The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

>It'll be like the movie Elysium.

The rich were able to insulate themselves in space which is much harder to get to than some place on Earth. If the rich want to turtle up on some island because that's the only place they're safe, that's probably a better outcome for us all. They lose a lot of ability to influence because they simply can't be somewhere in person.

It also relies heavily on a security force (or military) being complicit, but they have to give those people a better life than average to make it worth it. Even those dumb MAGA idiots won't settle for moldy bread and leaky roofs. That requires more and more resources, capital, and land to sustain and grow it, which then takes more security to secure it. "Some rich dude controlling everything" has an exponential curve of security requirements and resources. This even comes down to how much land they need to be able to farm and feed their security guys.

All this assuming your personal detail and larger security force actually likes you enough, because if society has broken down to this point, they can just kill the boss and take over.

This is basically what happened after 2008. The entry level jobs college grads did basically disappeared and didn't really come back for many years. So we kind of lost half a generation. Those who missed out are the ones who weren't able to buy a house or start a family and are now in their 40s, destined to be permanent renters who can never retire.

The same thing will happen to Gen Z because of AI.

In both cases, the net effect of this (and the desired outcome) is to suppress wages. Not only of entry-level job but every job. The tech sector is going to spend the next decade clawing back the high costs of tech people from the last 15-20 years.

The hubris here is that we've had a unprecedented boom such that many in the workforce have never experienced a recession, what I'd call "children of summer" (to borrow a George RR Martin'ism). People have fallen into the trap of the myth of meritocracy. Too many people thing that those who are living paycheck to paycheck (or are outright unhoused) are somehow at fault when spiralling housing costs, limited opportunities and stagnant real wages are pretty much responsible for everything.

All of this is a giant wealth transfer to the richest 0.01% who are already insanely wealthy. I'm convinced we're beyond the point where we can solve the problems of runaway capitalism with electoral politics. This only ends in tyranny of a permanent underclass or revolution.

In context of tech, H1B is great for the money people in the US and India. It suppresses wages in both countries and is a powerful plum for employee “loyalty”. There’s a whole industry of companies stoking the pipeline of cheap labor and corrupting the hiring process.

In big dollar markets, the program is used more for special skills. But when a big bank or government contractor needs marginally skilled people onshore, they open an office in Nowhere, Arizona, and have a hard time finding J2EE developers. So some company from New Jersey will appear and provide a steady stream of workers making $25/hr.

The calculus is that more H1=less offshore.

The smart move would be to just let skilled workers from India, China, etc with a visa that doesn’t tie them to an employer. That would end the abusive labor practices and probably reduce the number of lower end workers or the incentive to deny entry level employment to US nationals.

I joined in 2018.

Honestly it was 10 years too late. The big innovations of the 2010 era were maturing. I’ve spent my career maintaining and tweaking those, which does next to zero for your career development. It’s boring and bloated. On the bright side I’ve made a lot of money and have no issues getting jobs so far.

I've never had a job like that. My job has always involved helping my company, not just figure out how to build something, but what to build. We typically collaborate on a few ideas and then go away, let them percolate in our brains, before coming back with some new ideas to try. The whole point of the Agile Manifesto is that we don't know what to build in the first place.

Sometimes my boss has asked me to do something that in the long run will cost the company dearly. Luckily for him, I am happy to push back, because I can understand what we're trying to achieve and help figure the best option for the company based on my experience, intuition and the data I have available.

There's so much more to working with a team than: "Here is a very specific task, please execute it exactly as the spec says". We want ideas, we want opinions, we want bursts of creative inspiration, we want pushback, we want people to share their experiences, their intuition, the vibe they get, etc.

We don't want AI agents that do exactly what we say; we want teams of people with different skill sets who understand the problem and can interpret task through the lens of their skill set and experience, because a single person doesn't have all the answers.

I think your ex-boss Mike will very soon find himself trapped in local minima of innovation, with only his own understanding of the world, and a sycophantic yes-man AI employee that will always do exactly as he says. The fact that AI mostly doesn't work is only part of the problem.