I wholeheartedly agree. I don’t use self-checkout lanes, I don’t deal with AI customer support, and I don’t tolerate corporations that view labor as an expense to eliminate. I’m not afraid of AI or automation, in fact, I do both as two of my favorite hobbies. Unfortunately, that gives me a very real and salient perspective on the future of this world and it does not look good for the base majority of us. There is basically not an I industry that won’t be directly affected by this wave of technology. Essentially all of the “poor people jobs” are going to evaporate in the next 10 to 15 years. Amazon will be eliminating the staff as a whole from their distribution centers on the next 5 years, and that is something like half a million people out of the job. The trucking industry is moving ever faster towards fully autonomous vehicles for long-haul trucking. That’s another ~2.2 million jobs according to the DoL. Toss in the call centers, fast food industry, and sectors of retail and you are talking about an easy 5M people out of work because jobs vanish. That is >1% of the US population, and that isn’t even scratching the surface.
A UBI is literally the only way forward at this point. And I mean a true UBI which all individuals can actually live off of without supplemental income.
I live in Australia where we thankfully have better democratic voting systems and as a result lean far further into social benefit and developed social services, but we’re already struggling with underemployment where efficiency is outstripping the demand for bodies. The one benefit we have is one of the best unemployment support systems in the world, but we still have issues where the capitalists that are exploiting us for all their profit don’t want to use that money to pay for those social services that keep the society that supports them healthy, and I dare say they’ll want to pay even less when they have less employees doing the same work. I agree that UBI needs to be implemented, and some of the Nordic countries have already successfully trialled both UBI and further reduced working hours for same pay with the 4 day work week and the 32 hour full time week. The only real issue is that the one entity that needs to be aware that these things exist and are beneficial is the social consciousness, and it’s stupid, we don’t spend enough on education even here to make the social consciousness cognizant enough to act. People like to think they are individual and I fear American individuality has been weaponised against the populace for so long that the tide can’t turn without blood. The strikes are starting, the people are unionising, we’ll see how far the people can push before the corporations kick back and make them bleed, then we’ll see if the American social consciousness is resilient enough to fight back and start claiming significant workers rights or whether they’ll reel back covering their bloody mouth with their shackled hands. I fear they will fight for more than they have but not for what they deserve.
We are definitely trying. Unfortunately, we have had a concerted effort for about the last 80 years to systematically disassemble the populace’s capacity for cognition and critical thought. Couple that with obvious disinformation and a group who have mastered attacking people’s fear, emotion, and blind patriotism to manipulate them into acting against their best interests.
