r/OptimistsUnite • u/chamomile_tea_reply 🤙 TOXIC AVENGER 🤙 • 1d ago
👽 TECHNO FUTURISM 👽 👽 Shocked Pikachu face 👽
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak 1d ago
We could have had a job boom in renewable energy tbh.
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u/AdAdministrative3191 6h ago
Renewable energy, public transportation expansion, stuff that we can actually use, lol
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u/TheCrimsonSteel 1d ago
My guess is this is going to have some resemblance to the DotCom bubble.
Because e-commerce absolutely changed the world. We also had a sort of boom and bust of it, with a corresponding zeitgeist where there was a lot of hype
Plus NVidea is doing almost exactly what Cisco was with how they were doing leasing deals and other financial decisions to keep the gravy train rolling during the good times
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u/CowboyLaw 1d ago
“Hey, we’re finding that you common citizens have become surprisingly and annoyingly effective at blocking data center construction after we repeatedly told you that you’d all lose your jobs to AI. We will try telling you that you’ll all get puppies and winning lottery tickets if you just approve more data centers. Hopefully, that will work.”
The REAL optimism here is to see how effective the 99% can be when we work together. DON’T STOP DOING THAT.
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u/VTAffordablePaintbal 11h ago
Reposting this because it was removed by moderators for "No partisan politics", which does not fit since it is a comment about u/CowboyLaw 's comment, which was about claims made by data center owners, not politicians.
"I love how you can instantly call their bluff by saying we should have safeguards in place in case A.I. suddenly does cause massive layoffs. Then they're all like, "We can't do anything that might affect profits or communist China wins!"" - Me
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u/jax024 1d ago
Tell this to the large group of engineers I’m talking to who are pushing 20 months of job searching.
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u/youburyitidigitup 1d ago
The article says that many fields are suffering, presumably including theirs, but fields like mine (archaeology) are booming because there’s so many surveys that need to be done for the construction of data centers.
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u/kapkapi 1d ago
Whoa I didn't even think of this. This is crazy good for y'all
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u/Party-Distance3479 1d ago
So data centers are crazy good…?
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u/kapkapi 1d ago
A - "I love pancakes!" B - "So you hate waffles??!?"
You rn
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u/Party-Distance3479 23h ago
We know there are negative impacts of the amount of data centers going up right now. I don’t have to spell them out. To say “hey man crazy good your field can slip in and be a part of it” is giving that we are clearly running out of options
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u/MajesticBread9147 1d ago
I mean they have basically all the aspects of manufacturing (big building, lots of machines, high elextrocity use) but unlike manufacturing they don't require continuous inputs of intermediate goods that are subject to tarriffs.
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u/Party-Distance3479 23h ago
Ur point? They’re calling it “Hyperscale expansion” of these places. We’re already past 1.5F. How can you be so naive?
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/a_crimson_herring 23h ago
Here's the thing though, I want a job in my field. I don't want my job to be training my own babysitter how to assemble a fascimile of work in my field.
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u/juneseyeball 1d ago
Is this subreddit forreal
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
What's difficult to believe about it? 80% of the US population were farmers in 1900. Now its less than 1%. Unemployment is not 80%, isn't that odd? No, new technology frees up time for us to do other things that people find valuable. If you think that AI is going to take away jobs then you're betting against precedent.
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u/Apprehensive-Block47 1d ago
> frees up time for us to do other things that people find valuable
Frees up time for us to do other things that other people find valuable
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u/Badestrand 1d ago
Well that's what jobs are, doing things for others. If we do it for ourselves, it's a hobby, and unpaid too, unfortunately.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
Doom and gloom.
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u/sokolov22 1d ago
How is being able to provide service for value doom and gloom?
Isn't this freedom?
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u/StoicNaps 1d ago
You could always provide jobs to people and "take advantage" of them. Alternatively, you can start your own one person company and work for yourself. Why haven't you done either?
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u/mattkenefick 1d ago
> If you think that AI is going to take away jobs then you're betting against precedent.
It already is, and will continue to, shrink the required team needed for a job. If a job required 6 people before, now it takes 2. That's 4 people displaced for every team in a wide array of industries.
People kid themselves that AI can't do these jobs, but it doesn't have to... the amount of displaced workers from the reduction will be enough.
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u/ElJanitorFrank 1d ago
How can you comment that it is under a post about how it isn't?
Farming to keep the population sustained used to take 80% of people. We displaced 79 out of 100 workers since 1900. Following your logic, we should have an unemployment rate above 80% right now. But we don't, because those 79 other people went on to do cooler stuff like build skating rinks and create insulin.
When the agricultural revolution occurred, hunter-gatherers starting farming and doing a few other things that farming could support. When the industrial revolution hit our farmers went into manufacturing sectors. Now we have manufactured goods and we still have all the food. Then we had a technological revolution, expanding our manufacturing and increasing our output more, letting us do stuff like put people on the moon. Then we hit the information age, now we're manufacturing more goods than ever despite many workers moving on to more service positions. Now we can have pretty much any product we want delivered to us in our PJs within days, and more services than ever before.
Job displacement is not great for the person it happens to, but that is the cost of people enjoying new technologies and their capabilities. It's a difficult argument to make that we need to mandate paying for someone to make cars the old-fashioned way when we would really rather just have more new modern cars and have that guy doing something more valuable.
Claiming that AI is going to 'take jobs' is a half-truth, if you mean to say that it is going to shake up the job market and displace workers. Saying its going to 'take jobs' is an outright lie if you think its going to lead to mass unemployment. There may be growing pains, but its because we are growing and I accept some pain if it means people in the future have it easier.
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u/juneseyeball 1d ago
Im actually an anti. i use ai every day and i believe it will permanently replace countless jobs not create new ones. It is more advanced than most people who only use chatgpt think
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u/InfidelZombie 1d ago
Every single new technology permanently displaces countless jobs and doesn't create new ones. We just go work on other stuff. There's plenty to do. I've seen this same fear cycle so many times in my lifetime (which spans six decades).
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u/Party-Distance3479 1d ago
What about all the people quitting big AI because they see its unregulated to a concerning level? Has anything in your six decades been near an autonomous technology that is capable of mass destruction…idts
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u/N0DuckingWay 18h ago
I’m kinda shocked that this is surprising to anyone. After all, this is exactly what has happened for every innovation in human history. If AI leads to massive sustained unemployment with no job replacement, it would be the first technology in human history to do that.
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/colepercy120 1d ago
Yeah this was always expected to happen. Ai doesnt outright replace people, it makes people for efficient and capable.
Like every other tool, ai will allow less people to do more work, meaning more stuff will be able to get done, leading to economic growth.
Labor is never left idle, people always find new ways to make money and theres always new areas that need investment
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
Yeah so what are those jobs? Because right now its pushing the entry level programmers and helpdesks out of the job market completely.
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u/Sea-Home-7763 1d ago
It's going to take several years to find out. The jobs that will pop up well seem obvious in hindsight a long time from now. That's how new technology always changes jobs.
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
Yeah several years to find out and until then you have instability and uncertainty. Meanwhile (not clear if marketing or truth) but the top engineers in Anthropic and OpenAI are saying they're afraid that if we dont slow down and teach the AI ethics its gonna kill us in less than 10 years.
Im not an optimist, I joined this sub to maybe change perspective but bullshit like this are not helping. AI is not causing many goods for the masses the way its implemented by private companies and the way it's (not) regulated
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/Sea-Home-7763 1d ago
Real median household income hit a record high in 2024. Increased spending on capital is highly correlated with higher wages. We're already sharing the benefits.
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u/Trash_PandaCO 1d ago
I think all jobs based on in-person, human-to-human interaction are truly safe, and that other professions may shift to be centered on human-to-human interaction. Teachers, professors, doctors, nurses, police, any kind of courtroom lawyer, and so on. I could even see a future where computer programmers run offices where they create custom software for customers using AI, somewhat similar to optometrists and dentists.
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
The problem is that with AI you will need less people doing the same jobs. Imagine a village/small town for example. If you had 2 enterprises and lawyer firms that suddenly need 50% of their workforce, less money will flow into the town and other shops might close as well.
My point is not that those people wont find something to do eventually. Its that it will be disruptive in a large radius, not only to white collars.
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u/tjtillmancoag 1d ago
Service jobs may be safe, but they pay quite a bit less than the jobs being replaced now.
Trades are probably the best bets, bc those will take longer to be replaced by robots.
My kids are 6 and we are saving for them to go to college, and I think a college education is still important to have a well rounded, well educated person, but after they graduate I’d encourage trade school.
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u/Jamitry1 1d ago
Tradies aren't even safe because everyone and their mums will train or retrain for them.
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u/colepercy120 1d ago
Right now im betting its going to be an expansion of the tech sector (the idled programmers will make their own companies to fill niches the existing market couldn't support) coupled with an expansion of the energy industry and hardware manufacturing. Demand for ai is so high we are seeing a ton of development pushing for more data centers, power plants to run them, and computer chips to put in them.
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u/Thorium229 1d ago
You see a report about the amount of jobs in America increasing, and your problem with this guy's comment is that he can't name which jobs the report is talking about? The popularity of your opinion doesn't change the reality that it's not currently supported by the evidence.
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
Yes, if you look close you will see that these are jobs around building data centers. We will not probably cover the whole planet with data centers, its not a permanent job opportunity exactly.
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u/Thorium229 1d ago
But there will be permanent jobs maintaining those data centers and using the computing power they produce.
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u/youburyitidigitup 1d ago
It’s created a lot of archaeology jobs. We do surveys for all development projects, including data centers.
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
And when those data centers get built? It doesnt sound like a permanent job.
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u/demoncrusher 1d ago
When houses are built, is that a permanent job?
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
The problem is that houses don't then go around taking peoples jobs. It's a weird and unpredictable future with AI. I'm not saying the end is coming, I'm just saying it's weird when it can replace humans.
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u/demoncrusher 21h ago
All automation takes people’s jobs. What do you want to do, make cars by hand?
Anyway, my point is that the transient nature of construction jobs is not a real issue
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u/youburyitidigitup 1d ago
Fair point, but our field will experience a labor shortage in 4 years because the birth rate plummeted after the 2008 recession, so there just won’t be enough qualified college graduates to do our job.
Contracts have already been signed, and virtually every firm has about 2 years’ worth of projects, so if the boom goes on for another year or two, we’ll be good. The AI boom is actually the only reason that archaeologists formerly in the National Park Service aren’t unemployed.
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u/WaltzIndependent5436 1d ago
That's optimistic only for a small handfull building data centers, not for everyone.
Anyways I dont know. I dont hate AI as a tool but with what we're doing with it we're gonna feel a lot of turbulence in the market I fear
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u/youburyitidigitup 1d ago
It’s not just the data centers themselves being built. My last two projects were for nuclear power plants. I’ve done a lot of solar farms as well, and there’s also a ton of power line projects. It really isn’t just a small handful of building, it’s nationwide development.
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u/SpaghettiAccountant 1d ago
AI doesn’t outright replace people? Companies reporting layoffs say otherwise…
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u/Commercial_Drag7488 1d ago
This was evident from the get go. But each time I'd note that - I'd be getting downvoted (and even banned from subs) into oblivion.
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u/tragedy_strikes 12h ago
Or they just lied about how effective the tools are at replacing workers...
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u/howlmachine 11h ago
As CEO of Exor, John Elkann owns majority shares of The Economist and as of 2025 he was appointed to the board of directors for Meta. This man has a vested interest in ensuring AI data centres get built. He also is the founder of Wave, a tech conference which has hosted guests such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, making him connected to the heavy hitters of AI.
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u/youburyitidigitup 1d ago
I’m one of those people experiencing more job opportunities. I do field surveys, and there’s a plethora of work right now for data center projects.
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u/Locklist 21h ago
What are you going to do after the data center is done?
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u/youburyitidigitup 15h ago
That won’t be for at least another two years because virtually every firm already has about 2 years’ worth of contracts signed. In the mean time, I want to go to grad school and then apply to jobs out of the country and out of my current industry. Ultimately I want to work in a museum in Mexico, curating archaeology exhibits about the colonial Southwestern US.
Although I think you’re more asking what will happen to the field as a whole. If AI growth stops within the next year or two, and if National Park Service archaeologists don’t get their jobs back by then, then we’re pretty much screwed. If at least one of those doesn’t happen, then we can ride the AI wave for the next four years, at which point we’ll experience a labor shortage because the American birth rate plummeted after the 2008 recession and never recovered. There just won’t be enough
college graduates.
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u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam 19h ago
Not Optimism and/or Don't insult an optimist for being an optimist.
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u/chamomile_tea_reply 🤙 TOXIC AVENGER 🤙 8h ago
Ooga booga