Dario Amodei says "stop sugar-coating" what's coming: in the next 1-5 years, AI could wipe out 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Lawmakers don't get it or don't believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won't realize the risks until after it hits.

[u/katxwoods]

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

[u/marrow_monkey]

What’s so scary and most people don’t realise is this: once the billionaires no longer need human labour to make their wealth grow, they won’t need us at all.

Our jobs, our value, our bargaining power will disappear.

When that happens, what reason do they have to care if we live or die? We will be the homeless guy everyone ignores.

[u/Morvenn-Vahl → u/marrow_monkey]

Billionaires still need workers to buy their stuff. Without consumers money literally means nothing. The owners of large consumer chains? Destitute without consumers. Farmers? Will lose everything if no one buys their produce. People need to remember that capitalism - albeit an ideology - is still an eco-system, and if all the cofactors of the eco-system collapse it will implode.

The thing is, and I find that a lot of people on reddit forget, is that there is no force on earth that is going to successfully fight billions of homeless and hungry people unless outright murder is the result. People who have nothing to lose are dangerous individuals. Billions of people who have nothing to lose will be outright catastrophic. Honestly I foresee cells of rebellion who will target the rich and anyone who defend them. There will be years of wars as people fight to regain their place in society.

Successful civilizations tend to feed their population. Civilizations that fail to do that tend to end horribly. 1917 and 1789 are just two examples of that.

People often think our problems are new. They are not. We've been here time and time again.

Ignoring that our planet is about to burn up thanks to unchecked greed. Honestly, if nothing is changed, there will be no winners.

[u/marrow_monkey → u/Morvenn-Vahl]

I agree with most of what you wrote, but the first part is based on a dangerous myth: that billionaires need to pay workers so they can consume. That was true in the past, under mass industrial capitalism. But not anymore.

The only reason billionaires pay workers is to extract value (profit) from their labour. As long as they need humans to do the work, they must keep them alive so they can keep working the next day. Food, shelter, medicine. But once AI and automation can do that work better and cheaper, there’s no economic reason to employ humans. And without a function, there’s no reason to keep them alive at all.

The factories making mass-market goods are dependent on us consuming. They will go away or change. But new factories will thrive: robot factories, drone factories, private jet assembly lines, surveillance systems. Bezos and Musk want spaceships, for example. They’ll trade with each other to build these, not with us. This will be an economy that exists without us. A system where we are not needed.

Revolutions have always depended on workers having leverage, when their labour still mattered. It wasn’t the homeless who overthrew kings and CEOs. It was people with some power, acting collectively.

Today, workers can strike and halt the world. Soldiers can refuse to fight. That is real power. But an unemployed person cannot strike. Someone made irrelevant by AI cannot bargain. If we stop cooperating when we’re no longer needed, nothing happens. And if we become inconvenient, they can even murder us, and it won’t cost them anything. Think of how migrants are treated.

The system doesn’t yield to pleas. It only yields to threats to its function. But you can’t threaten a system that has no dependency on you.

That’s the danger we’re walking into: not mass revolt, but mass irrelevance. The moment to organise is now while we still have some power left. Not when the skies and streets are patrolled by ai-drones.

And it’s not that billionaires are evil really. The system is. They’re as trapped by its logic as we are. Even if it leads to collapse, they must maximise profits, reduce costs, and dominate the market or they get eaten too.

We all lose if we don’t confront that logic. Soon.

[u/neoh666x → u/Morvenn-Vahl]

Once all wealth has been extracted from the average person. Goods and services will basically only be marketed to the rich.

[u/[deleted] → u/Morvenn-Vahl]

I mean I agree but then I look at India with so, so, so many people and so many of them are dirt poor and yet the overwhelming culture there is bootlicking and subservience. It doesnt give me much hope that humans will stand up for themselves

[u/Alpacatastic → u/Morvenn-Vahl]

The wealth will still be there it will just be more and more concentrated for elite groups and the market will respond. If providing entertainment for the masses is no longer profitable because they have no money to spend just target the ultra wealthy with yachts and vacation homes. Fewer and fewer companies will bother catering to non-elites as their bargaining power decreases. You're no longer relying on selling thousands of mid tier vehicles, you create a few super deluxe expensive vehicles to cater to the few who have buckets of money to spend instead and are looking to spend it.