61k millennials dying is not going to bankrupt insurance because most young people don't have insurance yet.
And it is certainly not going to cause supply chain issues. Most people employed to completely useless work anyway (we should all be having a four hour workweek, if it weren't for Bullshit Jobs (Graeber)). Our economy cannot _really_ suffer from labor shortage.
That's certainly the position that the WEF and their pet intellectuals like Yuval Harari seem to hold: technology is creating a "useless class," fit only for eating bugs and collecting guaranteed basic income.
1. Robots are okay at building things, but they're terrible at designing or fixing them. We are a long way from computers that can create elegant architecture or make innovative scientific discoveries , and even farther from robots that come to your house to fix your plumbing/electrical/HVAC issues. Same goes for robot doctors and nurses.
2. There are millions of workers covered by employee insurance plans, all of which are calculated according to historical norms. By Dowd's math, it takes only a small fraction of them to drop dead/become disabled to throw the whole system off balance.
100% agree with your second point, and 200% with the first. AI and robotics is so hyped up and insurers (like every financial institution) operate on thin, fragile margins (this one of my points, hence, I hold with less conviction).
Besides, people don't need to be "useful" for more than a few hours a week to deserve existence.
Yes the group life insurance are often given for jobs. These people are working, usually for corporations that may have required them to get jabs at a higher degree than normal. The whole AI is going to take over all the jobs is BS. I wrote about that myself regarding self driving vehicles: https://sukwan.substack.com/p/the-hucksterism-of-self-driving-vehicles
Now what percentage of workers are doing bullshit jobs? That's a tougher question. Most government jobs need to continually expand and make up reasons for their existence, that is true. But what percentage of people are actually making, creating, repairing or supplying some necessary service? I'd say a fair number. If memory serves me Ed Dowd is in Hawaii, so he sees the slowdown as I do in Phuket. Nobody seems to work at either the IRS or the US Embassy anymore. Certain jobs will also become in higher demand due to death and the much larger long term disability: support services, caretaking, medical assistance...
I'm intrigued by your skepticism about AI. It sure seems like Noah Harari and the rest of the globalist intelligentsia are all-in on replacing us messy humans with clean machines.
The parallel trend, which you've noted, of real jobs going undone while bullshit jobs multiply like Tribbles, is an interesting counterpoint. Is there causation, or just correlation? Or, are both trends caused by some third factor?
I think "AI" is just a tool for various things: 1) mass surveillance, 2) a veneer of objectivity: when the AI says "vaccinate all" or "reduce carbon" or whatever, they can say "It's not us who are commanding this; it's the AI – Objectivity Itself." [While of course in reality it will be completely manipulated and tuned to spit out the desired result.] It's the same with climate research and so many other things: you create a mathematical model such that it says what you want it to. And the plebs goes like: "Wow, maths! Graphs! It must be true." Only people versed in maths know that this is a cheap trick and everything depends on the model parameters (which you chose). Or, similarly, you do a flawed medical trial or you make "mistakes" with statistics and you can prove the safety or effectiveness of basically anything. The book of tricks is SOOO THICK!!!
My hunch is, AI is not actually powerful enough to cost a catastrophic number of jobs (certainly not more than classic robotics did). Definitely not in combination with bullshit job creation phenomena.
A little bit of both. Advances in farming for example have led to huge increases in crop yields and manufacturing over the past few centuries. Maybe 8 or 10 hours of an average person's day was spent just procuring and preparing food at one time. So there is an element of what is to be done with all that extra time. But all those features of modern living certainly create real jobs. You probably don't need an HVAC repairman if you don't have HVAC. Meanwhile what has metastasized is the bureaucracy in tandem with it. All kinds of think tanks write bullshit papers on how to decrease vaccine hesitancy, for example. It's a complex system...
Your point about spare time is interesting. I look at midcentury America, where it was common for people to get together on weeknights and go bowling, play poker, or have cocktail parties, and I wonder why everybody is overwhelmed and over-busy now.
Well, I don't really wonder. It's a combination of a toxic culture and the normalizing of the dual-income household. When one partner could focus on earning money and one partner could focus on maintaining the home and/or childcare, both people had more free time. Now that we are all both wage-slaves and housekeepers, every day is a sleep-deprived race to the finish line.
+ people were more local and had more friends/acquaintances (parish community life)
+ less digital entertainment
+ work day was effectively 1h shorter (used to be nine to five with an hour lunch; now it's eight-thirty to five with a half-hour unpaid lunch)
+ smaller agglomerations, safer inner cities → less commuting time
+ housewife does all the work DURING office hours, not afterwards. Dinner ready at five-thirty; nothing to do after six.
Not saying we need the return of the housewife, because that's not really a full time job anymore. But reduce work day to 6h MAXIMUM. Nobody can concentrate for more hours anyway; the rest is pretend to be busy.
Meet one of my alts: advocate of devil
61k millennials dying is not going to bankrupt insurance because most young people don't have insurance yet.
And it is certainly not going to cause supply chain issues. Most people employed to completely useless work anyway (we should all be having a four hour workweek, if it weren't for Bullshit Jobs (Graeber)). Our economy cannot _really_ suffer from labor shortage.
That's certainly the position that the WEF and their pet intellectuals like Yuval Harari seem to hold: technology is creating a "useless class," fit only for eating bugs and collecting guaranteed basic income.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/20/silicon-assassins-condemn-humans-life-useless-artificial-intelligence
There are a couple of problems with this thesis:
1. Robots are okay at building things, but they're terrible at designing or fixing them. We are a long way from computers that can create elegant architecture or make innovative scientific discoveries , and even farther from robots that come to your house to fix your plumbing/electrical/HVAC issues. Same goes for robot doctors and nurses.
2. There are millions of workers covered by employee insurance plans, all of which are calculated according to historical norms. By Dowd's math, it takes only a small fraction of them to drop dead/become disabled to throw the whole system off balance.
100% agree with your second point, and 200% with the first. AI and robotics is so hyped up and insurers (like every financial institution) operate on thin, fragile margins (this one of my points, hence, I hold with less conviction).
Besides, people don't need to be "useful" for more than a few hours a week to deserve existence.
Yes the group life insurance are often given for jobs. These people are working, usually for corporations that may have required them to get jabs at a higher degree than normal. The whole AI is going to take over all the jobs is BS. I wrote about that myself regarding self driving vehicles: https://sukwan.substack.com/p/the-hucksterism-of-self-driving-vehicles
Now what percentage of workers are doing bullshit jobs? That's a tougher question. Most government jobs need to continually expand and make up reasons for their existence, that is true. But what percentage of people are actually making, creating, repairing or supplying some necessary service? I'd say a fair number. If memory serves me Ed Dowd is in Hawaii, so he sees the slowdown as I do in Phuket. Nobody seems to work at either the IRS or the US Embassy anymore. Certain jobs will also become in higher demand due to death and the much larger long term disability: support services, caretaking, medical assistance...
I'm intrigued by your skepticism about AI. It sure seems like Noah Harari and the rest of the globalist intelligentsia are all-in on replacing us messy humans with clean machines.
The parallel trend, which you've noted, of real jobs going undone while bullshit jobs multiply like Tribbles, is an interesting counterpoint. Is there causation, or just correlation? Or, are both trends caused by some third factor?
I think "AI" is just a tool for various things: 1) mass surveillance, 2) a veneer of objectivity: when the AI says "vaccinate all" or "reduce carbon" or whatever, they can say "It's not us who are commanding this; it's the AI – Objectivity Itself." [While of course in reality it will be completely manipulated and tuned to spit out the desired result.] It's the same with climate research and so many other things: you create a mathematical model such that it says what you want it to. And the plebs goes like: "Wow, maths! Graphs! It must be true." Only people versed in maths know that this is a cheap trick and everything depends on the model parameters (which you chose). Or, similarly, you do a flawed medical trial or you make "mistakes" with statistics and you can prove the safety or effectiveness of basically anything. The book of tricks is SOOO THICK!!!
My hunch is, AI is not actually powerful enough to cost a catastrophic number of jobs (certainly not more than classic robotics did). Definitely not in combination with bullshit job creation phenomena.
A little bit of both. Advances in farming for example have led to huge increases in crop yields and manufacturing over the past few centuries. Maybe 8 or 10 hours of an average person's day was spent just procuring and preparing food at one time. So there is an element of what is to be done with all that extra time. But all those features of modern living certainly create real jobs. You probably don't need an HVAC repairman if you don't have HVAC. Meanwhile what has metastasized is the bureaucracy in tandem with it. All kinds of think tanks write bullshit papers on how to decrease vaccine hesitancy, for example. It's a complex system...
Your point about spare time is interesting. I look at midcentury America, where it was common for people to get together on weeknights and go bowling, play poker, or have cocktail parties, and I wonder why everybody is overwhelmed and over-busy now.
Well, I don't really wonder. It's a combination of a toxic culture and the normalizing of the dual-income household. When one partner could focus on earning money and one partner could focus on maintaining the home and/or childcare, both people had more free time. Now that we are all both wage-slaves and housekeepers, every day is a sleep-deprived race to the finish line.
I conjecture:
+ people were more local and had more friends/acquaintances (parish community life)
+ less digital entertainment
+ work day was effectively 1h shorter (used to be nine to five with an hour lunch; now it's eight-thirty to five with a half-hour unpaid lunch)
+ smaller agglomerations, safer inner cities → less commuting time
+ housewife does all the work DURING office hours, not afterwards. Dinner ready at five-thirty; nothing to do after six.
Not saying we need the return of the housewife, because that's not really a full time job anymore. But reduce work day to 6h MAXIMUM. Nobody can concentrate for more hours anyway; the rest is pretend to be busy.
cool, blackrock is on our side now cool cool cool cool cool
In fairness, he left BlackRock. Pretty sure they want nothing to do with him now.