I always hated that fucking saying. No, you vote with YOUR VOTE. If you vote with your dollars the man with a billion dollars has a billion votes more than you do.
Top 10% owns 93% of stocks and accounted for 55% of market activity in early 2025, before tariffs and mass layoffs and an unnamed recession. They’re probably at 60 -65% of revenue now. You’re absolutely right. The rich have been working to remove us from the equation for decades. In our buying power, and in our labor power with AI.
Let’s be real though, this is less about actually replacing workers with AI that is often completely wrong because it’s not actually “thinking” and doesn’t actually know what it is doing. It’s much more about using the specter of AI and over-hyped arguments about what it could do, given time, to justify workforce reductions and pay reductions.
It has far less to do with actually replacing workers with AI and far more to do with justifying worse working conditions and worse pay without as much social fuss over why.
AI has some very useful tightly-specific niche applications, but “general purpose AI” is a joke that isn’t going anywhere realistic at the moment. Especially if we have to burn down our planet burning up fossil fuels to power software that is only doing a best guess of what the next string of text should be.
This is an important point in general. The old story of “voting with your wallet” is now more and more obviously mathematically absurd.
I always hated that fucking saying. No, you vote with YOUR VOTE. If you vote with your dollars the man with a billion dollars has a billion votes more than you do.
Top 10% owns 93% of stocks and accounted for 55% of market activity in early 2025, before tariffs and mass layoffs and an unnamed recession. They’re probably at 60 -65% of revenue now. You’re absolutely right. The rich have been working to remove us from the equation for decades. In our buying power, and in our labor power with AI.
Let’s be real though, this is less about actually replacing workers with AI that is often completely wrong because it’s not actually “thinking” and doesn’t actually know what it is doing. It’s much more about using the specter of AI and over-hyped arguments about what it could do, given time, to justify workforce reductions and pay reductions.
It has far less to do with actually replacing workers with AI and far more to do with justifying worse working conditions and worse pay without as much social fuss over why.
AI has some very useful tightly-specific niche applications, but “general purpose AI” is a joke that isn’t going anywhere realistic at the moment. Especially if we have to burn down our planet burning up fossil fuels to power software that is only doing a best guess of what the next string of text should be.