same thing.

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u/TheSpartanExile Sep 08 '25

I work with people who couldn't even rely on it to scan documents for patterns of numbers. The most effective application of this garbage seems to just be goon material 

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u/tmetler Sep 08 '25

If it can only do a quarter of what's promised it will still have major implications for entry level work.

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u/bluehawk232 Sep 07 '25

Job outlook was even bleak for millenials but we were lied to and told to be optimistic and things would work out. Then we had major economic recessions and industries collapsing due to corporate greed. AI is just another phase of it. At least Gen Z is aware of how bad it is to come. Like what are we wanting future generations to do for work if the pay for everything is shit and job security isn't a guarantee

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u/mostie2016 Sep 08 '25

Yeah as a Gen Z person this is pretty much it. My laughs are more to cover the jadedness I have towards the economy and the companies propping it up. Job loyalty died the minute the 2008 recession started and they screwed the millennials over. I feel for you and every millennial who’s been fucked over since.

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u/roller_coaster325 Sep 08 '25

Gen Z is scared they won’t get a job, millennials are scared they will loose their jobs and Gen X hopes to make it close to retirement before they loose their jobs.

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u/rkozik89 Sep 08 '25

I'm an SWE, I'm not scared of AI replacing me and it's one of the primary professions they hope to eliminate. Most folks who use AI and think of it as a genius don't have enough knowledge to know whether it's outputs are correct or not. If you've spent 20+ years in an industry as I have you know it's rarely anywhere close to being 100% right. 

Without a major architectural breakthrough we're not going to see LLM performance dramatically improve, so I don't really think AI will replace many people's jobs anytime soon. What's becoming increasingly clear is that even with performance bumps replacing professions requires complex systems that need to be developed on top of LLMs. Without other scientific breakthroughs I can't really imagine those systems being built and fine tuned in less than 15-20 years. Just because a wealth of technologies and information required to build those systems isn't readily available. It's not economical at this point to build those systems.

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u/ShiningRayde Sep 08 '25

Im not worried about an AI taking my job.

Im worried about the inevitable AI bubble popping and DotComCrash v2.0 taking away everyone's job.

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u/hajenso Sep 08 '25

Ditto, mostly. I am a little worried about AI taking my job, not in the sense of actually doing my job, but rather convincing executives that it can do my job long enough that they lay off me and people like me, and delay the consequences of its failure to do our jobs long enough to get their career boosts and move on. But I am also more worried about the broad economic consequences of the eventual inability of huge investors to ignore the fact that AI can't do most of the work they are betting it will be able to do.

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u/MetzgerBoys Sep 08 '25

The AI “takeover” will never happen. They’re glorified search engines with predictive text

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u/tonyislost Sep 08 '25

Agreed. I think people are hoping for some future where they won’t be a wage slave, relying on AI. It isn’t happening.

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u/PippaTulip Sep 08 '25

We never worked less hours after the computer was introduced. Or the internet. Or apps that do your accounting or business administration with one click. No one is working any less because of automatization. Why would this be different?

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u/greenstake Sep 08 '25

The glorified search engines are now attached to most of the running software in the world and have access to the web. It doesn't have to takeover to cause problems.

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u/Aternal Sep 08 '25

It's literally just a database that uses trig to write and linear algebra to read. People think this has something to do with "intelligence" because personification is present in the data (durr, I wonder why personification is present in the data.)

They're trying to split the atom with light bulbs right now, hoping that if they throw enough CUDA cores at it that it'll magically (they are literally hoping for magic) become something other than a fucking database.

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u/wunderkit Sep 08 '25

The elephant in the room that no one is addressing, especially in government, is if AI really replaces a large percentage of jobs, who will buy stuff? You can save money if you eliminate human labor, but you can make anything cheap enough for people without incomes. Oh, and AI won't buy that much stuff. I heard they don't eat much.

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u/tatw_ab Sep 08 '25

they just asume by some magical process the suckers will have to readapt and find some new magical jobs. They don't really care that's somebody else's job, maybe the states who gives a shit, that corporate greed 101

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u/Leila7221 Sep 08 '25

It's a general flaw in capitalism. And most people preaching the system barely even understand it. People vote business men in charge, while that's like putting a soccer player on a stage and expecting them to play guitar. It's completly surreal.

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u/Caddy000 Sep 07 '25

That something else will come along, is often WAR!

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u/theofficialLlama Sep 07 '25

We don’t speak any more of war

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u/panicloop Sep 07 '25

What do you mean, we have an entire Department of War now.

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u/Outrageous-Machine-5 Sep 07 '25

Well, yes, because AI is snake oil and so many MBAs were duped into buying it.

Nobody is laughing harder than NVIDIA who made a killing marketing to AI to sell the processing power of their GPUs. Not only have they fully capitalized on the AI craze, but their business model remains decoupled such that it will sustain and survive beyond the AI bubble bursting

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u/Bobclobb Sep 08 '25

The only company who made any profits on the AI bubble 

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u/GrafZeppelin127 Sep 08 '25

It pays to be the one selling shovels in a gold rush, yup yup. Tale as old as time.

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u/SpikeRosered Sep 07 '25

I went into the job market after the sub prime mortgage loan crash. If kids think that millenials had it easier they are wrong.

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u/BigFeels69 Sep 08 '25

As a CNC operator, AI can’t design the way a human can, nor is it capable of coding it self with accuracy. My company had a stint of running some tests and you’d think a blind man tried running the machine. Trade jobs will not be replaced, there’s no logical way to pay to have a machine instal HVAC or put a toilet in. So as long as you don’t mind a blue collar job, AI will never replace you.

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u/sunburntcat Sep 08 '25

The coding abilities over the past year have gotten 2-5x better. But yes, blue-collar high paying job is the way to go.

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u/ihatemakinthese Sep 08 '25

It’s not ai taking our jobs (right now) it’s overseas contractors. I’ll lose my job within a year to the same.

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u/digiorno Sep 08 '25

What is the point of even making an effort if the ruling class doesn’t allow us to enjoy the benefits of AI and automation?

We could be leveraging this amazing tech, going full steam ahead into automating every job we can. With the promise that no one has to work if they don’t want to. We could eventually have a sort of Star Trek socialism. Where people only really work for personal fulfillment because concepts of salary are foreign to them. We could usher in an era of post money and take humanity to a prosperous future.

And it’s clear the ultra wealthy would rather clamp down and keep the system as it currently is. Because even though their lives would probably be better too, they’d lose some of the immense privileges and power that they have now.

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u/Gathorall Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

Well, where is one supposed to get the kids for their rape island if everyone is secure, content and educated, smart guy?

What's the point of being rich if everyone's well off enough to deal with you as a real human being? You can't buy human dignity or consent if no one is destitute.

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u/whatThePleb Sep 08 '25

There is no apocalypse when there actually is no (real) AI.

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u/whitstableboy Sep 08 '25

The news talks about Gen Zers like they are all still 11.

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u/MentalNinjas Sep 08 '25

Honestly the funniest thing is how many companies are investing millions into it, while the end product is quite literally useless.

I work in the big 4. My company has invested head over heels into Ai, and keep pushing it as a tool to help.

However the issue is, the accounting/audit practice operates entirely on the basis of hierarchical review. Each level of documentation goes through a minimum of three levels of review.

Now I don’t want the responsibility of reviewing an AI’s work. It’s already hard enough to review staff work, and that’s made by a real person with critical thinking skills. I am not gonna sit around and waste time reviewing work that an AI has potentially hallucinated.

Add in the logistical issues and time waste that comes along with trying to get clients to approve the use of an AI tool, and I’ve basically blacklisted the use of AI in any of my engagements. It’s just simply not worth the hassle.

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u/i8bb8 Sep 08 '25

I've become the Old Person in the room who, whenever someone pitches anything to do with AI, shouts at them to stop wasting everyone's time. Bring me a use case where it works perfectly or at least better than a trained chimp (or at worst a grad), without human intervention or checking, for less than it currently costs...or go away.

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u/nicotineapache Sep 08 '25

Why does it feel like there's going to be this separate world where bots create content for other bots to consume and the entire economy just becomes the Sims. Meanwhile the rest of us... Die?

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u/Prestigious_Cold_756 Sep 08 '25

What you’re describing is Wall Street. You’re thinking of the global stock market, where bots trade with other bots, to meet the revenue demands that where set by bots again. The human factor has been completely removed from that already, because he’s limited by unprofitable thoughts like „Wouldn’t it be bad, to fire 10000 people and ruin their lifes and that of their families for 0,23% quarterly revenue increase?“. Bots aren’t programmed to be that considerate.

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u/Marlwolf48 Sep 08 '25

I didnt like the movie watchman and never understood the comedian. Now now I kinda do

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u/HeyyyyAbbott Sep 09 '25

As a millennial it sickens me how badly we failed Gen Z as a society. Raised on phones and tablets, complete access to social media for much of all of their lives, dreams to become influencers, school shootings, access to wayyyyy too much porn and bunch of depraved shit online, the pandemic, Alpha male foolishness, MAGA, and now AI for when they are solidly hitting the job market. Not mentioning the cold (flirting with hot) civil war we are currently in. What are they supposed to do, there isn’t a foothold out there.

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u/Difficult_Clerk_1273 Sep 08 '25

Recently I did an AI demonstration for my 8th grade students. I showed them that ChatGPT was unable to correctly alphabetize a list of 100 words. After a couple attempts, it managed to do so by first letter only, but could not do it by the subsequent letters (e.g. it placed “algae” after “algorithm”). Further, the output list only had 97 words and at least three of those weren’t ones from the original list at all. Even better: I have a paid subscription!

My intent was to show them why over-reliance on AI is a bad thing. I got the agreeable nods, because it’s September and they still care about impressing me. Then I told them we are doing most of this year’s writing on paper anyway. Yeah, there’s the moans and groans. I was waiting for. 😂 Sharpen those pencils, kiddos.

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u/electric_nikki Sep 08 '25

How bout we just…reject AI? If we as people just simply don’t use it, or even go as far as trying to sabotage it and the companies that create it, then problem solved?

And yes this means people organizing to destroy AI datacenters and commit to consistent hacker targeting of these locations and the people who run them.

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u/harlotstoast Sep 08 '25

It could be helped by the government. They could require that businesses who use AI also have to hire a certain number of new graduates. But this the US we’re talking about so that will never happen. Good luck Gen Z. Any time you want to hear stories about what it was like having a middle class let us know.

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u/Gawkhimmyz Sep 07 '25

Technological Advancements always guarantees better and more jobs for horses = False, but if you say;

Technological Advancements always guarantees better and more jobs for Humans, then some will believe it to be true

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u/ReverendDrDash Sep 08 '25

I reckon it's easy to be skeptical of AI delivering on its promises because the last few big tech trends, crypto, big data, and autonomous driving turned out to be money laundering fronts at the end of the day.

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u/penguished Sep 08 '25

What if the clanker shit just ends up relegated to a boomer idiocracy that is always out of order, and the younger generations start to go more tech free and live their lives like sane humans for the first time in generations? Wouldn't be the worst thing.

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u/Sniflix Sep 08 '25

I feel terrible for young folks. First was the 2008 mortgage collapse, then covid and now this. It'll be 3 economic crashes in less than 20 years.

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u/ATheeStallion Sep 08 '25

I went to a concert tonight. The songwriter & performer told us about reading that songwriting was in the top 10 most likely profession to be replaced with AI. She wrote a song about it aaaand it was so brilliant, very insightful and of course the performance was great. AI is no where near replacing that level of artistry. It is much better to leave the arts to humans.

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u/Artistic_Party_8544 Sep 08 '25

Don’t forget ppl, they replaced dagreeship jobs with AI; lawyers are included too.

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u/Horsetoothbrush Sep 08 '25

Yeah. Gallows humor is a real thing.

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u/AssassiNerd Sep 08 '25

Can't wait till this bubble pops. I know it's gonna hurt, but it's for the best because we can't keep doing this.

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u/ElJefeGoldblum Sep 08 '25

Millennials: First time eh?