Artificial intelligence is often presented as a growth driver. I argue the opposite risk is emerging.
AI-driven cost-cutting threatens jobs and demand, with the risk of a GDP decline,
He’s arguing that increased labour productivity is a bad idea.
Sigh.
Yeah… but along with the increased productivity of those still in work goes the unproductivity of those not, until one way or another they redeploy themselves and become productive again. Which, as we observe, doesn’t always happen.
“until … they redeploy themselves and become productive again”
The welfare state, combined with the planning permission state, will work tirelessly to reduce their incentives to redeploy.
I glanced at an article in the Terriblegraph which was about the potential effects of net zero migration. The argument seemed to be that this would be a disaster because of a lack of workers. Young people won’t work in hospitality and apparently no one will work in building trades, even though the money is pretty good. The disincentive of benefits didn’t appear to be mentioned. And apparently British firms are incapable of training workers.
Yes, the majority of replies (if they deign to reply) I get are along the lines of “you don’t have the 25 years’ experience we require for this entry-level job.”
British companies do the training that is in their interest.
What training aren’t they doing?
Those still working will go from, eg 100 widgets per zarble to 200 widgets per zarble, an increase in productivity of 100/1z to 200/1z. Those made redundant will go from making 100 widgets per zarble to zero widgets for zero zarbles, so they’ll go from 100/1z to 0/0z – which is infinity! An unmeasurable increase in productivity!
0/0 is NOT infinity – it is *indeterminate*
I saw that YouTube video too…..
How many people would like a sports car, custom made shoes, silk underwear, caviar?
We can’t afford to employ silkworm farmers and cordwainers but if we don’t spend so much on admin we might be able to.
There’s a lot more dog grooming and tattoos since we didn’t spend so much on travel agents.
You can’t get dog grooming, tattoos, hideous nails, pink hair or hot coffee off t’Internet. In some places that’s all that’s left in the High St. along with a convenience store or two. Surviving business are providing stuff you don’t or can’t use t’Internet for. Or are dark kitchens for Deliveroo.
Of course you can’t/ But if you’re not spending £200 on flights, but £140 instead, that’s £60 in your pocket for all of that.
…or for more sangria.
What I would say is that for him, and his audience which as many have said is largely (At least the You tube portion of it) US Leftists who hate Donald Trump, increased labour productivity is a bad idea. He needs loads of poor people to vote for his policies. He has no interest (As he has proven on numerous occasions) in ordinary people being better off. Such developments should be limited to those like him who have a need of such largesse.
Well if company X sacks 50% of its workers and replaces them with AI bots, with no loss of output, and reduced costs (the AI bots cost less than the humans) then has GDP risen? There’s no more output, its just cost less to produce. The company’s gain in extra profit is matched by the workers loss of wages. And because there’s mass unemployment (as everyone is doing the same) the aggregate demand in the economy will drop, so in fact company X will suffer a drop in sales, so it may end up no better off at all. I can’t see how this helps GDP at all, or the income for the median person who used to be employed in company X
Now I know what our host will say, all those unemployed people can go off and do something else productive, which will then add to GDP. Except they won’t, because a) the welfare state, b) loads of them will not be suited or capable of doing the sort of jobs that will still need humans (middle aged female HR managers aren’t going to become brickies or steel erectors, or AI experts) and c) loads of the new jobs won’t be in the UK anyway, because all the AI stuff is foreign owned.
So I foresee the UK becoming a national sized version of Merthyr Tydfil. A place where productive employment was destroyed, and has never been replaced by anything else, and exists only because money and goods are pumped in from outside. The people in Merthyr (and places like it) never moved to other productive employment after the mines etc shut, they just sat on welfare instead.
Welcome to shithole Britain, made even worse by AI.
The internet destroyed the jobs of travel agents, record shop staff and bank tellers. Are there people sat in their Thomas Cook uniforms begging?
No. They found another thing. The 30% commission on flights went into people’s pockets and they spent it on something else.
The number of tattooists must have increased about 1000% since then.
Yeah everyone saved that commission but lost days farting around trying to book a holiday.
Although that might just be me.
If it was a significant number of people then there would be demand for someone to do something about it
Trailfinders is still in business. I thought there must be a reason for that, so when my daughter wanted to visit Oz and Japan last year I suggested she call them rather than faffing about. After giving her a load of useful advice they booked a much better, cheaper deal than she could possibly have done by herself.
It then turned out that their travel insurance was far better and cheaper than anything else I could find, so I use it myself too.
Hays Travel is still in business and has over 500 branch outlets. So it too must be doing something customers want.
Some people want advice, a personal touch. Like there are wine shops even though you pay more than Aldi. Or, that people buy Apple stuff.
That’s called “outsourcing”. Dumping the cost of operating your business and providing a service onto your customers. It’s a brilliant trick until your customers start costing their time. Then they go back to travel agents, because it ends up better and cheaper overall.
Do what? I can book a flight from my phone at home, taking a dump instead of going to town and queuing up.
Indeed Jim. But that would be Brit lack of enterprise. The history of economic growth is you increase labour productivity in one area. That frees up labour to enable something else to be done couldn’t be done before.
Problem currently is the entire Brit system is actively built around preventing this happening. All the incentives are in the opposite direction. That’s what Spud’s saying isn’t it? You shouldn’t reap the benefits of AI because….it upsets the status quo.
“The history of economic growth is you increase labour productivity in one area. That frees up labour to enable something else to be done couldn’t be done before.”
But as I have repeatedly pointed out, it didn’t work like that. The new technology required labour and inputs themselves BEFORE they could put the cart and buggy whip makers out of business. A railway doesn’t just magic into being. It requires massive investment of labour and materials to be constructed. Ditto a car factory. With huge down the line requirements for steel, coal, power etc etc. All of which creates more well paid employment. Where is that new employment coming from AI? A few big sheds dotted here and there, full of chips made abroad. A bit of one off extra work connecting these shed to the power grid. Then thats it. Very little employment created in the AI business in the UK in and of itself. Yes, given time and entrepreneurial vigour (which is lacking in the Uk for all the reasons you list) people ‘may’ come up with new businesses that utilise the AI and create new employment, but its no way guaranteed in the way a steam railway definitely needed thousands of tonnes of steel, millions of tonnes of coal and aggregates, thousands of employees etc etc before the first train could run.
By 1850 in the UK there were 250k navvies employed building railways, and another 250k employed on the newly built ones. Out of a population of 21m people. Thats equivalent to 1.6m people today. Plus all the people employed in the industries supplying raw materials to the railways. And yet the canal network continued to operate profitably well beyond 1850, as they actually experienced a boom transporting building materials to the construction of the new railways. So by the time the railways ate their lunch there was plenty of work for ex-bargees to go and do. Where is the equivalent for AI?
“But as I have repeatedly pointed out, it didn’t work like that. The new technology required labour and inputs themselves BEFORE they could put the cart and buggy whip makers out of business. A railway doesn’t just magic into being. It requires massive investment of labour and materials to be constructed. Ditto a car factory. With huge down the line requirements for steel, coal, power etc etc. All of which creates more well paid employment.”
I don’t think this really paints the picture well because the transition is gradual. Car companies like Renault and Ford started with fewer employees than a football team. They barely made a dent in the number of stable boys. Gradually, more people making cars, fewer stable boys.
“Where is that new employment coming from AI? A few big sheds dotted here and there, full of chips made abroad. A bit of one off extra work connecting these shed to the power grid. Then thats it. Very little employment created in the AI business in the UK in and of itself.”
Per mile travelled, in real terms, cars created transport unemployment. If you went from Bristol to Birmingham with a horse, you’d have to not only buy Dobbin, but stable it, feed it, shoe it, do its vets bills. You couldn’t do that trip in a day, so you’d have to stay over at a Coaching inn. Then there’s the value of your time. If horses were more efficient, we’d still be using them instead of a Nissan Qashqai.
So was that bad? Well no. For one thing, it means we can travel further. Go and have a nice day out in Bath (the gentrification of Bath was about the car and people coming to visit). Choose our employment and get new opportunities. Or to spend less on transport and spend on other things.
I built something cheaper using Google AI Studio. I got ChatGPT to suggest a domain name for it. Cheaper software means more software. And this has always been the case. The introduction of compilers cut the amount of labour required to write software, but we didn’t get less software, we got more. Because something that cost £100K eventually cost £5K to do, and then, it added up to use a computer to do it instead of people.
And you can’t measure progress simply in terms of equivalent X and Y. There’s the unmet needs thing. Cordwainers, luxury cars. Let’s get some farming of sturgeon going in Gloucestershire and we can all have beluga caviar on toast and take sturgeon off the endangered list. Think of everything that didn’t commonly exist 40 years ago. A lot of it exists now because we made it or everything else cheaper.
“Yeah… but along with the increased productivity of those still in work goes the unproductivity of those not, until one way or another they redeploy themselves and become productive again. Which, as we observe, doesn’t always happen.”
Not always, that is true, but it is more or less what has been happening since industrialisation first took off a couple of hundred years ago. Mechanisation of production has been putting people out of work since the industrial revolution yet the majority of people remained in productive employment.
“Mechanisation of production has been putting people out of work since the industrial revolution yet the majority of people remained in productive employment.”
Because (a) they had to find some productive employment, however poorly remunerated, because the alternative was starvation and b) the new technologies were manufactured in the same place as the people were being made redundant by them. So to use an example local to me – the farm hand made redundant by a traction engine could go and get a job in the Swindon GWR works where they were made (or their railway equivalent). Or on the railway itself. Or in the factories springing up everywhere making the new things made possible by the internal combustion engine and electrification. The work was roughly equivalent too – while there were skilled factory operatives, grunt work was still universally required, even in factories. And it was possible to learn on the job. Start as an engine cleaner, eventually make driver. Start as a floor sweeper, become a time served apprentice. Now what is a redundant pen pusher supposed to become, a data centre maintenance man? (apart from which there won’t be a need for as many data centre maintenance people as people made redundant by them). The difference in skill sets between those being thrown out of a job and those jobs now required is greater than they have ever been.
We see what has happened to areas of the UK when productive employment has been removed from them by changes in technology or cheap foreign competition – they become welfare dependent shitholes. They don’t become productive in other ways, even decades after their downfall. Welfare dependence is a heritable state. Thats the future for Western economies if they embrace AI and try to keep their welfare states. Rapid technological change can be forced through (though it can be very socially destructive, see the Luddites, Saboteurs etc) if people are forced by circumstances to accept the change. If welfare gives them a third way between changing and starving, guess what, many will take it.
Put it this way, rapid and socially disruptive technological change has never been attempted in societies that have a) universal suffrage and b) universal welfare systems. Saying ‘Its always worked before’ is not a very good predictor when the base conditions now are very different to what they were before.
Because each mechanisation step opened up other economic endeavours, either at larger scale, or in a different field/technology.
Wars and disease also did a fair job of creating …attrition.. in the potential work force to balance the loss of employment in a sector a bit..
AI is, for the first time, an actual replacement of human labour where there’s not really anything to soak up the “excess work force”.
Certainly not one which main job was Chairwarming, Meetings, Ignoring Emails, and avoiding actual *work*.
Your average Office Drone is…. ill equipped…. to retrain into anything else but another version of Office Drone, all of which AI “threatens/replaces”.
Yes, but in all the pre-digital iterations of Industrial Revolution one mass-employment manual labour industry has been supplanted or accompanied by another, as Jim points out. This is the first time mass-employment industries have been supplanted by low-employment industries alongside welfare and universal suffrage, which enables those on bennies successfully to vote for more, and corrupts pollies into bribing them. This is a new combination.
What cannot last will not last, which is why, in other discussions, I’d agree with this same Jim that the faster we drive this clapped out jalopy over the cliff the better.
I would suggest that a significant percentage of those in employment are in ‘compliance’ jobs – digging holes to fill the hole they just dug – and don’t produce anything useful *except* in the current regulatory regime.
They may produce next to nothing or even are a net drag on production, but they all have a vote………
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the rick-burning that happened when the majority of people couldn’t find any employment, productive or otherwise. Majority my nether regions.
From 1830 onward when the Industrial Revolution really took off, the Poor Act of 1834 and all that, mechanization was displacing people faster than they could be absorbed in other industries.Poor relief at a shilling in the pound or more was the greatest single burden on the finances of a parish. Why do you think that the message of Marx and Engels took off so strongly? Because the majority of people were NOT in productive employment. Kindly take your sanctimonious platitudes and stick them.
I’m so much more productive when I don’t have a job weighing me down and stealing my time and energy. A quick check of my “to do” list shows more than 450 items of coding I’ve done since my last job six months ago. The only downside is that it doesn’t provide me with any resources to afford food.
I don’t mean to downplay your ability or intellect, but isn’t shelf-stacking in Tesco better than the situation you’ve been describing?
I’ve applied for shelf-stacking type jobs, and have been turned down for not having any experience in shelf-stacking jobs – or accidently ticking ‘No’ to the the question “can you repeatedly scrunch down and up carrying loads of heavy loads for eight hours a day?”.
Recently, I was in a cheap chain hotel for breakfast while my car was being fixed over the road.
Eating breakfast were some tourists and commercial travellers. But the interesting thing was that among the staff there was this old girl, must have been north of 70, tottering around collecting cups and saucers and wotnot. Maybe to supplement her pension, maybe because she’d been bored at home. No idea. But anyway, she was no one’s idea of a sprightly young slip of a thing and yet, there she was, picking up her £60 a day, or whatever it is.
The youtuber and tuber has gone and got himself a substack. Appears unmoderated. Please let substack be owned by the wrong sort of people.
AI isn’t improving productivity tho…
There’s lots of fluffy reports claiming they do, and they’re all written by AI companies who want you to buy AI subscriptions.
“AI driven cost cutting” is just cost cutting, but if you say you’re sacking people for AI, the share price might go up.
In the real world of big, crap, British businesses, we’re not investing in the future or even the present. We’re continuing to hollow out the ability of the UK business to do anything by sacking people who’ve been doing more with less for so long they’ve forgotten what good looks like, and replacing them with people in a Calcutta call centre who can’t spell “good”. Each more delightfully incompetent than the last, but look at the savings.
All that matters is the share price. As soon as line goes up, CEO can cash out with millions, go to another big, crap, British business, and ruin them.
“The people in Merthyr (and places like it) never moved to other productive employment after the mines etc shut, they just sat on welfare instead.”
I’m wondering if the people who had a bit more about them just up and left and are now prospering somewhere else? A lot of my extended family got quality degrees and then moved to find well paid jobs. Whereas my generation mostly lived our lives close to where we grew up, the current generation are now spread all over the country.
That has undoubtedly happened, at the margins. But societies such as Merthyr quickly become self perpetuating under a welfare system – those with get up and go do so fairly quickly, whats left is the plodders and losers who stay. And breed, because they can because they are funded by welfare. And if your family are all on welfare, guess where you’re headed, unto the n-th generation?
It’s well known that the Aztecs and Inca did not have the wheel. But some ancient Maya glyphs have been translated, and apparently some of them reference a debate over someone who invented a wheelbarrow causing great consternation over the loss of jobs it could cause for laborers carrying heavy loads. He was promptly sacrificed as a warning to other inventive people.
I think there were similar debates in Europe over the invention of sails and the effect it would have on rowers
“ a debate over someone who invented a wheelbarrow causing great consternation over the loss of jobs it could cause for laborers carrying heavy loads. He was promptly sacrificed as a warning to other inventive people.”
Why would Aztec Construction Inc want to sack half its workforce after giving the other half barrows? If it gives them all barrows they get teocalli No 1 done in half the time and can start on teocalli No 2 that much sooner. Kerr-ching on the annual revenues. There would also probably be a net increase in Aztec employment as twice as much building materials would be needed, as well as all the barrow makers and repairers. A boom in Aztec quarrying, as well as the lumber industry. All the changes would be organic – the faster building rate would need more materials, and the newly formed barrow making industry would need wood and labour too.
Where is the organic demand for extra goods and services (which will soak up the discarded labour) going to come from if 50% of the penpushers are made redundant in short order (say 5-10 years)? Its not going to come from the companies using the AI, because most of the AI services involve foreign imports (chips and IP). No extra local demand will be created. Its certainly not going to come from those made redundant as their incomes will have dropped massively.
AI is only going to make producing the current amount of goods and services cheaper. Its not going to massively increase the amount of goods and services being made, nor is it going to result in extra demand for new inputs. The steam engine maker needed steel, the steel maker needed coal and iron ore. The railway engineer needed large amounts of labour to build his railway, plus lots of building materials, and then more labour to run his new train set. All of which has to come before the railway can put the bargeman out of business. The growth in employment in the new industries precedes the decline in the old.
We are expecting it to be the other way around. Loads of people made redundant [waves magic wand]they all find new productive work to do. Fantasy economics.
Indeed. This was the Sainted Margaret’s big mistake, as it turned out. They didn’t get on their bikes. They sat and claimed bennies, and put up with being relatively impoverished, because actually there’s fuck all most redundant miners and steelworkers can do. They’re not all entrepreneurial.
The Aztec construction companies may have seen it that way, but they did have academics and scriveners who probably bemoaned the potential job losses. Fretting about new technologies and the effect on work goes back long before the Luddites.
Maybe they find work, but not necessarily productive work. AI makes pen-pushing more efficient, result; just as many pen-pushers but much more bumf.
The Aztecs & Inca did have the wheel. What they didn’t have was an animal capable of pulling a loaded wheeled vehicle. Without that there’s not sufficient economic benefit in building the roads would be needed for them to run them on. Wheels only work on flat firm surfaces. If you don’t have that, you’re better off with skids or carrying. They did however build a great deal of stairways to cross high ground.
A wheelbarrow still might have proven handy. The lack of draft animals is a valid point, but you are aware of the number of Mormon pioneers moving across the American west pushing handcarts?
Copypastata explaining how “AI investments” work:
Peter Girnus u/gothburz
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.
$30 per seat per month.
$1.4 million annually.
I called it “digital transformation.”
The board loved that phrase.
They approved it in eleven minutes.
No one asked what it would actually do.
Including me.
I told everyone it would “10x productivity.”
That’s not a real number.
But it sounds like one.
HR asked how we’d measure the 10x.
I said we’d “leverage analytics dashboards.”
They stopped asking.
Three months later I checked the usage reports.
47 people had opened it.
12 had used it more than once.
One of them was me.
I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.
It took 45 seconds.
Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.
But I called it a “pilot success.”
Success means the pilot didn’t visibly fail.
The CFO asked about ROI.
I showed him a graph.
The graph went up and to the right.
It measured “AI enablement.”
I made that metric up.
He nodded approvingly.
We’re “AI-enabled” now.
I don’t know what that means.
But it’s in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn’t use Claude or ChatGPT.
I said we needed “enterprise-grade security.”
He asked what that meant.
I said “compliance.”
He asked which compliance.
I said “all of them.”
He looked skeptical.
I scheduled him for a “career development conversation.”
He stopped asking questions.
Microsoft sent a case study team.
They wanted to feature us as a success story.
I told them we “saved 40,000 hours.”
I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.
They didn’t verify it.
They never do.
Now we’re on Microsoft’s website.
“Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot.”
The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.
He got 3,000 likes.
He’s never used Copilot.
None of the executives have.
We have an exemption.
“Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction.”
I wrote that policy.
The licenses renew next month.
I’m requesting an expansion.
5,000 more seats.
We haven’t used the first 4,000.
But this time we’ll “drive adoption.”
Adoption means mandatory training.
Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.
But completion will be tracked.
Completion is a metric.
Metrics go in dashboards.
Dashboards go in board presentations.
Board presentations get me promoted.
I’ll be SVP by Q3.
I still don’t know what Copilot does.
But I know what it’s for.
It’s for showing we’re “investing in AI.”
Investment means spending.
Spending means commitment.
Commitment means we’re serious about the future.
The future is whatever I say it is.
As long as the graph goes up and to the right.
Applause!
I used to have a rather dim colleague whose main term of approval was to call something “mainstream”. No doubt people like him are walking around burbling that AI has become mainstream.
Well, yeah. Pointy Haired Bosses in large stupid companies. ISO9002, Myers-Briggs, diversity.
There’s a few good uses of it, but everyone is bullshitting. Trying to get a bigger team or to go to Amsterdam to smoke weed and visit whores, I mean, attend important AI conferences.
Almost none of my clients are using any machine learning. It has uses (one uses it to categorise some text data). But everyone is lying. You do a study and tell Microsoft about it and you and your company get some pr.
I reckon 12 months it’s going to all go to shit. That’s after all the VCs have cashed out of openai and anthropic.
I remember ISO 9000. Almost two years of writing stupid documents that were never referenced again. I think we abandoned the whole shelves of them when we moved office.
Whats often forgotten in the race to explain that ‘we’ve done this all before, in the Industrial Revolution’ etc etc, is that then the new technologies actually created new jobs before they destroyed all the old ones. There was a net increase in demand for labour. Hence why the factories had to pay more than agricultural wages. They had to in order to draw workers off the farms into the factories, it wasn’t the case that they had hundreds of people knocking at their doors all demanding work. So the transition actually worked more like ‘Lord X has to buy a traction engine for his estate engine because half his workers have f*cked off to work in towns for more money’ than ‘Lord X buys a steam engine and tells half his workers to f*ck off’.
Plus of course it all took time. There were still people using horses for transport and farm work in WW2 and soon after, despite the traction engine having been invented by about 1850, and the ICE powered tractor by 1900. It would probably have continued even longer had it not been for 2 world wars driving the need for agricultural productivity (and of course loss of manpower). So chances were that your average farm worker who worked with horses could probably see his career out somewhere doing what he’d always done (if thats what he wanted). A career as an ostler would have been something the youngsters decided wasn’t for them and went off to be a tractor driver instead. The old fuddy duddies could toddle on to retirement as their career disappeared into history. Old industries faded away, new ones sprang into existence.
All of which is a bit different to overnight telling large sections of a society ‘Sorry, there’s nothing for you to do any more’. Not least because in previous transitions the work got easier. Walking behind a plough in all winds and weathers (or shovelling sh*t all day) was a lot worse than sitting on a tractor (not much better without a cab, but still better than walking). Or working in a factory. Or driving a train. Now we are going to tell people ‘Hey you know you used to sit in a nice warm office from 9-5? Well now the only jobs are going to be the physically demanding ones out in all winds and weathers which mean you’re going to be physically f*cked by the aged of 55’. I’m sure Maureen from accounts is going to love being told she’s got to start working on a building site installing plasterboard. And she won’t at all vote for a party that promises to call a halt to AI.
Its just not going to fly, not when everyone has a vote. They’ll vote to stop it dead in its tracks, and all the ree-ing from economists won’t stop them, because democracy has given the Luddites far more power than they had before. The industrial revolution wouldn’t have happened if everyone had got to vote on whether it could or not.
When investing never fall for “this time is different”. It won’t be.
When being a neo-Luddite, arguing “this time is diffferent” just makes you foolish.
AI isn’t remotely as drastic a change as the introduction of cheap PCs. Yet jobs survived (indeed grew as more women work). And we had the welfare state 20 years ago. I remember then bleating about what were all the typists going to do. Find other jobs. It wasn’t as if manual typing was making us rich!
There are issues in the West of no longer making things, but they are entirely separate from the AI thing.
I’m afraid I agree with Jim, Chester. AI represents the first real large-scale replacement of mass-employment industry with low-employment industry. Everyone else is going to have to be doing each other’s washing.
To elaborate, AI also probably gets rid of loads of those women’s jobs WB is always on about, which are more social club than work. Are those women going to go back to being tradwives? Even if they want to, can they afford it? They’re not all going to become builders, plumbers, electricians and heat-pump installers, are they?
In the UK the collapse of traditional heavy industry caused a bifurcation: those with get up and go got up and went, mostly to the South. The post-industrial North was left with bennies bludgers living on Welfare funded by North Sea Oil windfall taxation. Now we have a service economy supporting a welfare underclass. But AI is gunning for the service office jobs. The “creative industries”? Fucked. Marketing and HR? Fucked. Call centres? Fucked. Hospitality? Fucked, but not by AI. What are the soft-handed to do?
I’m bemused by the possibility that a truly intelligent AI given a job in HR would just say ‘This job is a load of shit and doesn’t need doing’, I suppose it would get reported to Inhuman Resources. And appeal to a totally AI tribunal.
I had the misfortune to find myself in a Morrisons supermarket the other day. A robot floor cleaner, about the size of R2D2, was toddling about. I wonder what happened to the human cleaners?
Well, the robots need service and cleaning support so the human cleaners now look after the robots.
I rather doubt that. But even if it were directionally true it’s very obviously not a one per one situation.
They went back to Africa/India/Asia? (Not E Europe ‘cos they went ages ago)
When was the last time you saw a white guy/gal mopping the floor in a retail outlet? Or the bogs in a motorway service area?
“I remember then bleating about what were all the typists going to do. Find other jobs. It wasn’t as if manual typing was making us rich!”
And where did the typists go? They went into HR and all the other pointless paper pushing jobs the State created that suited women. Not really the stuff of a revolution is it? ‘Here Mavis, instead of typing all those letters for Mr 1970s Sitcom Boss all day, you can get a ‘career’ in a local government office doing something pointless 9-5 with a fat pension at the end of it’. Yet if the techies hype is to be believed (and I don’t FWIW) all those jobs are disappearing under AI. So where are all the erstwhile typists going to go now?Telling them the only jobs available involve manual labour, heavy lifting and working in dirty and dangerous environments rather than a nice airconditioned office isn’t going to be popular is it? And what do you think is going to be political fallout of such mass female dissatisfaction?
Moreover, in an office environment a cheap PC is little more than a typewriter with a built-in filing cabinet and post office. Oh, and a fancy calculator. It was the same women, still typing, but allegedly “more productive”.
Giving NHS nurses laptops and tablets was one of the most productivity destructive moves possible. All they want to do now is sit behind a desk tapping away. Actually looking after patients, pah, who wants to do that? Its far too icky and demeaning (for the staff naturally).
Absolutely. Been there, seen it. Actually (whilst tethered to an obs machine) had to get a screen-absorbed nurse’s attention and direct her to some poor woman in a bed near me (mystifyingly, I seemed to be in a women’s ward) who was having the most horrific time throwing up and had run out of receptacles. I was disgusted, and not with the poor woman, who I hope is still alive.
It seems to me that the millions of people we imported to ‘look after us in our old age’ or shore up the ponzi scheme for a little longer are just the people who oughta go home now our ( never was) labour shortage is about to be resolved. The way to fix the generation demographic puzzle is actually to plan to reduce the population. It’s going that way anyway and the measures we have been taking will not work. Grit you teeth, use AI to do the work and earn the money, wait until the boomers (yes I am one) snuff it and manage the transition into a lower population more productive state. The UK was more successful with a far lower population than it has now.
In other words we don’t have an AI problem, we have several problems of which AI is merely one of a number of factors.
Good observation. I have yet to see the AI that can wipe arses.
Or a nurse that bothers to
While you have an education system built around teaching people to be desk jockies you are fucked.
My doctor daughter is discovering this. She wants to be a clinician, but is finding that if you want to make serious career progress you have to do research. Get a Masters, a PhD, publish. Never mind the poor bloody patients.
I very much doubt we’ll be finding the solutions to the UK’s problems on this forum. The commentariat here is, at a guess, 95% some flavour of desk jockey. There’s only really Jim & a couple of others had any experience of much else. So they all have an interest in some form of the status quo.
Some of us are still involved in the metal bashing industries BiS.
Unfortunately, whereas once we served the automotive industry and exported to all corners of the globe, now our main customers are primarily state subsidised and rely on the whims of government pen-pushers and politicians. A fact that gives me cold sweats at night.
There’s a factory in China (Yutong) that can produce 30,000 buses a year, which totally mogs anything Britain or Europe can do, and that’s who we’re competing against. With some of the highest energy costs in the world, and some of the tightest regulatory hurdles to overcome.
By rights, Birmingham (workshop of the world, dontcha know) should have become what China is now. If we weren’t led by highly educated morons who hate us and are determined to lead us into economic (and cultural) decline.
Our company is in the happy position that we want to expand, but if we succeed in growing, it exposes us to more costs and more risks. The possibility of some unforeseen company killing event in the future grows larger.
You only have to look at the pub & hospitality sector to see how Government interference can instantly kill 10’s of thousands of jobs.
I’m in agreement with many on here that advances in Ai are going to nuke many, many comfortable middle class jobs.
Society itself seems to be stratifying itself into Elois & Morloks.
Maybe this is why the likes of Starmer are so keen to involve us in adventures abroad. A nice war of attrition with Russia to kill off a goodly number of white Brits afflicted with WrongThink.
“Maybe this is why the likes of Starmer are so keen to involve us in adventures abroad. A nice war of attrition with Russia to kill off a goodly number of white Brits afflicted with WrongThink.”
How would that help? The problem going forward is that the jobs that may be destroyed by AI are predominantly female ones. Office based stuff. And the jobs that will survive AI are the hard dirty ones, that are already done 95%+ by men. And we’re already struggling to find enough men to do them. Try finding a plumber or a sparky these days. They’re all booked up the wazoo, charging whatever they like, and many of them are rapidly approaching retirement, so God help us in 5-10 years time when they finally decide to stay at home and count their loot.
So we have a societal disconnect between the roles that will be available and the people available to fill those roles. Women will not be prepared to go and physically labour, even if they could, which many can’t. Nor are they in any way interested in manual type jobs, construction, engineering, mechanicking. You’re not going to get women to go and repair wind turbines in the middle of the North Sea. Just not going to happen on so many levels.
Going to war and killing off loads of young men is not going to solve this problem its only going to make it far worse.
Point conceded BiS. I was a government paper shuffler for my entire ‘working’ life!!!
It was prompted by this comment from Jim, Which quite surprised me.
Telling them the only jobs available involve manual labour, heavy lifting and working in dirty and dangerous environments rather than a nice airconditioned office isn’t going to be popular is it?
Would have thought Jim, of all people, would have known better.
The brute force & ignorance bit of what’s loosely called “manual work” has been disappearing for years. It’s increasingly mechanical handling & using tech rather than muscle power. And it’s not for idiots.Take working in a warehouse. The basic tool is the fork lift. Ever used one? A competent fork lift driver will approach a rack usually on a curved path. The tip of the forks will follow a complex path in three dimensions spatially & in time, the vectors putting them at the entrance to the rack within an inch accuracy as they reach the required height. Withdrawing the load will follow another three dimensional complex curve avoiding obstacles, some of which will not be be observable to the operator. Done by spatial memory. Controls, for forwards & backwards & speed, direction of travel – remember this is rear wheel steering, opposite for a car & the steering reverses depending on the direction of travel, – height of forks & possibly fork extension. A symphony requiring both hands & maybe both feet working in unison. And he’ll repeat the operation with close to 0% failure rate all day long. The mathematicians amongst you could probably describe the geometry given a couple of hours. The operator will do it by eye in seconds. How many of you lot could do this? Are you even capable of leaning to do it? And these days, people carry their safety & their environment around with them. But that requires understanding the requirements of the environment & forward planning.
I very much doubt we’ll be finding the solutions to the UK’s problems on this forum.
“Get rid of your government.”
What do I win?
BTW, your slighting of the commentariat is tasteless. Value is in the comments, not the commenters.