The Coming Layoffs and the Revenge of the Measurers

The "AI" we have right now seems to be able to replace at least 20%-30% of white collar jobs. Maybe more as it improves. The layoffs are underway. Now and then I remember going to the Burger King in SF next to the cable car turntable at Market Street, and hearing some homeless people talking about the good old days when they were printers and Linotype operators. That was a good union job once. Now it's gone.

We know what Universal Basic Income looks like. It looks like this.[1] I used to take a bus past those housing projects. Warehousing useless people is not a good solution.

What country seems to be preparing to handle AI unemployment well? Is there any model to copy?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes

"To get AI, we need the people, which includes the measurers, on board. To get the people on board, we need to give them something: money, security, dignity, a credible story about where they fit. We do not have to figure out the long-run answer to what humans are for. We just have to manage the next five years."

The blogger otherwise experiments with gastown-like setups and is maybe afraid that his toy will disappear:

https://www.hackyexperiments.com/experiments/agent-order

First and most importantly, it's not really about LLMs, it's about AGI, and the second does not necessarily follow from the first; LLMs in their current state are pretty clearly not AGI, and most of the LLM-world progression in the last few years has been about better tooling/interfaces, refinements in training data and techniques and people learning how to use LLMs effectively rather than the huge leaps in fundamental capability that we saw in earlier years. It seems more likely that at this point, when AGI comes, it will be something entirely new or something that LLMs are only a component of, rather than "we built an LLM with ten trillion parameters and suddenly it became God".

Second, it's not even really about AGI, it's about AGI superintelligence. And more than that, it's about affordable AGI superintelligence, assuming that such a thing won't cost billions a year to operate.

We have to handle this phase transition process deftly.

We have so many problems to solve and we need people to solve them. AI will aid them in that.

Let's say there are there are only 1 million people in the world and all the money is concentrated under 1 person. There will be no economy at all. This implies some form of UBI is coming. This is the main reason why Christian tradition had the concept of Debt Jubilee

If UBI is not coming, youths will force the rich to share the abundance because they now a concentrated target to attack. ie Data centres. Concentration works both ways. Rich can accumulate power. But that power has a physical manifestation. And that could get attacked.

An employee allegedly burned down a 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark toilet paper warehouse in Ontario, California, causing an estimated ($500) million in damage. The massive 2026 Ontario Warehouse Fire was set on April 7, 2026.

"Tech layoffs have passed 100,000 for the year"

"There's no escaping the reality now. AI is going to wipe out a huge chunk of white-collar jobs. Blue-collar ones will also follow once robotics is solved."

The author states the layoffs are here

But then states we have to wait for "AI" to "wipe out a huge chunk of white-collar jobs. Blue collar ones will also follow once robotics is solved."

Does that mean "tech" jobs are neither white nor blue collar. Are these "bullshit" jobs

Is 100,000 in a year not a "huge chunk"

Well, unless we are "tech" workers it sounds like not much is happening. Yet

The future is here, supposedly. But don't focus on that, pay no mind to the present. (All those non-"tech" employees who still have jobs.) Focus on the future

The author states "There's no escaping the reality now."

The reality is by and large non-"tech" employees still have jobs, and a "large chunk" of so-called "tech" workers don't

Focusing on a speculative future cannot esacpe this reality

This doesn't make sense to me. "A clearer signal of leverage" implies an objective way to measure software engineering output, which has been the white whale of engineering management for the last 50 years.

Too late, for that. From what I hear, account suspensions with Google are basically the "love scene" from Deliverance.

Who, and how, will the gains be redistributed?

If the white collar jobs go, you don't need robots to kill the blue collar jobs. The supply of blue collar workers will skyrocket and wages will go effectively to zero.

And then, when nobody has any money to buy anything, the C-levels are also screwed.

The future is bleak for many, but jobs lost is the least of our problems.

Regarding the idea of a rise of “trillionaires”, gobal wealth is about $470T. Unless there is a gigantic expansion of the middle class from formerly poor people, it is impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires.

The idea of a 1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable. Any business doing that much turnover is going to be hiring lots of vendors and contractors. I guess they could decide to outsource nearly all operations to keep headcount low, but the idea of one singular person generating a billion dollars of value from labour alone with no assistance from capital of an employer is likewise laughable.

The rest of this article doesn’t. HR is going to measure what? No they aren’t.

A 1000x engineer? Really?

> 1. The producers and marketers (PMs/Sales). [...]

> 2. The leadership (CEO/VPs). [...]

I'm sorry, what? Product managers are producers and executive leadership are innovators, but engineers are just waste?

So much of what's currently wrong with our society can be narrowed down to two things: risks and incentives.

We have incentivized mass layoffs with the erasure of any and all duties a company might have outside of those to shareholders. Fewer people working, lower costs in the next ninety days. Long-term costs remain to be seen, but that's not what finance bros care about. They want to know the quarterly outlook.

Second, we've eliminated all risk once you get past a certain level of wealth and success. There's nothing "brave" about firing hundreds or thousands of people if you're in the c-suite, at least not in the United States. Like I said before, the shareholders are happy, and you'll be rewarded for meeting the target that the board (which was elected by the shareholders) met for profit. You may very well be given a multiple of the average American's lifetime earnings in a single year for your performance. The people who got laid off - assuming that it doesn't destroy their mental health to the point where they attempt/succeed with self-harm - will bury yet another round of financial dreams and hopes and try to find something else to pay off their debts. Will it be as good? Probably not, but we've started calling that the "creative destruction of capitalism", so they buy into that and move on, apathetically, with their lives. The c-suite and shareholders are effectively isolated from any sort of negative outcome through articles of incorporation, government bailouts, and sheer financial inertia.

This directly contradicts the old saying "with great reward comes great risk". The people getting the reward - the massive bonuses, the kiss-ass articles in the media, a life effectively free of financial consequence - aren't the ones assuming the risk. The rank-and-file are.

That hasn't been a real problem until now. AI as we're now implementing it has the potential to cause real damage to the financial futures of massive chunks of the population. Knowledge work is going to get less and less valuable. The people who worked in knowledge work fields often went into debt to be able to do so, sometimes for the first 10-20 years of their careers. Some have put off emotionally-meaningful things like starting families for the promised payout that now might not come at all.

That being said, the author thinks that UBI is a potential salve. It's not. Over the last 40 years, more and more people were told that they should find a job that means something to them, that gives them at least some measure of fulfillment. They're not going to get that from a check delivered once a month from an expanded OASDI scheme. They're going to look at life as effectively a game we all play by a set of rules, and the rules have now been changed several times, each one screwing them more and more. Those at the top are the ones making the rules, and they keep gaining more and more. Instead of giving people the chance to work their way up the latter in a career, the rulemakers have now said that the best you can hope for is essentially welfare that will be unlikely to let you meet your long-term goals for your life. If you maybe put off having children until a later time to buy them more financial stability, you effectively blew your best parenting years for nothing.

This could see a great realignment of risk-vs-reward back to where it's said it should be. If you're going to use AI to become a part of the first class of trillionaires, you can bet that a lot of social ire produced by what I've described above will be directed directly your way. In a society like the US, you can bet at least some of the malcontents will resort to violence to express their ire.

I talk more about the gran future here

https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/machines-of-loving-emb...