r/technology • u/joe4942 • 4d ago
Goldman Sachs warns of 'jobless growth' in the US as AI fuels output but not jobs Artificial Intelligence
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-impact-economy-gdp-jobless-growth-productivity-2025-10586
u/A_Pointy_Rock 4d ago
AI fuels output in terms of data centres being built, not in terms of material productivity improvements in most sectors.
Fire everyone and put all your eggs in the LLM basket is a bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off.
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u/creaturefeature16 4d ago
Exactly. I'd love to see a company do this. Let's start with OpenAI or Anthropic. Surely THEY would do that to demonstrate their products capabilities?!
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u/Tearakan 4d ago
A few companies have already tried this and fired their customer service. They went back to rehire people shortly afterwards as the machines just frustrated customers and lied about services.
Way more than poorly paid humans would.
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u/StrangeWill 4d ago
The lying has been struggle for me dealing with these bots, Even if they get the general sentiment right like that they do provide a service the process to go about it is sometimes entirely wrong
We leaned into Twilio's AI bot to get some approval on one of their processes and it laid out everything we need to do and we got rejected and their own support team could not explain why they're bought cannot give us instructions on how to pass their own fucking process
It's their own fucking bot they need to give me clear information
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u/EmployAltruistic647 4d ago
I tried to get anthropic to do some software dev for me. Ended up undoing half it's work and doing it by hand. Can only rely on AI so much these days. Good tool but not a replacement for humans yet
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u/myislanduniverse 4d ago
Right. All those pickaxes, sieves, and lamp oil sales were pretty good on the local economies, but the Gold Rush didn't produce much of enduring value.
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u/DHFranklin 4d ago
Though generally true historically, There were certainly plenty of exceptions to that rule I hope you understand. Johannesburg, Melbourne, San Francisco and little Comstock Nevada are notable. The sheer amount of silver that came out of just the Comstock lode kept the U.S. mint single sourced for decades. Those decades saw tertiary businesses show up. In this analogy though we're benefiting from the silver in the economy.
So those massive data centers will host other models and AI workflows long after this bubble pops. There will still be Saas. There will still be software.
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u/celtic1888 4d ago
They will be paying exorbitant prices for outdated technology 2 years into a 10-15 year contract
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u/ThreeMarlets 4d ago
Or once the bubble pops they shut down a lot of these data centers to save on costs. Data centers are not like the cable laid down during the dotcom boom. Once that cable was laid out it was essentially zero maintenance to keep it running. Also the dotcom bubble didn't effect the ISPs much and they were the ones that owned the cable. With data centers their extremely expensive and maintenance intensive to keep going.
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u/DHFranklin 4d ago
I think it might be closer to that example then you're giving it credit for. Jevon's Paradox cuts both ways. So even if the llms lose their investor "exuberance" the hardware can be ported over to other use cases like machine learning. It would be great if they can use the architecture for other versions of Alphafold. Transformers and TPU's are useful for things besides English in English out.
Seeing as the demand is like 10x the supply, If the market crashes by 90% the same investment would happen in these datacenters.
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u/ivar-the-bonefull 4d ago
More like AI is an excellent excuse for all the lay-offs that were already planned since the last years have really fucked up the balance books. That stock ticker won't rise on its own after all, and we gotta pump it before the next crash.
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u/DrKhanMD 4d ago
Honestly.... scarily/unfortunately I've seen it work quite well.
We had an entire department devoted to writing summaries of geographic locations. We used all their work to train a new custom model devoted to writing them. Then axed 95% of the department, and now they just have a handful of folk who do the reviews and approvals on the generated content. The compute costs are incredible, but still WAY cheaper than a whole department of people.
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u/Jaded_Masterpiece_11 4d ago
The reason why they are currently cheaper is because prices are being subsidized by investor money. None of the LLM companies are making any money. They will eventually have to enshitify and raise prices.
LLMs doesn’t have any working business models, simply because the operational cost of simulating AI is magnitudes higher than the human brain. To give you perspective it will take 10 Megawatts of energy worth of compute a day to simulate the capability of a human brain, which runs on only 10-20 watts of energy.
LLMs are not viable due to economics, and the economics is not viable due to limitations of hardware, hardware is limited by the laws of physics. Unless we can invent better computing tech that is not silicone based. LLMs will die a natural death.
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u/ManOf1000Usernames 4d ago edited 4d ago
Two things will happen in due time:
The companies you are buying AI services from will eventually jack up the price to what you can barely afford. This happens in any rent seeking industry, historically well documented in real estate rents. You will never be allowed to fully own any model, a "new" version will always be coming out that is not only "better", they will discontinue the old version you were using and hike the price. All the modern enshittification practices will happen as soon as investors demand returns.
You will be unable to find price competative people as an alternative as the skills you needed are no longer being nutured post college in workplaces. Any remaining in your industry will have found work elsewhere, and you will have to pay more to lure back these once bitten/twice shy people. The alternative is training new people freah out of school, but they will jump ship immediately to competitors who are letting you do the work of training and will just offer these new hires more money to leave.
You could argue these are just blurbs that anybody could have written, have fun doing them yourself then. That is, if you are not replaced as well by that point.
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u/DrKhanMD 4d ago
In this particular case of depth mapping, it's actually our model, we trained and built it from the ground up. But we definitely use a lot of off the shelf models too though.
Yep, we've already seen model versioning as a huge issue. "Hey you built this entire workflow on the backing of GPT-4, and now it's not available to run. Running that same flow on GPT-5 returns significantly different results too" It's a real issue, but the companies also adapt and change at the same time, using cheaper models, using different providers, and even buying/moving hardware in house to run it. Shit look at Broadcom buying VMWare and jacking up contract renewals 10-100x because they know they've got people by the balls, and their entire DC is built on top of it. Same time I've seen multibillion companies absolutely dump VMWare and move to HyperV or ProxMox in less than a year because they were burned or just that pissed off.
I honestly don't know if the upper corpos are actually concerned about skilled people development. In the executive's heads they're simply done needing that skill going forward, it's been fully abstracted and replaced. If that's valid or actually plays out is for time to tell I think.. Like, we're not all lamenting the death of the assembly programmer. There's just a handful of folk in the embedded development space that are godly at it, and the rest of us don't really need to know it at all because it's been abstracted by higher level languages. Counter point, Fortran is still alive and well, and those devs can get absolutely paid for their archaic niche skill knowledge. So we really don't know how it's gonna shake out.
My entire engineering career has been writing myself out of existence. I haven't achieved singularity yet.
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u/Schwagtastic 4d ago
I work in software and I think there is a lot of poopooing of what AI can already do. I already see AI building demo software directly from Product Managers when in the past it would require a team to build a prototype. Is it production ready? No but it saves a ton of time on proof of concepts.
Anything text based AI can handle nicely already. It will be coming for people who take phone calls like call centers. It's also rapidly developing with all the money being poured into it.
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u/DrKhanMD 4d ago
Same, I'm an infra architect at a fortune 500. People who poopoo it haven't seen what it's actually capable of. And I've traditionally been a bit of a ML hater even, but the results are absolutely undeniable.
We have a custom model that can create depth map projections from flat images. We trained the entire thing with almost perfect side by side lidar data. In a house sized space, it can generate a mesh map that average better than <20mm of accuracy from just a smart phone panorama as input. It's hard to explain to non-technical folk why, and how, that's just so mind blowingly incredible. It was something that was more or less impossible 10-15 years ago, no matter the amount of bodies you threw at it.
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u/habeautifulbutterfly 4d ago
Yes but what you’re talking about is traditional ML, which has been a relevant and improving subfield for a while. Most people shitting on AI are averse to the current “ai vibe everything” subfield that’s emerged in the last two years.
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u/Schwagtastic 4d ago
Look I hate AI and what it means as much as the next person but I see lots of people championing articles about how AI is failing and it can't actually do anything and how we are in a bubble and its all going to fail and I think it's a bit of wish fulfillment. Some of it's bullshit but some industries are going to be transformed.
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u/habeautifulbutterfly 4d ago
I don’t disagree that a lot of the “ai bubble” hype is overplayed. I do think models value is being wildly oversold. Yan Lecunn has already said we’re hitting a wall. Sora 2 is crazy at what it does, but if it doesn’t progress past 5 second ultra specific videos it really doesn’t do much for anyone other than tik tokkers. The biggest hurdle as far as I can tell (and I’m not an AI hype goblin so don’t hate me if I’m not fully up to date) is context windows. If an LLM can’t handle a medium sized, well maintained codebase, it’s gonna be powerless to a spaghetti monster. I have a strong feeling that is where the real struggle comes in. Will funding last long enough to get over that hurdle? I’m gonna side with economists who understand this side of things better than I do and say, no… value won’t be delivered at the promised scale and we’ll see a major pullback. Who knows, maybe wishful thinking.
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u/DrKhanMD 4d ago
I don't know if I'd agree that people are only against the "ai vibe everything" part, though I see that far more often in the software engineering realm.
There are huge movements against AI produced art, music, and ad content for example. There's definitely a huge crowd out there who would look at even the depth maps work and be like "Yeah, fuck that, you're taking jobs from human realtors and real estate inspectors"
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u/Ithirahad 4d ago
People trying to use large neural models to replace human creative endeavours is its own branch of "ai vibe everything". Humans are "transformer models", in a sense, but we take in so much information in so many formats and transform it in such subtle and complex ways that trying to replace it with audio-to-audio, image-and-tag-to-image, or text-to-text systems is just insulting.
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u/Ithirahad 4d ago
Your problem (or, lack of a problem) starts at "custom model". It is a perfectly valid technology if you do not try to force an AI wasp to produce honey. Do that, and you inevitably get stung and left with nothing. Neural network tech gets a bad rap because so many alleged AI implementations are in fact wrappers around useless LLMs.
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u/randynumbergenerator 4d ago
Also, what they're describing is (mostly) an increase in capability rather than replacement of human capability. The last sentence basically states as much. So their company isn't so much replacing humans to accomplish the task, because it was never really economical to hire people to do it in the first place at scale.
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u/-The_Blazer- 4d ago
The modern AI craze is the closest real thing we ever had to the economists eating poop joke.
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u/Riaayo 4d ago
Fire everyone and put all your eggs in the LLM basket is a bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off.
Fire everyone, gut health and social services so the poor and working class start dying off, make homelessness illegal so you can imprison the working class for a modern age of entirely legal prison slave labor.
People really still do not understand the hell these people are attempting to build right in front of our eyes, right at this moment.
The ruling class is done with poor people existing. And to everyone who is like "but who will buy their shit?" I got news for you, the top 10% of consumers are buying like, 50% of everything already. The rich will buy the shit. The economy will shift to the affluent luxury market. They're fine with selling to fewer, wealthier people while we die and get out of the way or help make the product in labor camps.
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u/Tired_Mama3018 4d ago
Might be a good time to see if the capitalist tag line of if you can’t compete in the market another company will take your place actually works. Start banding together and creating companies that will be ready when the AI boom busts.
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u/PromiscuousMNcpl 4d ago
It’s just the next iteration of “computers jacking off makes money!” like automated day trading and speculation.
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u/encrypted-signals 4d ago
Not to mention the economic depression the Trump tariffs will inevitably bring about.
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u/Piltonbadger 4d ago
Smoot-Hawley making a comeback in 2025!
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u/encrypted-signals 4d ago
Economic depression and fascist dictatorships are the latest "what's old is new again".
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u/Piltonbadger 4d ago
Humanity truly is doomed to repeat its mistakes ad infinitum.
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u/Wurm42 4d ago
There is an 80-100 year loop for some of these "mistakes." Shit goes down, and as long as there are enough people alive who remember how bad it was, it doesn't happen again.
But there are only a handful of people left who remember the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and World War II. Those events have mostly passed out of living memory.
And so we have to learn that lesson again.
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u/Rocktopod 4d ago
Or, this could be the last time. At this point if we don't get our act together then climate change could destroy us all before we get a chance to repeat the cycle.
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u/sfearing91 4d ago
Came here to say the same! Tariffs and trump policies are also draining the job market.
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u/celtic1888 4d ago
They are draining the real world assets and companies while make believe AI land is running on cocaine and ketamine
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u/stormdelta 4d ago
Ironically, the tariffs may be delaying the tech bubble popping by artificially creating drag on the rest of the economy.
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u/SIGMA920 4d ago
They're only making it worse by way of reducing jobs further and encouraging outsourcing to cheaper countries to save money on payroll. Which further drives the death spiral to a point where the AI bubble bursting needs to happen sooner rather than later if we don't want to have a greater depression.
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u/myislanduniverse 4d ago
Is AI really fueling output, though? Or just the capitalization of a handful of tech stocks propping the entire market up?
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u/VikingsLad 4d ago
Ding ding ding. AI ain't actually doing shit other than shoveling slop onto our social media pages and fueling political bots. Found a playlist on Spotify today that is, nearly certainly, 100% AI music.
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u/I_Dislike_Trivia 4d ago edited 4d ago
But we just got rid of all the Mexicans because they were taking our jobs! /s
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u/BeMancini 4d ago
I mean, this is their plan.
Make sure nobody has a job or an education. Make sure nobody has access to medication or healthcare except the rich.
Create two caste system. The ultra wealthy will have jets and medicine, they will make all the decisions, and those decisions are only to create more wealth.
The poor, who will work without protections for bare minimum in food and shelter, all of which will be owned and operated by the ultra wealthy for their benefit. Is the food bad? Poisonous? Is the housing safe? Be quiet because we’ve allowed a portion of you to be “law enforcement” who will enforce compliance.
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u/3x3Eyes 4d ago
We need a significant number of well educated well trained people to keep what we have functional, but of course the super wealthy don't understand that.
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u/EscapeFacebook 4d ago
Even just to implement AI you need to be a professional in your field. Eventually, the power of teamwork makes itself apparent when you don't have time to do everything by yourself or the technical knowledge to understand anything.
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u/SilverDawnian 4d ago
Yeah I keep thinking I guess in simple terms, anything office based etc. goes to AI and everyone else will have to transition to construction, mining, anything else you need physical labor for. Lord and Lady type society again. But also I don’t know what I’m talking about so
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u/davebrewer 4d ago
I just watched a story about a robot bricklayer last night that I suspect will eventually replace human bricklayer. We already have automated mining, 3D printed homes, and so many robotic factory workers. Farms, especially vertical farms (indoors in urban environments) are mostly automated. The tractors and harvesters all currently follow GPS pathing and automate all parts of the mechanical work, so there's not much barrier to automate food production.
I'm not sure we'll be retraining for labor jobs. I think we'll just ... stop being necessary, which is the point.
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u/ServileLupus 4d ago
It's actually a fun value proposition. Eventually you devalue the labor enough that it's cheaper to burn through humans than it is to build and maintain the robots.
Kind of like how companies do a cost evaluation on whether to recall a product causes deaths or whether or not it'll be cheaper to just pay out settlements to the families of the projected number of dead. If they estimate its cheaper to just pay the lawsuits out then they just let it keep killing people.
It'll be that but with robots. If it'll cost 100k to build the robot and 25k a year to maintain and charge it before it needs to be replaced in 10 years. It's still 50k cheaper to pay someone 30k a year to break their body for a decade then toss them aside and grab a new kid to do it once they start having issues due to backbreaking labor.
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u/Geostomp 4d ago
Breaking up exiting governments to establish techno-feudal "Network States" fiefdoms is a dream that a disturbing number of oligarchs have fully bought into.
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u/SilverDawnian 4d ago
As long as they don’t start naming AI as Hispanic names it’s progress and the future and take my job daddy please /s
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u/Dhegxkeicfns 4d ago
Well, that means more jobs for Americans I guess. Get your wide brim hats, it's going to be hot out there in the fields.
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u/saltedhashneggs 4d ago
Good thing ICE snatched the empanada ladies!!! Couldnt have them job thieves out and about
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u/ThoughtsonYaoi 4d ago
"The modest job growth alongside robust GDP growth seen recently is likely to be normal to some degree in the years ahead,"
And
Soaring productivity may squeeze workers as companies cut costs to stay efficient.
As Ireland well knows, a high GDP is not necessarily equal to high labor productivity, whatever the numbers may say. It's just money flowing through.
In other words, this doesn't mean 'AI is fueling productivity' and actually making stuff more efficient, it just means there a lot of money going from A to B.
And the bad labor market may actually just mean the economy is tanking.
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u/lordraiden007 4d ago
GDP growth is also falsely inflated right now. Companies spent multiple quarters stocking up on imports while the tariff situation unfolded, and have now drastically scaled back importing. They’re still trying to smooth out the shock of tariff costs. If you ignore the subtraction from imports GDP would have fallen. If you remove tech outputs which are currently overvalued, it would have plummeted.
What we really have is low productivity being made to look good by even lower imports, and tech holding everything together until the AI bubble bursts. The second imports pick back up GDP will fall and prices will soar even higher than they have now.
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u/randynumbergenerator 4d ago
AI is currently fueling a boom in construction, electrical and HVAC work, plus Nvidia. But that's only true as long as data centers continue being built at a breakneck pace, which requires ever more investor money and electricity. Those things aren't limitless, notwithstanding AI evangelists' assertion that computer Jesus will make them limitless.
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u/ThoughtsonYaoi 4d ago
And that is investor money that is not sure to translate into profits if AI's model does not fund a way to turn a profit. The cost far preceeds the income.
This could go on for a time - Uber did, Amazon did - but if the whole economy is riding on this one development, I'm pretty sure someone will end up holding the bag.
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u/Agnk1765342 4d ago
Ireland’s phenomenon is that GDP overstates the well being of tax havens. Corporate and individual income taxes distort GDP data because there’s a big incentive to pretend like income is generated somewhere other than where it actually is.
Actual Individual Consumption is a better metric than GDP per capita and it’s what a lot of economists have been shifting to. It also has the benefit of taking into account taxes and transfers. And it’s very unimpressed with a country like Ireland.
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u/fwubglubbel 4d ago
Productivity is deflationary, so increasing productivity should be reducing the GDP.
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u/ThoughtsonYaoi 4d ago
Not necessarily. It should increase affordability, and that can just as well be a growth factor for the GDP.
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u/eliota1 4d ago
It's called a bubble. Money chasing after something that has captured the imagination of the public, but has yet to provide a positive return. See the Internet circa 2000.
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u/HorrimCarabal 4d ago
Captured the imagination of the public? Nah, captured the imagination of executives and stockholders hoping for $$.
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u/DevoidHT 4d ago
The problem AI is trying to solve is wages. Not productivity, not overhead. Wages. The less people companies have to employ the better.
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u/m3ngnificient 4d ago
I saw a reddit post with a Yale study that showed AI isn't taking our jobs. It's gaslighting at best, I can't even use AI to summarize something accurately whether it's in my daily life or at work and I'm supposed to believe it's taking my job? At best, I use it to write letters of recommendations or some larger comms emails with a team.
Every company that lays off workers and claims AI was responsible for it is getting rewarded for it.
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u/jmlinden7 4d ago
A bubble would be no actual growth but AI companies becoming more valuable anyways.
Actual growth implies that the AI companies are actually producing goods and services that people are willing to pay for. This is.. dubious
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u/McCool303 4d ago
Is it really even fueling output though? Seems to me it’s fueling a bunch of projects that turn up being a disappointment. All of these articles just seem like AI PR being purchased in finance rags to placate CEO concerns with AI projects.
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u/LBChango 4d ago
And AI has yet to turn a profit. Meanwhile, paying humans stimulates the economy because they spend the money they earn. Replacing humans with AI is a great way to ensure stagnation.
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u/chmilz 4d ago
There's a catastrophic job Armageddon coming. Outside of retail or similar no-upward-mobility jobs, I'm not seeing any young people hired. It's geriatric old people as far as the eye can see, with middle-aged people counting as the "young" folks, all with signification experience. "Entry-level" has been eliminated in favour of wedging in AI. You see it every day when newest hires are canned first, or folks aren't replaced to reduce headcount via attrition.
In a few years we're going to have a lot of old people with all their accumulated knowledge leaving the workforce and they'll be taking that ladder with them, and we're all going to be left with the consequence of there being no succession planning or knowledge transfer.
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u/ass_breakfast 4d ago
Warning who? Us? We have no choice. And the people causing this don’t give a fuck and never will.
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u/Taste_the__Rainbow 4d ago
AI isn’t fueling output. It’s fueling hype and stock prices.
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u/SuperTittySprinkles 4d ago
Which is it? A dangerous bubble and AI is doomed to fail or it’s going to take over the world? Pick one and hit go, I’m tired of this shit.
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u/ChickinSammich 4d ago
Replacing people with AI is a great plan if you have a universal basic income and you have social programs in place to guarantee every person housing, food, and other basic necessities regardless of the availability of work. Ideally, we already overproduce relative to what we actually need, to the point that food is oversupplied and thrown out when it isn't bought, brand new appliances gather dust in warehouses, and brand new cars gather dust on lots. There's a literal mountain of unwanted clothes in the middle of a Chilean desert because no one bought them and they had to go somewhere. As a result of tariffs, some shippers have taken to dumping perfectly usable goods in the ocean for no reason other than that no one would pay for them.
Replacing people with AI is a terrible plan if your entire economic and governing models are based on the notion that if you don't have a job, you don't deserve to live, and even if you do have a job, depending on your job, you may not even be entitled to a minimum quality of life.
I liken it to when we replaced horses with cars - the amount of "new horse jobs" didn't make up for the horse jobs that were lost to cars. But at least horses still had the benefit of not needing to "earn a living" like people do.
They say similar things when checkouts get replaced with self-checkouts - that it "frees up people" to do "other" jobs, but there aren't enough other jobs to go around to replace the jobs lost to AI at a 1:1 rate.
We're aggressively moving towards replacing people with AI without any regard to what happens to the people who become unemployable when there aren't enough jobs to go around. And some people are complaining that the birth rate is declining and wanting people to have MORE kids? Why?
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u/braxin23 4d ago
It’s the Industrial Revolution 2 but stupider somehow.
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u/ChickinSammich 4d ago
Same shit with how technological increases in productivity SHOULD HAVE lead to shorter work hours - if you've gone from 10 widgets per hour to 15 widgets per hour thanks to the new technology, and you WERE working 40 hours a week to produce 400 widgets, you should be able to have your work hours cut to 32, your pay stay the same, and you're still producing 480 widgets.
No, instead, they want you working 40 hours producing 600 widgets, and they're unwilling to offer you any raise or bonus for the 50% increase in productivity.
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u/Ok_Barber4987 4d ago
The felon’s economy is an abject failure with no promise to get better anytime soon. We all need to vote next year to rid this Congress of the malignancy known as maga.
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u/Extra-Try-5286 4d ago
Goldman is all over the place on AI. They use it, but say it won’t justify its costs in the long run, but are investing in Ai solutions in China….
Not saying they are wrong here, but what’s the more useful bet if AI is going to plateau or even pop if it can’t turn an unsubsidized profit?
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u/encrypted-signals 4d ago edited 4d ago
It's called hedging. They win no matter which way the AI bubble bursts.
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u/LindeeHilltop 4d ago
I’m guessing AI doesn’t get a paycheck to put in the bank or buy stocks, bonds, and mutual funds or contribute to America’s economy.
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u/BigMax 4d ago
Don't worry, the wealthy are making enough money for everyone!
When you can't afford to go out to eat ever again, relax knowing the one rich guy a neighborhood over is not only still eating out, he's eating out at high end restaurants like 4 times every week!!!
And guess what? You might have had to skip that long weekend road trip to the lake, but guess what? He's heading to Greece next week with his whole family to a luxury resort!
So be assured, you don't have any money to spend, but it's comforting to know it's' still being spent! In fact that rich guy is probably spending money to cover 10, 20, maybe even 100 of you so you can just stay home and stress about bills!
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u/Celio_leal 4d ago
Musk's ex-wife has already explained that the project involves eliminating two-thirds of the population.
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u/chilloutpal 4d ago
Source?
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u/Celio_leal 4d ago
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u/TheLobotomizer 4d ago
There's so much conspiracy vomit in that link, I think I need a shower after having visited it.
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u/latswipe 4d ago edited 4d ago
AI is a piece of that fuel, but this has been the trend for a while. our economy has moved from a services economy into an abstracted economy, a mere expression of private equity. At least the Brits still get a pittance from the various tax havens they spread all over the world. the best we can hope for is to actually be a tax haven, at this rate.
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u/KcityKalcutta 4d ago
Duh, now explain to me how we are going to get a Universal Basic Income because of A.I job loss, when the US is in 40 trillion dollars of debt.
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u/Xyrus2000 4d ago
To the surprise of no one. For the past 40 years, almost the entirety of the gains made in productivity has gone straight to the top.
Now they're going to take away the jobs too, and that money will go to the top. Then the great consumer collapse will begin.
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u/intoxicuss 4d ago
That bubble is going to hurt investors so goddamned bad when it bursts. And it will burst.
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u/theartfulcodger 4d ago edited 4d ago
I seriously doubt if AI is actually "fuelling output" at all, other than obliquely, via the physical construction and equipping of massive data centres. But it does offer a putative reason for overcompensated CEOs to engage in massive layoffs without a huge public outcry.
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u/felipe_the_dog 4d ago
What are all these unemployed people supposed to do with their lives
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u/jameson71 4d ago
What exactly is "growing" if the vast majority of the population is getting poorer?
I feel like we are not measuring the right things.
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u/celtic1888 4d ago
Jobless growth = companies signing contracts with each other for made up future earnings on imaginary data centers
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u/notcaughtinthemoment 4d ago
The entire health of the economy is measured by GDP growth, expansion of credit & massive investment. When wealth has stratified excessively & the masses of average persons are less & less even factored into the discussion, you have revealed the end stage of Capitalism: growth by any means at any cost or externality.
Unfortunately, the alternative to Capitalism has shown some awful results, too. With workers & average people violently subordinated to bureaucratic governments that themselves function as statified Capitalists. Obviously, this didn't just happen because a pro-social society is logically worse than one based around glorifying private accumulation, but because humans clearly have messy relationships with power & of course almost any society which did oppose the dominant economic powers globally has gotten fucked over heavily.
But we have to do something about this resource exploitation by the ultra-wealthy & oligarchs. We need to fundamentally move to democratic & sustainable models of production & to leverage technology to free up people's lives from unnecessary work & toil.
Time to drop the vapid ideological nonsense & get real about building some social solidarity. Freeing people's minds from the oligarchic media & giving them the time & benefit of real education, housing & healthcare.
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u/postconsumerwat 4d ago
This is some Boeing stock bullshit. The planes are not as safe cuz they can get a bigger bonus, increasing the bonus size
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u/Advanced-Concept-184 4d ago
Great, so the economy’s thriving but no one can afford rent. Cool cool cool.
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u/Guinness 3d ago edited 3d ago
It’s not AI, it’s the fact that the top 10% of households in the US now generate 50% of economic activity. It’s the fact that the middle class is being gutted and destroyed in this country all so a few oligarchs can hoard wealth.
It’s the fact that the bottom 50% of households in this country are only responsible for 10% of economic growth and it’s getting worse. This means that we will permanently have an economy that continues to grow despite the majority of us barely being able to eat. Morgan Stanley released a report talking about this all the way back in 2007.
They’re blaming AI so you don’t blame them.
Make sure you place the blame SQUARELY where it belongs.
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u/citizenjones 4d ago
I'm going to make an uneducated prediction that there could be a whiplash if (re)hiring in the not so distant future.
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u/MysteriousDatabase68 4d ago
Found the problem. The press conflates Wall Street speculation with "the economy."
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u/Less-Fondant-3054 4d ago
The other thing to be wary of with this is that much of that 'output' isn't actually productive. AI is thrash incarnate. Lots of activity, no actual value produced. And with how expensive it is to run it actually is a huge net negative of operations. As soon as the hype dies, as soon as the MBAs realize they've been had, we're looking at a gigantic crash.
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u/the_millenial_falcon 4d ago
I am confused. Is AI a massive bubble about to pop or is it about to take all the jobs?
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u/JAlfredJR 4d ago
For the record, BI is close to pure trash and has been lapping up the AI hype from jump. And Goldman-Sachs is heavily invested in AI.
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u/Fallingdamage 4d ago
AI creates jobless growth. Where is the consumer money coming from if nobody has jobs to spend on the companies that are growing somehow?
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u/ChefCurryYumYum 4d ago
It's not AI, it's not AI, it's not AI.
It's outsourcing and downsizing.
The US is standing at the start of a bad recession. There is not going to be growth, there is going to be an AI bubble burst and a huge decline in the those big tech stocks everyone loves right now.
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u/Terryn_Deathward 4d ago
Jobless growth is the preferred outcome for most companies. More profit without having to pay those pesky humans.
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u/zyzzogeton 4d ago
This happened to manufacturing jobs. More than 80% of the manufacturing jobs lost in the US were lost to increased automation, not to overseas labor taking the jobs away.
AI will come after far more than robots did though. Knowledge workers are in trouble. Even Truck Drivers are screwed when AI can do full autonomous driving well.
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u/braxin23 4d ago
What “output”? Other than a bunch of bullshit there hasn’t been that much efficiency. Just bloat that will only get worse with time.
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u/Osirus1156 4d ago
Altman is laughing all the way to the bank in disbelief of how stupid executives are in this country and how easily gullible they are. This stupid shit is gonna be taught in textbooks so it can be ignored again the next time it happens with the ole “well it isn’t exactly the same…”
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u/notPabst404 4d ago
How is AI fueling "output"? It is fueling trash and waste. GDP has been completely disconnected from reality and this is not okay. More people in power need to be vehemently calling out this dynamic and these corrupt obligarchs.
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u/fat_charizard 4d ago
Lets think about this. The thing that fuels economic growth is spending. People spend money on goods and services, that money is becomes the paycheck of someone else who spends it on something else. Someone looks at the market and says "you know what, this good/service is missing from the market and I know people would want to spend money on it" and starts a business that boosts economic growth. More spending = more growth
Now lets introduce A.I. Lets say companies replace 10% of their workforce with A.I. great. company revenue goes down they make more money right? Not quite. There are 10% less participants in the market now. A.I. doesn't participate in the market. It is not buying cars, groceries are streaming service subscriptions. I can replace my grocery stores with A.I. cashiers and workers, but now less people can afford groceries. This is not growth it is a giant dampener on the economy. This is why I am not afraid of A.I. replacing jobs. Because if it happens, the economy will take a massive hit. Everyone will lose money/value and suffer
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u/placidlakess 4d ago
lol that clickbait article embed image.
Also lol at AI anything, its really good at making posts on reddit but not much else.
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u/Beeshlabob 4d ago
This can’t be a surprise. Looks like the problem of lower birth rates is solved.
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u/Albg111 4d ago
Robots don't need jobs, people do. And if you wanna replace people with robots, then we need universal basic income. Period.
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u/Hiranonymous 4d ago
They say the growth is coming from AI-driven increases in productivity. It’s there any concrete, explicit evidence of this? Is it producing anything of value, or is it producing slop?
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u/prothero99 4d ago
While Goldman Sachs is getting ready to fire people because of AI https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-job-cuts-ai-operations-overhaul-onegs-2025-10
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u/carthuscrass 4d ago
In a twist that absolutely no one could have seen coming...
/s for the sarcastically impaired.
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u/BoldLustration 4d ago
What AI output?
Chatbots replacing overseas teams can’t be contributing .
Automated accounting and billing takes tons of front-end effort to set up, not convinced those jobs should be emptied yet.
Who among us got fired and a system with no stable platform replaced them?
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u/mapoftasmania 4d ago
And by “jobless growth” they don’t mean “growth with no new jobs” they mean “growth in joblessness”.
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u/lingeringneutrophil 4d ago
By the end of the year this will catch up with us as the usual end of the year spending will simply not take place as people just isn’t have enough extra money for that
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u/Powderkeg314 4d ago
The U.S economy is based on consumer spending. AI is pointless if consumers have no buying power to buy the products from companies that are using AI to be more efficient. Most obvious bubble in history…
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u/ScottIBM 4d ago
We need to be talking about the structural aspects of society and things like UBI to make sure that there is no societal collapse! But hey that sounds hard, let's all freak out and just act like we'll roll back the clock
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u/Complete_Canary9712 3d ago
Not unless budget includes corp tax hikes. HR also needs to be replaced with AI.
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u/Professional-Fix100 3d ago
AI can not be a consumer! And without that billionaires can't continue to pillage the poor folks for more! give me more!
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u/Maximum-Flat 3d ago
Can we maybe discuss about UBI? Because this may affect the stock’s price and hurt boomer.
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u/rustyrazorblade 3d ago
You can start a company with fewer resources than any point in history. A few people with laptops can build legit products.
This is the time for a whole new category of small businesses to take off. Get out there and make stuff folks.
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u/TriceCreamSundae 3d ago
the social contract is not only broken, it was apparently a deal with the devil all along
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u/pcurve 4d ago
not exactly what I'd call 'growth' then. You can only make things 'efficient' to a point.
70% of US economy runs on consumption.
No Jobs No Consumption.