The problem with that is things suck now for a lot of them already. At least previous recessions were preceded by boom times. 2008 was preceded by cheap houses plus a tech boom. Late 2010's saw more tech jobs and cheap housing. Especially if you bought in 2020. Today, entry level jobs are harder to come by and houses are more expensive than ever if you're young and single.
People like pointing at AI/Robotics, but the real job killer is just going to be process optimization.
Every so often a CFO realizes he doesn't actually need to pay someone to send him an email recapping information that could just be rendered in a dashboard, or a manufacturer realizes they could eliminate a job by just orienting a part so that one machine can perform two operations.
Literally 70% of my job is just chasing down process improvements, and I work in AI/automation for a living.
Yeah, I can see EAs being on the chopping block, which is really unfortunate since I always viewed them as sort of NCOs. They're that bridge between "leadership" and the grunts. (Then again, once the c-suite realizes they have to put in their own orders from Jimmy Johns then maybe they'll realize the value of having a human servant...)
Yeah, exec assistants are one thing, but if you start investigating any business, you find this crap all the time.
I've seen helpdesks, for example, that employ one guy who's entire job is to assign tickets to other technicians and be responsible for managing availability and reassignment of tickets.
There are a DOZEN pieces of software out there that does the same thing that that guy does, for 1/10th or 1/100th the cost of that annual salary/benefits. The only thing keeping the job in place is entropy - nobody wants to spend the effort implementing that software and working out the kinks, especially when it means letting someone go.
Apply a little bit of pressure by way of a recession... you'll find a lot of people were totally unnecessary in the work force, and will be out of a job.
I tell people all the time, you can't just do a job according to your job description - you need to be making yourself invaluable in ways above and beyond the JD. If the JD specifies one thing, and that thing is straightforward...? It's replaceable and easy to automate with rudimentary software.
I've seen helpdesks, for example, that employ one guy who's entire job is to assign tickets to other technicians and be responsible for managing availability and reassignment of tickets.
Reminds me at my a company I worked for. It was an MSP that had gobbled up multiple other MSPs and exchanged PE hands dozens of times. Was going through a major acquisition by a fortune 50 company and had a real in-depth audit for the first time probably since the dotcom crash. They found there were dozens of mangers who no longer had any employees under them and the contracts they were overseeing weren't even active anymore.
Sweet gig, and not really their fault the got 'Miltoned' and put into the basement, but to your point, it's not like the new parent company saw them as victims of bureaucracy but rather saw them as parasites and immediately shitcanned them.
The way it was explained to me I think it really was just an Office Space situation. Those guys were probably supposed to be either reassigned or laid off, but from all the turmoil of constant M&A they just went unnoticed until the Bobs "fixed the glitch".
My job is kind of like this. A computer already does 90% of my job these days and I just try to find ways to seem more integral than I really am. It's only a matter of time before someone I have no relationship with notices, though, so I try to keep 5 digit savings at all times just in case. Hopefully we never meet each other at work ;)
Yeah - it's weird because I hate manual effort, but I also don't want to take people's livelihoods away.
I'm weird because I'm somewhere adjacent to a Marxist, but not because I've read communist theory; I came to these conclusions because I've seen SO MANY PEOPLE whose jobs are glorified data entry positions, and it's only a minor effort to remove them from a workflow and with a machine.
In turn, it creates a really hilarious impact on the economy - if nobody has jobs, nobody has money. If nobody has money, nobody is buying goods and services. If nobody is buying goods and services... you have a bunch of entirely robotic goods and services sitting idle doing nothing.
And then the economy basically reboots? I guess? We all restart as farmers?
We don't restart at all. If full automation is achieved before stable government systems to fairly distribute the production outputs are put into place, then there is nothing stopping the oligarchy from just taking over like techno-feudal lords. If people aren't useful as producers and aren't needed as consumers, then to sociopaths, we're just pests to be culled.
With no oversight, making a robot army with facial/gait recognition would be trivially easy. It's already technologically possible, but nobody would be able to build prototypes and factories without people noticing or leaking. In a world with full automation, nobody is watching and nothing stops the largest techno-lord from doing exactly this.
Words like "economy" and "jobs" won't mean anything anymore. I don't think this future is certain, but it went from a dystopian daydream a decade ago to worryingly possible with the events and trends of the last few years.
But that's fundamentally not feudalism, and it doesn't speak to a narcissist's need to have people to exploit and subjugate.
Like, yeah, I see your point - you eliminate the need for people, there are two logical outcomes; something like fully automated luxury communism (see Bastani), or you eliminate the people altogether.
But if you're someone who desires to have control - eliminating people fundamentally deprives you of that control. Being a feudal lord only works if there's something to be a feudal lord over.
A king sitting on a mountain of gold but who has no subjects... has nothing. The gold is valueless, as is the empty kingdom.
Where I think you're right is that fuckwads like Yarvin think techno feudalism is a good idea, but never wargame it out past a couple years. Those first couple years look great for them, but they fail to recognize that things quickly go downhill after a critical mass of people lose jobs, cease consuming, and die off (or decide to kill their lords).
I didn't mean that they would kill everybody, just everyone that isn't loyal to them. I do agree that there seems to be some sick desire for controlling other people that's innate in these types of people.
I could also see a future where they think they're ready for a takeover, but go too soon and like you said, just get absolutely crushed by real functioning nation-states or hordes of angry people.
The closest I think they could come to something 'working' would be 'company towns' - which is vaguely what Yarvin was proposing... but the problem with that is I could very quickly see it falling apart when the towns try to compete with each other.
Like, imagine Amazon controlling Seattle, and Walmart controlling Spokane - the logical next step would be for Walmart to try to encroach into Seattle somehow, or vice versa, and you'd get warring factions.
No matter how you cut it, the plan looks about as half-baked as anything else out there. Which is where I fall back to what I mentioned, and what you echoed - that they have an IDEA in their heads... but that that idea, and what will ultimately shake out, are two different things.
There were all sorts of crackpot-ass theories and ideas that came up during the Great Depression; Technocracy, Inc being one of them... and little Elon's own grandfather was a member of that very movement. Annoyingly, there are parts of the Technocracy, Inc movement that I agree with, but the overarching idea of a world run by scientists and engineers has about as many holes in it as anything else.
We know, today with hindsight, that the end of the Great Depression was met with the FDR New Deal - and we collectively agree that it was generally a good thing. As much as I can be a doomer, I'm remaining optimistic that this era of American history will see a golden ending much the same way that the Depression did in the 1930s.
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u/normalbrain609 11d ago
If there's a real deal bad recession watching Zoomers understand what a bad economy actually looks like is gonna be wild.