Assuming mass white collar automation happens in our lifetime while the current economic and government structure stays intact shows a complete misunderstanding of both economics and human nature. What makes this different from every other disruption panic since the dot com bubble is the scale of the claim. Self-driving cars were going to end trucking. Crypto was going to end banking. The metaverse was going to end…going outside? Each wave of hype picked a lane. This one is claiming all white collar work in the near term and all work, period, in the long term. Basically, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand!” Not only is the evidence for it about as solid as Elon’s “full self-driving by 2018” promise, which eight years later means a few Waymo cabs with Filipino remote drivers, but even in the hypothetical where you could pull it off technically, it’s socially, economically, and politically impossible. I don’t understand why that isn’t obvious? At that near universal scale of job disruption, you’re talking about the total collapse of the economy and government, with a level of civil unrest that makes the French Revolution look like a Berkeley drum circle. Which means these guys are either full of shit and know it, or they genuinely haven’t thought through the fact that if they’re right, they’re just speedrunning their own demise. Sam Altman would be the most hated man alive. These companies would be the first thing a desperate government nationalizes and or regulates to death. The pitch only works if it never actually comes true . And honestly, if the goal really is to turn the entire country into a techno-feudalist dystopia, you’ve got to slow your roll fellas. That’s a 150 year project minimum. The frogs will jump out of the pot if you turn the heat up this fast! And before someone mentions UBI… There is no UBI system or equity sharing setup that would actually mollify results at that scale, and these guys know it. The evidence is in their own behavior. Altman’s actual UBI project is a crypto token you receive in exchange for scanning your eyeball into a device he owns to prevent bot fraud he’s responsible for. Make of that what you will. He also famously promised Reddit users a cut of the profits from the data that trained his models, which went exactly nowhere. And the companies themselves are putting zero serious research or pressure behind any of this. If you genuinely believed your own predictions, equity sharing and economic transition planning wouldn’t be a PR afterthought. It would be among your highest priorities, because successfully buying off the anger and resentment of the huddled masses is the only scenario in which you survive. Look, if any of these companies actually had the tools they’re claiming to have, why are they selling them to you? If you genuinely had software that could replace all white collar work, you wouldn’t be pitching it to developers at a conference. You’d just use it. You’d build the best law firm, the best accounting firm, the best hospital, the best everything, and own the entire economy within a decade. Someone will say they need the subscription revenue to fund the research (because they’re not quite there yet), or that antitrust would stop them, or that a thousand companies building on their platform gets there faster. Maybe. But then stop telling people their jobs are gone. Either the tools are transformative enough to replace human labor at scale, in which case why are you selling API access for $20 a month, or they’re genuinely useful productivity tools that smart companies can build on, in which case shut up about the end of all knowledge work. Pick a lane. Also how do you square the idea of the end of human work when OpenAI, the company projecting $200 billion in revenue by 2030, is looking at $14 billion in losses in 2026 alone, with no real path to profitability. The outfit selling you magical productivity shovels that will bring about the end of human labor can’t figure out how to turn a profit. Make that make sense. https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-profitability-analyst-investor-opinions-funding-ipo-2026-2 Here’s the actual danger: the American economy is getting shredded by tariff/political chaos and is catastrophically overleveraged on AI. Millions of people are in danger of losing their jobs, yes because of AI, just not in the way these guys are pitching. And Altman has basically been bragging that OpenAI is now too big to fail, which, if you’ve seen this movie before, is just foreshadowing for the bailout. Congratulations, you’ve been promised the future and you’re going to get the bill. This is why populism is on the rise. Political and economic elites have been disrupting everyday life for decades with the promise of improving material conditions, and they stopped delivering somewhere around the Clinton administration. People are finally getting wise. What’s staggering is that Silicon Valley has completely forgotten that social contract exists, let alone that there are consequences for not holding up their end of it. You can only tell people “We’re from Silicon Valley and we’re here to help” so many times before they stop believing you. Never mind “We’re from Silicon Valley and we’re going to purposely collapse the economic system, aren’t you excited?” Like, what the hell are they thinking? At the end of the day, fear sells I guess. submitted by /u/Minute-Buy-8542
Originally posted by u/Minute-Buy-8542 on r/ArtificialInteligence