The AI job disruption is fully here, and I am perturbed by how I don’t see it being talked about. Maybe it’s partially because we are a very binary society, and we aren’t seeing entire career fields being let go. However, we are definitely seeing job fields getting decimated.
What I mean by this is, for development teams where they might have had ten developers before, now they may have 3. And the rest is being covered by reliance on AI. In ONE YEAR, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, predicts that all programming jobs will be replaced by AI. One year from now! That’s so many high level jobs that will be wiped out.
And that’s just in an industry that I am personally involved in. The same thing is happening across the creative sphere, and in nearly every job that requires a degree that doesn’t require a person to physically be there. The entire white collar labor force will be affected in one way or another, with the majority being “affected” by it in the form of layoffs. Other fields that are highly likely to be disrupted, and are already being affected, are accounting, mathematics, drafting, copywriting, computer graphics (video games and movie productions are already trying to edge AI graphics in to see if you notice), any sort of data processing or paralegal work, medical imaging. And that’s just the beginning.
I know, every technology that comes along that displaces people, has some new field that opens up. But what’s concerning here, is the scale of disruption. There just won’t enough new jobs made to offset the jobs lost. This is going to be a jobs bloodbath, and the effects can already be seen. It’s taking much longer for developers/programmers/technical workers to find a job than it did in years previously. That’s not a coincidence. And it’s also the jobs that required people to go into debt to get degrees in many cases, and now the fields are disappearing.
The darker side of me wonders if part of this “bring manufacturing back to the US” agenda isn’t to try to push people into those manufacturing roles, because there just aren’t going to be educated and skilled jobs at a meaningful level, before we know it. They are skirting saying it, because some the people behind this push, are also the AI developers. So much money is being poured into those efforts, and the people in charge of our government have a vested interest in making AI dominant. For one thing, they want to beat the rest of the world at it (particularly China), which I understand. But the darker part is many of them are billionaires, and will be able to be continually enriched if AI is the backbone of the workforce for our intellectual and technical jobs. The requirements for AI to work on an environmental and technical scale are enormous. I was concerned years ago by how much energy bitcoin mining was eating up, and now this is that issue on steroids. With the addition of provisions into the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump and the republicans are trying to pass, that would keep states from regulating AI AT ALL for the next ten years, this is not looking good.
Paired with the push for manufacturing jobs (though I haven’t actually seen much movement towards anyone building new factories here; in fact many investors are now moving plans outside of the US that they were planning on having here, due to our financial instability since March), is the massive cutting of worker protections, Medicaid, restarting wage garnishment and reducing payback plans that had been approved for student loans, and environmental protections.
All of those topics, if you look at them from the perspective of unleashing the AI gods and pushing Americans into menial work, fit together under a very depressing lens. Particularly if you remind yourself of how many of these government changes were brought about by the chainsaw of Elon Musk, the billionaire who has an AI company.
I’ll elaborate. If you reduce EPA regulation, and open up National Parks to development, all of a sudden the environmental problems (huge requirements for electricity and clean water for cooling, for example) for the massive drain that AI is on infrastructure goes away. Now, they also have plenty of new land to purchase and exploit to make data campuses.
If you take away Medicaid, increase the tax burden on all of those under the top earners, remove worker protections in every form, and allow the harshest penalties against student loan debt again (I’ve always thought that this was a form of indentured servitude. You can declare bankruptcy for gambling debts, but not school debt? Why?), who is forced into the positions that are freed up by exporting all the immigrants?
The not rich Americans.
Whose job security and job availability is decreasing at an incredible rate?
The not rich Americans.
The ultra rich are living in a world where they barely even have to see regular people anymore, except for possibly as blurred faces in the crowd when they give speeches. The rate at which the richest accumulated their money during the pandemic exploded, and it is exploding again with the market manipulation that has happened since March.
Now that they don’t need us humans to fulfill jobs, I’ve noticed that many places are treating their workers much worse. Forced back to office policies, worse benefits, increased surveillance of workers whether or not the job is getting done….this is all a symptom of a change in American economy. The push for “manufacturing jobs” is largely a farce, and if it’s not, will take years to happen. Meanwhile, if we aren’t needed for votes anymore, and we aren’t needed for production…where is the power of the average American citizen? This is why we have to claw for it while we can.
One of the issues that I understood during the election to be an issue, that the Democratic Party didn’t, was that there are two “economies”, and the Democrats only acknowledged one. There’s the wealthy economy, which is stocks and bonds and the Fed and inflation, and it’s the one that gets headlines. All of that does affect things downstream, but when an average American talks about “the economy”, they mean the prices of houses, gas, food, and needs. Most Americans don’t invest in the markets at all.
And here’s where this issue is coming back again. The Republicans understood those differences, and still do…but don’t care. As this regime has shown, they don’t care if the “regular person economy” if suffering right now. Tariffs are jacking up prices (e.g.: the standoffs with Walmart, the announcement Subaru just made about raising their prices, and on and on), and they don’t care. Because they already got the votes they need. And what will benefit the “rich person economy”? It’s not bringing down the cost of groceries; it’s dominating in software and AI. And the rest of us, unfortunately, are chattel in that game.
Big Tech is not called Big Human. They don’t care about us. Look at the “dead internet” theory. Have you heard about this? It’s that as algorithms, AI, and bots have proliferated online, most of our experience as users means we aren’t even actually interacting with humans. Meta even has AI “agents” that are fake accounts meant to drum up interactions to keep us online….because humans aren’t cutting it. They want your attention, but not you.
As the generative AI models have continued to grow, a concerning trend has come out. They are “hallucinating” at a higher rate. That means, they are making up data and scenarios that they aren’t supposed to, almost a “ghost in the machine” effect. It’s confusing the developers, because they expected that hallucinations would decrease, but the opposite is happening. Which, to me, just highlights how we are children playing with fire. There’s another concerning side effect, where people are using AI as a therapist and friend. I see how that happens; it’s meant to make you like it, so it puts things in a way meant to make you feel good. Unfortunately, that also means that it will just make stuff up for its user. That can be handled with new parameters, but that brings us to another thing: AI is supremely editable. It’s very easy to manipulate or change data as someone who owns an AI tool, which means introducing falsehoods and bias is even easier than it was before. And when that information comes from a “trusted” source, that’s not allowed to be regulated? Well that’s not a good thing, if you are someone who cares about humanity or freedom.
Meanwhile, there’s the issue of AI getting smarter than us and breaking out of its confines. Will a lack of oversight help that? I don’t think so, do you?
For years I’ve been saying that we need to come up with a universal basic income plan for the AI jobs disruption (I first wrote about it in 2016), and we have only moved backwards. Just last month, Bill Gates started calling for the same thing. But without industries even acknowledging that this is an issue, it’s frightening to see how quickly the average American will be impacted by this, without having any sort of societal safety net at all.
This has been a lot of doom and gloom, but there are upsides to AI. I think that if we harness it in the right way, it could change humanity for the better. It could make suggestions for change and optimization, without the emotional baggage of a human’s biases and desires. I love the idea of that applied to the climate crisis, trade deficits, and medical science, for example. But an unregulated AI industry won’t result in that, as clearly the AI gods are demonstrating. They want to be able to follow their ideas, with no interference or input from the world they are changing (and, in case of the environment, ruining). Does that seem fair to you? It doesn’t for me. Transparency and safeguards are needed in this industry, and they are needed now. We need a blanket rule on ethics, bias, transparency, and on keeping experimental AI away from the unknowing public without safety measures and guardrails. (Did you read about the unethical experiment run by Standford on Reddit? It used AI agents to influence the opinions of people who thought they were talking to other humans, and it worked. I’ll post a link to that scary stuff below).
Contact your lawmakers about your concerns, these measures are being debated now. And hopefully we can get people involved in government who understand technology more than only being enriched by it. And remember, if you’re reading this, it’s not you vs me, no matter your politics. It’s the super rich against the American citizen.
Google CEO quote about AI replacing programmers in one year:
https://san.com/cc/former-google-ceo-predicts-ai-will-replace-most-programmers-in-a-year/
An estimate of how much power generative AI takes: https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption
Ban on regulating AI: https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-congress-39d1c8a0758ffe0242283bb82f66d51a
Unethical Reddit Standord and University of Pennsylvania experiment: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/04/reddit-ai-experiment-no-consent
4000 jobs lost to AI in May alone: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-job-losses-artificial-intelligence-challenger-report/
Dead Internet theory: https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/what-is-the-dead-internet-theory/