A 1 Percent Solution to the Looming A.I. Job Apocalypse

nytimes.com

11 points·vharuck··7 comments

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/opinion/artificial-intell...

Here's another take.

https://www.noemamag.com/the-politics-of-superintelligence/

It's mostly about AGI predictions, but it made the point that talking about "inevitability" of AI apocalypses ultimately moves resources to AI companies.

That said, I'm all in favor of tech companies offering useful retraining to the masses. (It's just that I've always seen predictions that AI will also create jobs, so I'm not ready to concede that mass displacements are inevitable...)

This is an insanely cynical take. Replace workers with AI but commit some money to retrain them for some theoretical jobs which seemingly aren’t able to be replaced by AI. Don’t worry about if they ever get jobs just give Sal Khan more money to retrain people and your conscious will be clean.

This has been suggested by economists many times and never happens at scale. Problem: Losses of tens of thousands of coal jobs due to automation. Solution: Job retraining! Actuality: no successful job retraining programs are created. The number of workers successfully retrained can be counted on one hand.

data centers will have to be fortified like prisons, so that ordinary citizens don’t bulldoze them

The protection of data centers is provided by the state. Rule of law, peace, police.

If things degrade to the point where people are resorting to bulldozers (and getting away with it) we have other larger problems.

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