Inequality was growing hugely (and still is) before the recent advent of LLMs.

Given the slow-burning but growing resentment against the people who are profiting from this inequality(popularly the “billionaires” but in reality broader than that) I wonder to what extent they are supporting the anti-AI message as deflection?

As in reality, many lower-paid jobs are totally safe against this generation of AI (nurses, care-workers, builders, plumbers - essential skilled manual workers) whereas the language-based mid-level jobs are hugely at risk.

So if there’s an inequality-driven backlash, it should be directed not at AI, but at the real causes. In contrast, when swathes of largely irrelevant mid-level management, marketing and HR drones lose their jobs to Claude 5.7, they are the ones who should attack the datacenters. Not that it will help.

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jncfhnb 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Removing a white collar job from the economy puts a worker into the bottom tier _and_ reduces the wages of that bottom tier.

We are speeding towards a servant class. Uber was the first wave. Now it’s more mundane things like getting groceries. I doubt it will be long before we rip off the band aid and make full time servants more popular.

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mft_ 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You're right, and I think we're slightly at cross purposes. I'm not disagreeing that AI will drive some major societal changes as you outline.

My point is that the current narrative of "AI will take our jobs" is too simplistic, and that it might even be a smokescreen against the rising inequality that is already fueling anger across the world and which is totally unrelated to AI. If you're struggling to pay your bills today, that's not AI's fault - it's years of bad politics and politicians, geopolitics, hyper-capitalism, supply-chain issues, inflation, and so on.

In the future, if/when AI decimates parts of the middle class and they've had a chance to retrain, there will likely be a second-order impact on today's skilled manual workers. But that's years off, and not something I've seen discussed in detail in the mainstream.

You're probably aware, but if not, worth a read: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic

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jncfhnb 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I guess I just feel like your appeal to skilled manual workers is pointless. They’re not really the focal point. It’s the large masses of people being relegated to the bin labeled “effectively unskilled”.

	▲	ijk 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Getting dumped from "upwardly mobile middle class" to "unemployable underclass" does seem likely to be radicalizing . It's not clear yet how much it'll actually be happening, but it does challenge a lot of the traditional focus on blue collar workers as being the most up in arms about automation and labor.