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I've all of the sudden seen AI blackpilling break out into the normie space around me. Not so much about FOOM, and paperclipping, or terminator scenarios, but around the sudden disruptive nature, and especially around economic upheaval. Not exactly sure why. Veo3 has been part of it.
For example, coworkers suddenly aware that AI is going to completely disrupt the job market and economy, and very soon. People are organically discovering the @2rafa wonderment at how precariously and even past-due a great deal of industry and surrounding B2B services industries stand to be domino'd over. If my observation generalizes, that middle class normies are waking up a doompill on AI economic disruption, what is going to happen?
Let's consider it from 2 points of view. 1 They're right. and 2. They're wrong. 1. is pretty predictable fodder here - massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption, with difficult to predict state on the other side.
But is 2 that much less worrisome? Even if everyone is 'wrong', and AI is somehow not going to take away 'careers', people in mass worrrying that it's so will still manifest serious disruption. People are already starting to hold thier breath. Stopping hiring, stopping spending, running hail mary's, checking out.
Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact. (They keep framing 'If we can cut costs, we'll come out on top, instead of following the logical conclusion, if everyone stops spending the B2B economy collapses.) - I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get. The film industry seems about to completely topple, not because Veo3 will replace it immediately, but because, who's going to make a giant investment in that space right now?
I suspect the macro economic shock is going to hit faster than most are expecting, and faster than actual GDP gains will be made, but maybe I'm just an idiot.
I'm personally of the opinion that normie dooming about AI and the job market is just a way to express the growing malaise that's enveloping the west and has little to do with actual macroeconomic effects.
Yes, if we do manage to create truly transformative AI that obviates labour everything is on the table - I'm not too interested in litigating AGI timelines but if that does happen it's not just going to be a weak white collar labour market, we're walking out the other end gods or 6 feet under.
On the other hand, if we top out somewhere around "useful tools" level as we are now it's not clear to me that anything is likely to change macro-economically. There's been no meaningful changes to any macroeconomic statistics attributable to LLM's as of yet [unless you count the wild valuations of AI companies].
In my domain, software, there's quite bitter culture wars about how useful LLM's are on a micro level [personally I find them very useful but certainly not a replacement for anyone yet] but there really haven't been noticeable improvements in software productivity on a macro level. All the commercial software I use day-to-day is still varying degrees of shit and there's been no noticeable change in velocity in open-source [the use of Copilot in the .net repo is quite amusing, https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115762].
Even the internet, clearly the most transformative and life-altering invention of the last half-century has had questionable impacts on GDP and productivity growth.
It's true that individual tasks may become obsoleted like copy-writing and perhaps translation [although every translator friend of mine seems to be drowning in work right now] but jobs have always been augmented by technology to replace tasks and that's nothing new. The vast majority of white collar work is in my opinion either transformative-AI-complete or there because we want a human [for liability/regulation/comfort] even if a machine could already do it. If we reach the point where AI is not outcompeted by AI-human centaurs in doing meaningful white collar work then we should be much more concerned about not being paperclipped than whether Becky can still get a job in HR or marketing.
To return to the original point, my opinion is that AI kvetching is largely driven by people wanting a safe way to express the sentiment that life in the West is just generally going downhill. I was struck by a quote I heard from a friend the other day, that "nobody dreams of the 22nd century" like men in the 20th century used to dream of what the 21st might look like.
A blue triber might tell you it's because the billionaires are taking all the money and that climate change will end the world, a red triber might say it's because mass immigration and the death of Christian values is ending western society, and a grey triber might say it doesn't matter because AI will save/fix/kill us all. Nobody can agree on the causes, but pretty much nobody in the first world thinks life will look better in a century without some sort of eschatological transformation.
Anecdotally my extended family in the old country seem to be much more optimistic about the future and everyone seems pretty optimistic about AI despite being mostly pretty poor by first world standards. Each generation saw pretty drastic jumps in quality of life and things are looking upwards for the next generation too. You can see here that it's almost all poorer countries on an upwards trajectory excited for AI and richer countries going downhill that don't like it which is interesting to consider.
https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/public-opinion
I mean if you take tasks off the lap of your workers you don’t need so many of them. If you can take half of my job away, you can just give me double the workload of tasks that only a human can do and therefore you need half the staff. And while you didn’t get rid of everyone, you’re saving a lot of money, while also putting significant downward pressure on the wages of those who remain.
Do the above over most of the kinds of jobs normies have, and it is an apocalyptic loss of jobs. If 70% of normie jobs reduce headcount by 50%, that’s a lot of people. And since nobody needs to hire them, they’re either trying to retrain for new jobs or they’re simply dropping out of the labor market.
But now you have half the staff, and your competitors have half the staff, so presumably the market price of the stuff you are selling will face downwards pressure. It could be that your existing clients will want to buy more your stuff as its now cheaper and you get now clients who previously were not able to afford your product, perhaps you find out you need to hire more people...? But if half the workforce got fired at step 0, that is much less people able to buy any products despite their cheaper price...?
It will be nightmarishly complicated to adapt to when its happening, let alone predict.
People make comparisons to horses and combustion engine. True, many horses got "unemployed", yet traffic increased a lot. There are probably more people involved in logistics and industries enabled by it than ever were in "horse service industry". And horses were never the presence on the demand side of the equation, they never bought anything.
It also reduced the need for horses, who have been reduced mostly to glorified pets.
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