Jobs that exist only during construction, ambient noise, higher electricity and water prices. They also get the privilege of living near technology that represents the future: degraded education, unemployment and spiraling inequality.
Sure, in Loudon County, which has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, has seen its property tax rate fall about 40% since 2010. This is due to data centers representing about half the tax base now.
Key difference with this and TFA though: Loudon has never offered a tax abatement
There's one example. I'm not saying on the whole they're positive.
I'm not that cynical, I think they got stars in their eyes, were charmed at the idea of doing business with big money / tech and didn't do any actual cost/benefit analysis. Maybe they get an opportunity to make a very powerful friend/crony and took it without considering their duty to their constituents.
> Per the report, the package of tax breaks and incentives was achieved through local officials bound by nondisclosure agreements, quietly struck legislative deals, and parliamentary sleight of hand to avoid public scrutiny of the deal. [1]
This is clearly false, the K shaped economy framing does ring true to me and you are describing the lower half of the K. Those millenials (and younger) with crippling student loans, no savings, and unmarketable skills are a major voting block and will definitely have an impact on policy. The size of the impact will be determined by their level of anger and ability to essentially convince the upper half of the K to go along with wealth transfers (traditionally not easy to do).
If Anthropic does a down round, the US economy will crash. Not hyperbole.
The US economy right now is based entirely on the AI bubble. This is an indisputable fact if you examine GDP stats and equities.
That bubble is driven by (rational) over-investment in AI capacity. For that investment to continue, there must be demand for it.
The demand for that infrastructure essentially lies in the hands of a few businesses: principally OpenAI, Anthropic, Google.
The reason I highlight Anthropic is that without their advances in the last six months, the game would already have been up. Only via Opus 4.5 and 4.6 did the possibility of ROI look plausible. We are very much dependent on a handful of companies’ progress to keep this bubble going.
I’m not saying AI is bs, just that this is a bubble like others (for example, Victorian railways) and a down round would signal the end of the bubble.
So for an enemy of America, whether that be China or Russia or any other country, it is logical to target the AI bubble to cause an economic crash and thus restrict America’s ability to compete in terms of spending etc.
That will happen inevitably, we are throwing spaghetti at the wall right now, and cleaning up the mess, lessons will be learned. The question is whether that phase will lead to real lasting damage and to what. For myself I no longer read cold emails, I believe they are all AI generated, and that communication method may legitimately die culturally. What else will be destroyed?
Many things will change, because many things are currently useless in the world right now, literally most jobs in a way shouldn't even exist. You think a guy behind the mcdo counter should exist? It shouldn't, that just an engineering "mistake" as it can already be solved, the world is just slow to catch-up, but it's not only AI, that's just automation. We banked for decades on jobs that virtually shouldn't exist except for the sole purpose of creating jobs, it's like a giant ponzi scheme literally and it will all catch-up at some point.
I think Society will completely reshape itself over the next decades, likely with UBI and other form of social help and the ones that don't want to partake into the whole "AI orchestration" will just not have any opportunity imo, sad, but this is the way I see it. I truly believe it because myself and ALL the people I know have pseudo-replaced their work with solely orchestrating AI, including very complex jobs and lately because some of my friends asked me, I've also built "agents" that replaced entirely their work, and their employer don't even know about it (customer management, remote) which proves that those jobs shouldn't even exist as they are ALREADY replaceable, all Zoom meetings are immediately recorded, agents do basic loop adversarial with all common models, then proceed with doing tasks and so-on, that last for about 30min and the whole week of work is done, all chats are directly sent to a triage agent as well then the whole rag thing and so on.
My work went from managing/developing 1 repo to 70 repo at once, evening to morning answering questions like a bot 10h a day with 8 monitors in front of my face, and I'm realistic, I know at some point I can literally replace my own self with an AI as well to answer for me, it's just a matter of time.
We need to rethink everything and the whole AI hate from the youth will not change anything about it.
I have multiple friends also running pretty large businesses with 30 or more staff, and right now they are literally at a point where they argue about why they shouldn't fire most of them, it's fuckin sad, but it's the reality.
Many countries have a form of UBI, although it's not guaranteed as the meaning of UBI would in a sense, but look at France with their RSA as an example, if you have no incomes/low incomes, you are entitled to it.
RSA is not UBI, UBI literally means Universal Basic Income, it's not for no income/low income people, it's universal.
You are conflating the concept of UBI with social welfare, they are different things and it's a bit annoying to see the erosion of the UBI concept into social welfare, I've noticed an uptick of this the past year or so, no idea where it's originating from...
Agreed I butchered it, but what is the concrete difference right now for someone that has no job (so where UBI is relevant) with social welfare and "UBI" if in the end, that person gets a monthly income that is somehow guaranteed?
The concrete difference is simple: you don't have to spend most of your life convincing the government that you deserve to continue getting money. If you've ever interacted with a welfare system, you'll know. They work much better on paper than in real life.
The concrete difference is that the society around the person living in a UBI-society will be very different than one where there's only social welfare.
I don't have enough expertise in this field but I don't think we should be thinking only with a doomsday scenario, humans are quite resilient and innovative, society will completely change and I genuinely believe we will find ways, there will be a lot of suffering in between (and maybe after as well, as there is now) but we might eventually reach a point in automation where a lot of prices drop to the point where it's virtually free, food could be included, if we do have 24/7 machines that can build, expand, deliver and so-on with free energy somehow, it's not crazy to think that a KG of chicken could worth 10 times less than it is now, so many things could be reconsidered.
UBI could mean also that people could be living in places further away from main cities, and eventually housing will be automatically built as well so costs could drop sharply.
Well if AI keeps cannibalizing jobs, governments will HAVE to find a way to make UBI works. If they do not there will be deadly riots as people lose their livelihoods.
There will simply have to be a solution, whether or not it’s deemed “impossible.”
I believe the solution is fairly simple: military robots to keep the masses in check.
Just look at how utterly evil and despicable the rich and powerful have been acting over the last years. Do you really think that people who are investing in shock collars to prepare for societal breakdown scenarios would give the non-rich masses a single red dime?
Of course humans will adapt, the core issue is how we can avoid as much suffering as possible while these changes happen, that's always the point. No one wants to live a life during a transitional period in history where suffering is increased, as a species we should be working to alleviate that.
What's the point of progress if we keep repeating the same mistakes of leaving miserable people behind? Is that progress or just a repetition of the cycle with new shiny things?
They are both right, the revolution needs to be oriented for ordinary people and college kids to benefit from it or else their attitude is wholly justified. There's basically no reason for them to cheer on a future of trillion dollar corporations using AI services to battle for knowledge work market share.
My first day of orientation at the CS dept was at the height of the dot com crash. I think I got told by 20+ seniors that day to drop out before paying a single bill. That it was all pointless and the internet was an over valued bubble and no one was getting hired. Mood on campus was scary for almost two years post the crash. If we had social media back then I can only imagine how much more fears would have been amplified.
In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining. This time it might be truly different. If one day AI can actually do all knowledge work, there might not be anything left for former knowledge workers to do. There's no physical law that says new technology necessarily produces 1:1 new, different jobs.
Most jobs for most of human history have not been "knowledge work" involving symbolic manipulation. Maybe all the marketers, business analysts and software engineers of the world can take up their true callings as plumbers, carpenters and dishwasher repair people.
You think that all knowledge workers of the world will accept their social and material downgrades without making wave? That they'll all be able to find manual work?
Who knows, maybe we'll come to value manual and caring work once AI can easily do all the moving-electrons-on-a-screen?
The financial and social hierarchy you allude to is not immutable. Programming was once a low-paid, low-status job done largely by women. It's only relatively recently that it's become a lucrative, high-status masculine-coded career.
> In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining.
Labor saving technology does not create enough alternative jobs to employ all those that it displaced, otherwise it wouldn't be labor saving.
Instead, the surplus created by these technologies allows that society to deploy labor on less immediately necessary jobs. These jobs weren't created by the technology, they were always there, but society did not have the resources to staff them (think education, research, academia, merchants, etc.)
This dynamic has been true since pre-historic times, so you'll need some extraordinary evidence if you want us to believe this time is different.
Many people who pointed out the Industrial Revolution becomes the basis of modern quality of life skip what happened in between the 17xx-18xx until today.
Things like Unions, Wars, etc.
What comes after new technology has always been the elite class owning them all and forcing everybody else to suffer until something managed the distribution of resources slightly better (War forces that).
The Luddites were mad not because the machines put them out of work but because the machines were supremely shitty. The machines were dangerous and they made lousy products that reflected a lack of pride in workmanship.
The Luddites were all for saving labor, but not if enshittified products and slavery to unreliable machines were the price.
Many Luddites were protesting labor conditions. At the time the majority of labor laws were being written by the capital class with the help of political leaders and the constabulary. Common complaints were working hours, child labor, safety, wages, and protection from furlough. There were some who protested the quality of the product the machines created... but I would say those are the minority.
Destroying the machines was a way to gain leverage for a class of people who had none. People had been using looms for centuries. It wasn't the technology that was the problem... that's what the victors, the capitalists, have written was the reason.
A lot of money was thrown around the last 10 years trying to pump up entertainment companies in a bid to either take over the industry in a winner take all streaming world or get acquired. Now that the consolidation has finished, it's about cutting back. How Paramount has managed Star Trek, and where it is now is informative in my opinion here.
Yes it must go beyond the mere desire to have children produce economically valuable output. However this is easier said when the costs (to recipients and public taxpayers) are much smaller.
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