US senator appears at Manhattan rally alongside New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who cautioned that AI is ‘coming for human jobs’
Bernie Sanders has sounded an alarm over the US economy, warning “the worst is yet to come” unless workers overcome a “ruling class” of billionaires.
The US senator spoke at a rally in Manhattan on Sunday alongside Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, who cautioned that artificial intelligence was “coming for human jobs” amid mounting concern over the technology’s rapid development.
As the pair headlined the launch of Union Now, a new drive to boost labor unions across the US, Sanders issued a bleak assessment of the consequences if workers fail to organize against billionaires like Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX; Jeff Bezos, executive chair of Amazon; and Donald Trump, the US president.
They can’t wait to force everyone into abject poverty.
They’re already doing this systemically on a massive scale.
I’ve lost 2/3rds of my department at my job to AI. It’s amazing how bad things are getting… The content the AI spits out is horrific, but CEO’s and executives are firing people left and right anyway, drunk on the bonuses they are likely receiving as a result.
What happens once everyone is forced into abject poverty, though? If we really play this out, what’s next? The push for AI comes across like the billionaires are saying “we won’t need you, anymore.” If that’s true, then what the fuck is the benefit of being a billionaire?
Take Zuckerberg for example. His income is derived from selling ads to potential buyers. Replace all the workers with AI, who exactly is going to buy anything from his ads? Where do they get the money from? Where do they get the free time to use Meta from?
The entire idea seems to be leveraging this fantasy ideology where the working class doesn’t need to be paid in order to consume, and like the billionaires aren’t dependents of the working class’ consumption. So, what am I missing that they apparently know? Why does any of this make sense to them?
Are they so beholden to capitalist ideology that even the blatantly obvious end result here is obfuscated by their need for short term gains? No, right? I mean… obviously that’s part of the situation, but there must be more. They’re banking on something, but what?
You see once you are that wealthy more money doesn’t really make a difference. If everyone around you is middle class and not desperate you have very little actual power.
Now on the other is hand, if you gut the middle class and make everyone poor they are suddenly desperate. Now you have power because people will do anything to survive.
The wealthy people need to make people poor in order to appreciate their wealth at this point. A strong middle class can tell them to fuck off, but a desperate poor class will do anything they tell them.
I don’t believe such a thing is sustainable. Look to Iran, a similar dynamic where Israel would have liked to prevent Iranian independence. Independence to build strength, presence, sovereignty, … Israel had this idea that they would need to “mow the lawn” — which translates to bombing the shit out of them every once in a while.
This is like antibiotics. You kill the many of the entities, sure, but short of committing genocide, you’re left with a smaller population of more capable individuals. Those individuals will come back stronger and will demand harder, as we can see now with the emboldened Iran we’ve been left with.
It’s not a pretty path forward. But, I’m doubtful it will work out for them in the long run.
It is not sustainable and these policies will likely hurt the wealthy in the long run with decreased profits. They don’t care about the long term though.
They are basically trying to take as much as they can and do enough damage that we can’t undo what they pushed through easily.
Unfortunately they have been winning not just in the US but every developed country as seen in the ever growing wealth gaps.
The answer is small incremental changes/policies that will slowly eliminate the wealth gap without causing too much disruption.
They’ve murdered the planet and they’re trying to buy the survival of their descendants. They’re perfectly okay letting everyone else die and for their companies to collapse, so long as they get their place in the bunker/spaceship/whatever.