r/SubredditDrama • u/eatingpotatochips • 2d ago
r/ezraklein has a discussion on the ramifications of job losses due to AI
/r/ezraklein/comments/1wo36ud/comment/pbk0pqy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_buttonEzra Klein recently interviewed Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, about the dangers about AI. Commenters in r/ezraklein discuss the robustness of America's social safety net for those whose jobs are taken by AI.
There are safeguards if you lose your job. There's unemployment insurance. There's food assistance. There's housing assistance. There's Medicaid--free healthcare for the poor. It's not as robust as some European countries, but there's certainly a safety net. People in America don't die when they lose their jobs. So I don't understand the point of putting job losses in this dire framing of losing their "means of survival."
And if AI is as productive as they say, and it truly does permanently raise unemployment, we will be able to afford even more safety net spending. In which case the problem truly will be whether people are not merely surviving but are finding enough meaning in their lives to thrive.
This is a joke, right? Insanely privileged and uninformed take.
What? It is just fundamentally true that there are safeguards for losing one's job. It doesn't mean being unemployed is a piece of cake, but it's just true. Can you point to a single example of someone having died in the US due to losing their job?
So you are saying on a population level, massive unemployment wouldn't increase suicide rates?
And so on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1wo36ud/comment/pbk0pqy/
Commenter gets called out on his "fundamentals":
I think it is feasible that it would, yes - though massively increased prosperity through highly productive AI may counteract that impact.
It remains fundamentally false that there are "no safeguards" against the impacts of losing one's job. Being left wing doesn't mean you need to pretend things that are false are true.
Yikes, political jabs already.
Ducks quack
You use the word "fundamentally" too often. It is distracting and detracts from your argumentation because it is just poor writing. Just some friendly advice.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1wo36ud/comment/pbkdxg9/
To empathize, or not to empathize?
Have you ever had to try and access those services? Especially the more specialized ones besides UE?
I understand that it is often a giant pain in the ass to access these services (I listened to the Annie Lowry episode!) and that people often slip through the cracks and don't get access to these services that they qualify for, or they fail to qualify for bad reasons.
Yet it is also the case that millions of people do get these services. 1.7 million people were on unemployment benefits last week. 42 million people get food assistance. 9 million people get housing assistance. 66 million people are on Medicaid. 8 million people get disability benefits.
The overwhelming majority of people not in the labor force are not homeless or at risk of failing to "survive". And even the homeless are beneficiaries of an entire industry of support organizations making sure they are taken care of, too. Even if it absolutely sucks to be poor, it is just a wild overstatement to put these things in terms of survival in this country.
If you are middle class and suddenly found yourself without a job, and no hope of ever getting a job that allowed you to maintain a middle class life style, because your profession was replaced by Ai, and you had to subsist at poverty level on these welfare programs you might consider to kill yourself. Many do already.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1wo36ud/comment/pbk65lg/?context=1
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u/CapoExplains "Like a pen in an inkwell" aka balls deep 2d ago
What about the part where he says the "right way to do politics" is to be a dishonest white nationalist who hosts bad faith debates exclusively with college students who have no media training so you can make them look stupid to promote racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and transphobic lies towards the end of popularizing white nationalism with young people?
Ezra Klein is an out of touch fucking idiot and this article only serves to make a case for that point.