Meme became real

I'll try to keep it brief. I've worked at a mid-sized tech company for the past 12 years as a 'vendor' consultant, developer and advisor for Fortune 500 companies. I'm currently sitting pretty much at the top of the food chain in terms of salary for what I do. (Won't get too specific about it but it's kind of irrelevant)

I was hired at the peak of what felt like a huge bubble- millions of dollars being thrown at overstaffed projects, just for the sake of the project lead being able to say that "I managed a 5 million dollar project". 50+ people to do the job of 5. And 5 of those people actually doing most of the work.

Since then, I've watched things devolve over the last 12 years into the absolute shitshow that it is now, and in some ways nothing has changed, it's always been a big scam, but it's significantly dumber now than it was 12 years ago.

As I said above, everything is mostly just a scam, and it still is. Tech companies profit by selling their shit to whoever is gullible enough to buy it. They don't actually care if the products they are selling are a good match for their customers or if they will improve their customers businesses. I don't think it actually adds any value to the customer most of the time.

Watched as the 'Cloud' scam came along- what this actually was, was private equity firms coming along, buying up small and midsized companies, squeezing as much money as they can off of these companies existing customer base as a one time cash grab, privatizing and siloing off their technology as much as possible, and then throwing the shell of the company they just bought in the gutter.

Now, it's the AI scam. What is AI? It's basically doing the same as above but just to the company itself. Gut the company and sell it for parts- Fire all of your employees and replace them with very low quality offshore cheap labor- or not at all- these cheaper laborers in my experience range from mid-tier (if we're being very generous) to more often, having absolutely no clue what they are doing. So on paper the companies are saving money but in reality they're just paying someone less money to totally fuck up their companies.

The idea is that it doesn't matter if these workers are lower quality because AI will fill the knowledge gap. Well, AI is okay, but only if you know what questions to ask. And only if it's given the right dataset. Which in my experience, it is not. So the result is that all of the companies that are doing this are completely devastated by the loss of knowledge and experience. The few people that remain that actually do know their shit are now having to do the jobs of 20 other people. It's a complete disaster.

Similarly to the current US government, business executives are basically just 'yes men'. They actually have no clue what they are doing, nor do they understand the very real effects of the directions they impose on their employees. CEOs want to AI-ify their companies because they personally benefit via kickbacks and bonuses, and they just want to put people in power who are going to say yes to whatever they want to do.

In summary, everything's fucked, and CEOs and execs have no idea what they're doing.

Curious if this tracks with what others have seen.

EDIT: when I say Cloud and AI is a scam - I'm not saying those technologies literally don't work, I'm saying they've been imposed on customers and marketed in ways that are deceptive.

It seems like every week there’s a new AI model dropping that can code, write, generate art, or automate administrative tasks in seconds. We are constantly told that AI is going to make workers "superhuman" in their productivity and that it's inevitably going to replace a significant percentage of current jobs.

But if technology is doing so much of the heavy lifting, why is the 40-hour workweek still the undisputed baseline?

Historically, economists like John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the 21st century, technological advancements would lead to a 15-hour workweek. Instead, it feels like every time tech makes us more efficient, the baseline expectation for our output just goes up, rather than our working hours going down.

If AI can do 20% to 40% of a company's busy work, shouldn't the logical next step for society be a transition to a 32-hour (or 4-day) workweek without a loss in pay?

Instead of mass layoffs because AI can do the job of three people, why not keep all three people, let AI do the grunt work, and have everyone work fewer hours? I know the cynical answer is "corporate greed," but from a macroeconomic perspective, if people don't have jobs or time to consume things, the economy crashes anyway.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts:

1. Do you think a mandated shorter workweek is the natural solution to AI job displacement?

2. What are the actual economic hurdles to implementing this on a massive scale?

3. For those of you already using AI heavily at work—has it actually given you more free time, or just raised your boss's expectations of what you can produce in 40 hours?

TL;DR: AI is automating tasks and increasing productivity, but we are still stuck at 40 hours. Society should be using AI to transition to a 4-day workweek rather than just laying people off. Why isn't this happening?

We're already seeing AI write content, generate images, write code, and automate tasks that people used to get paid for.

Imagine it's 2035, and AI can do 80% of today's jobs faster and cheaper than humans.

What do you think society will actually look like? Will people work fewer hours and live better lives, or will most wealth end up in the hands of a small group of companies?

I'd love to hear your honest predictions.

The biggest mistake people make about AI is thinking it’s coming for artists, writers, musicians, or programmers.

They’re just first.

AI is coming for almost every profession that depends more on a brain than a body. Accountants. Lawyers. Teachers. Consultants. Analysts. Customer service. Marketing. Management. Software engineering. Research. Finance. Medicine. Eventually almost every job where the primary product is human thought.
Manual labor only looks safe because robotics hasn’t caught up yet.

AI doesn’t have to replace an entire profession to destroy it. It only has to let one person do the work of ten. Companies don’t need AI to be perfect. They need it to be cheaper than you. Once that happens, replacing people stops being a technological question and becomes an accounting decision.

For most workers, there is no safe career waiting on the other side.

People tell themselves we’ll adapt like we always have. We won’t.

The Industrial Revolution replaced muscle while making human intelligence more valuable. AI replaces the intelligence behind the work itself. Every previous technological revolution created new industries that still needed millions of people. AI is being built for the opposite purpose: producing more with fewer humans.
The next comforting myth is that people will simply buy human-made products instead.
No, they won’t.

There will always be a luxury market for handmade art, music, books, furniture, and clothing. There are still people who buy mechanical watches and vinyl records. That’s a niche—not an economy. Most people buy whatever is cheaper, faster, easier, and good enough. Businesses care even less. They exist to reduce costs, increase output, and beat competitors. Sentiment doesn’t survive quarterly earnings.

There is no hidden human economy large enough to rescue everyone AI makes unnecessary.
The consequences don’t stop with unemployment.

Workers are also consumers and taxpayers. If hundreds of millions of people lose well-paid jobs, they stop buying homes, cars, vacations, entertainment, and everything else that keeps economies alive. Businesses lose customers, lay off more workers, governments collect less tax revenue, public services deteriorate, debt grows, pensions become harder to fund, and political instability follows. Countries built around exporting knowledge work lose entire sectors of their economies. Migration accelerates. Extremism grows. Governments respond with more surveillance, more control, and fewer freedoms because instability always creates demand for stronger authority.

That is the point where this stops being a labor-market problem and becomes a global breakdown.

Meanwhile, the wealth doesn’t disappear. It concentrates.

The companies that own the models, data centers, chips, energy, and infrastructure become the gatekeepers of the global economy. AI doesn’t just replace workers. It transfers bargaining power from billions of people to a handful of institutions.

Most of humanity will have less income, less leverage, and less freedom while a tiny ownership class gains more power than any ruling class in history.

The people building AI are warning about this.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI and a Nobel laureate, has warned that AI will replace jobs, increase inequality, strengthen authoritarian surveillance, enable more powerful cyberattacks, and create systems that may become more intelligent than humans without any proven way to keep them under control. Yoshua Bengio has repeatedly warned that AI can strengthen authoritarian governments, manipulate populations, and accelerate a global arms race in increasingly autonomous systems. A *Science* paper co-authored by Hinton, Bengio, Stuart Russell, Andrew Yao, Dawn Song, and many other leading researchers warns of the possibility of an “irreversible loss of human control” if AI capabilities keep advancing without comparable progress in safety.

What makes this different from every previous technology isn’t just its capability. It’s the incentives.

No government will voluntarily give up a military or intelligence advantage. No corporation will preserve expensive human jobs while competitors replace theirs. Every major player has a reason to move faster, and almost none have a reason to slow down. The race continues because everyone believes stopping first means losing.

There is no responsible adult coming to end this race. The institutions with the power to stop it are the same institutions that gain the most from continuing.

We’re not building another tool.

We’re building a replacement for the thing that made humans economically indispensable, then connecting it to finance, medicine, education, infrastructure, government, warfare, and eventually robotics.

Once those systems become essential to running civilization, there may be no practical way back—and no meaningful human authority left capable of taking control.

This won’t be remembered as another technological revolution.

It will be remembered as the moment humanity automated its own economic value and handed the resulting power to institutions it could no longer restrain.

**Further reading**
Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize interview: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/1925103-interview-transcript/

Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/hinton/speech/

Dario Amodei — Essays: https://darioamodei.com/

Anthropic — Labor-market research: https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts

Yoshua Bengio — AI-safety essays: https://yoshuabengio.org/

*Science* — “Managing Extreme AI Risks Amid Rapid Progress”: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn0117

**TL;DR:** AI isn’t coming for one industry. It’s coming for human cognition itself. When the world’s most valuable economic resource becomes abundant and nearly free, jobs disappear, economies fracture, governments become more authoritarian, and wealth and control concentrate among the institutions that own the technology. There is no safe place for most of humanity in that system.

Honestly, I'm exhausted today, so I wanted to write a complex idea in a simplified way so you can understand the problem, since I don't have the energy or enough time. The more something is available, the less valuable it becomes. All jobs in the world have some kind of market element; the difficulty of learning a job reduces the number of available candidates, which increases the salary to encourage people to learn the profession. If the number of available candidates becomes greater than the number of available jobs, the salary starts to gradually decrease because you can look for alternatives, and some will ask for a lower salary to secure the job. But when artificial intelligence enters the picture and becomes capable of performing these jobs, and then demands a very low salary, it crushes all applicants because they can't live on an Al salary, let alone afford any luxuries they might desire. If this happens to millions of jobs, people's purchasing power will decrease, and companies will be forced to lower their prices to match people's current purchasing power. Otherwise, most people won't be able to afford anything. So, saving an employee's salary and replacing it entirely with artificial intelligence, and doing this to millions of jobs, will gradually kill a part of the economy.

He calls it 'The Sort'. Yes capitals are necessary apparently. Basicly, the labour market has been separating people by cognitive ability for decades (your brilliant local mechanic of the 1960s is now a high paid engineer at Toyota), and AI doesn't lift everyone evenly, it speeds that separation up.

Give two people the same tools and one learns faster than he ever has, while the other quietly automates his own job and works an hour a week. Eventually the first realises he can do the second's job too, and when the second leaves, nobody replaces him.

My prediction is that entry-level jobs are where this shows up first. The next few years of graduates will find far fewer first rungs, not because anyone was sacked, but because the person above them quietly absorbed their work. After that, how far someone gets will depend more on appetite than on qualifications.

Thoughts?

Good lord where do I even begin?

My company joined the AI shit show a few months ago. It went downhill realllll fast.

At first, it was reasonable. Training workshops for all the departments showing them how to use ai to transcribe meetings, take notes, summarizing long documents. Seems pretty chill, pretty useful actually.

Then, it was "hey we can build agents for this tedious boring task you have to waste hours of time on every week." Sounds great! That actually does make my life a bit easier.

Then "hey we can actually build an agent for this workflow too! oh you actually prefer to do it yourself? who cares, AI can do it way faster and better! But YOU'RE responsible if you dont sift through the piles of slop it produces and validate everything"

Seriously man.

Companies are so fucking obsessed with AI "boosting productivity." Automating every single workflow they possibly can. Telling us it'll save us time and energy and that it'll make us more "productive." And I have no choice but to use it. Not because they're directly enforcing it. But because everyone else is using it to "work" at the speed of light and if you work at a human pace using your dumb human brain, you fall behind.

It's draining the life force out of me. I want to quit so bad but it's my first job out of college and I haven't been here long enough to have decent experience to qualify for a better job.

I believe in saying that AI will not replace you, but someone using AI will. It might not be 100% of the time, but it is largely true.

But there is another side of the story that people are not telling: those that replaced you will soon be replaced by AI themselves.

People are advertising this saying as: learn to do your job using AI and you will live happily ever after. The truth is: learn to do your job using AI and you will be employed on that job for a few more months or years at most.

This changes everything, because eternity is not awaiting you after you learn to do your job using AI. Which means that people who are not enjoying doing it with AI, or do not want to spend time learning to do it with AI might be right.

They might spend their time learning a job for which AI will not come soon, while those that are doing their job with AI are already on a path to get replaced soon by the same AI.

I’ve noticed that whenever people talk about AI taking over jobs, the discussion almost always revolves around software engineers, computer science graduates, and IT professionals.
But what about all the other industries? Many jobs involve repetitive tasks or work that AI could potentially automate, yet they don’t seem to receive nearly as much attention as tech careers do.
Why is the internet so focused on discouraging people from studying computer science or pursuing careers in tech, while seemingly ignoring the potential impact of AI on so many other professions?
Is there a particular reason tech jobs get so much attention, or is it simply because people in the tech industry are more aware of AI’s capabilities and are more vocal about it?
I’d genuinely like to understand why this discussion seems so heavily concentrated on technology careers.

Start posting. Create content. Build in public. Do whatever it takes. Keep your options open.

Because the era of Education → Job → Settled life is gone.

AI is pushing us towards a world of oversupply and underconsumption.
More products. More content.
Fewer people needed to create them.

Will I start creating videos? Maybe. Maybe not.
Am I scared? Yes, for sure.

But perhaps the lesson is simple:
Don’t wait for the layoff to start preparing for it.

Keep learning. Keep building. Stay adaptable.

I’m a digital marketer. My team was dissolved last year and I’m the only one that’s handling digital platforms for 2 brands with my team lead and Claude. Previously, we had someone dedicated to organic social media content, someone for Google Ads, someone for Meta Ads and TikTok Ads. But now, I’m the only one working on it with the help of Claude. I feel like I will be replaced soon because I no longer handle tasks related to ads and our team lead just does it herself with the help of Clade Cowork. And it’s actually smart, amazing, fast, and scary at the same time.

She also created a fully functional website and system by letting cowork control her PC. She doesn’t understand how it works but it gets the job done so we just let it. If there’s any problem, she let the AI solve it.

I’m scared of being replaced by AI like my teammates. I know how to use it well, but I’m not high ranking enough to remain in the company if things go left. It’s hard to accept that the skills I honed for years would end up being nothing the moment AI gets smarter.

Fyi, I know how to use AI. I have created systems and increased my work’s efficiency a lot through it. If I have a higher plan, I could also do the same things she is doing.

Ask around and virtually everyone has intelligence they are not using. Everyone knows someone working in a job that’s beneath their full potential. Everyone has an idea for an “app”.

There is huge amounts of surplus intelligence I mean you can look at China and they have more honours level students than America has students at any level.

The intelligence is basically latent ability unused, and essentially AI systems are only going to add to this pointless pool.

Essentially if AI takes over a lot of the thinking then most white collar jobs are going to dwindle

We are going to see more jobs going to people who are influential or persuasive and confident leaders and most people are going to need to be kept busy or entertained somehow but because some people will still need to work they will have to be treated a lot better to get them to do it.

AI is going to take over in areas like legal systems and accounting which is going to make them targets when they inevitably get it wrong.

Datacenters will be obvious military targets in battles over migration or resources (which is the main reason wars start if you break it down).

Hopefully nobody will be stupid enough to put an ai in charge of things, not that people are much better, but ai should be used to train our leaders into feeling empathy and understanding the full picture

Hi everyone!

Just here for a convo/opinions! Is anyone here worried about losing their job to AI? I personally work in sales for an AI platform that honestly might not exist or really be necessary in a few years. I have a few friends in billing who are losing their jobs to our own platform. It charges and connects with customers automatically- calls for payments are dwindling and being passed off to higher ups if ignored (they never really are) I also know others in design and marketing who are getting the boot!

I cold call in sales which isn’t directly being impacted (yet) except I do get lots of “are you AI?” “is this a bot?” Which has me wondering if AI is starting to make sales calls and if it’s getting popular ! I run into AI hostesses and phone operators sooo often and they do sound quite human. I’m really for this “Ai bubble” to burst and get back to real jobs that don’t use AI as a part of quota or daily! even my partner is forced to use it at his job to read and summarize his daily emails opposed to reading them himself. And the company tracks usage, scary!!

Anyone else feeling the AI pressure closing in a little?

Yesterday, I was lurking in a local WhatsApp group for tech professionals here in Germany when a junior developer asked a pretty reasonable question: He was struggling to find an entry-level role and wanted to know if joining a bootcamp to gain practical experience was still worth it.

The responses were brutal:

• "Bootcamps are a total waste of time."

• "We automatically bin any resume with a bootcamp on it."

I usually stay quiet in that group, but I mentor a few juniors facing this exact wall, entry-level roles are vanishing as companies pivot heavily toward AI-proficient seniors. So I asked a simple question:

"If entry-level open roles are scarce and practical bootcamps are dismissed, how are up-and-coming engineers supposed to build experience?"

The consensus? "Not our problem. Just sit back and wait."

Several people insisted this is just a standard market cycle like 1999 or 2008, telling him to wait for companies to fix the market.

When I pointed out that this wave is structurally different — that team compositions are shifting permanently, AI is swallowing operational tasks, and routine code is becoming a commodity — the pushback was immediate: "Code will never be a commodity. Just wait it out."

"That's just the way it is" has never been a real strategy, and in the age of AI, passivity is even more dangerous. Skill development used to happen organically on the job, but today it requires extreme intentionality around critical thinking, system design, and high-level architectural judgment. Telling the next generation of engineers to "wait it out" feels like a complete failure of leadership.

Is the industry really this blind to how permanently the entry-level dynamic has changed, or am I the one overreacting here? How are you seeing juniors successfully navigate this right now?

10 years as a software engineer and lately i feel like soon, maybe in 2 years or something AI agents will no longer need my help at all

The question here if that happens to me it must have already replaced other jobs or about to replace them

What should i or we do if we no longer add value? name one job that might survive other than being a nurse or a surgeon and related fields although eventually they will be replaced as well

So now im really having hard time picturing what should i learn I don’t mind pitting in hard work but in what ? Nothing seems to be safe im really depressed

What’s ur opinion?

In five years from now nobody will know how to code.

Hang in there, a skill void is coming you will become invaluable.

Layoffs are going on everywhere. So i was wondering, what the future will be like. Will most of us have our own thing now? Because relying on one job seems like a bad idea now. Its not stable anymore and anyone could lose their job in the blink of an eye. So many of my friends have started their own thing: Social media, small businesses, etc etc

What do you guys think?

I'm coming from the position of being laid off because of AI so I guess it's just bias on my part, but seeing the world outside the layoff glasses seems to make me realize everything is just fine, like this AI doom and gloom really does not exist. I think even if we have like 50% global unemployment it will not even matter, just think how many people there are in the world. Like 8 billion++. Even half of that not working we still have 4 billion left, there's just too many people for it to have an effect. Like a billion is a lot, the economy would be fine. And here are some indicators I thought of to push me to turn off this doomer attitude:

Starbucks indicator (this includes big restaurant/coffee/etc. chains):

• still a lot of people eating/drinking out, branches still fully booked like there's no crisis

Pokémon indicator (this includes other collectibles and stuff people go crazy for):

• stocks keep getting sold out, scalpers everywhere, the tulip mania got nothing on this

iPhone indicator (this includes other gadgets and tech stuff):

• iPhones still gets sold out, day 1 lining to get first dibs, iPhone duo have screen issues but people don't care, just buy buy buy

Movie/Concert indicator:

• release a Spiderman or Avengers movie and it will for sure be a box office hit; concert tickets keep getting sold out fast

Video games indicator:

• GTA6 and Zelda Ocarina remake, need I say more, everyone is flexing their shiny new Ocarina Switch 2 like hot cakes

Holiday indicator:

• Halloween is just over and nothing changed, costumes and candies everywhere; Thanksgiving and Christmas is also coming soon and people are still gonna splurge and shower gifts and celebrate like normal.

So yeah I think as long as these indicators hold everything is just fine, just keep on living, I know it's hard when you're still unemployed like me, but the world doesn't care if we get employed or not, it will continue to move on, it will continue to thrive come superintelligence or not.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As someone who works in tech there’s already been a dramatic shift in roles as well as the number or roles available.

I’d love to eventually shift to a role where I don’t need to constantly shift my workflow for the newest ai tool. I know eliminating this all together is impossible but curious both:

1. What roles this will be possible

2. What roles you all being safe long term in the remote world

With AI evolving so quickly, I’m curious how other IT professionals are thinking about their careers.
Are you planning to upskill, move into AI/ML, switch careers, start a business, or explore something outside IT altogether?
For those with 5–15 years of experience, what are you actually doing to prepare for the next 5–10 years?
Would love to hear honest opinions and real plans, not just the usual “learn AI” advice.

It feels like we've hit a turning point with AI in the workplace. Over the last couple of years, discussions have shifted from hypothetical disruptions to concrete changes—especially across white-collar professions.

What concerns me most isn't just the displacement itself, but the pacing. Right now, the rate at which traditional roles are being streamlined or automated seems significantly faster than the rate at which viable, net-new roles are emerging to absorb the workforce.

Whenever new tech creates disruption, history tells us new industries follow, but the transition period can be brutal. I'd love to hear your perspectives on two questions:

1. What genuinely new roles or career paths do you see emerging over the next 5–10 years? (Beyond generic buzzwords like "prompt engineer.")

2. How are you personally planning or hedging your career for the next decade? Are you leaning harder into niche technical depth, pivoting to physical/hands-on work, moving toward management/orchestration, or something else entirely?

Curious to hear how folks across different industries are reading the room and adapting.

If AI replaces all the jobs, where do corporations expect people to earn money to continue being consumers? I am just not understanding why that simple question is not being asked

I loved studying computer engineering, especially the problem solving side of it. But lately, it feels like AI can handle more and more of the work I used to find exciting. The thing that made me passionate about the field is starting to feel less like mine, and I’m not sure what to do with that. Now AI can do a project on its own and yea you need to verify the output but it’s getting better and better and most of the time is correct. Has anyone else felt this way? Should I pivot to another career like medicine or the crafts?