With all of this talk about AI in the media and online and even on this site.....
Now at my job today we had a company wide meeting where they brought us all in a large auditorium serving us coffee and danishes and shit....before they dropped the news.

Essentially they said that the headquarters has decided to invest heavily into AI technology over these next few years and that we should expect several rounds of lay-offs between now and June of next year.
They are looking at cutting the work force in HALF, and that's just the location where I work.

Nation wide they were talking about eliminating over 40% of all physical locations, a much higher percentage of the labor force and condensing the entire corporation depending on how well AI is able to manage the operation and productivity!

Data centers were also brought up in the meeting several times, but after they announced the planned lay-offs I didn't pay too much attention to the rest of the shit they were saying....lol.

Man o man...............

Enjoy the lives you are living now, your relative comfort and security, because shit is about to get real.

I don't know how long it will take--certainly less than a decade--so brace yourself. Keep and your loved ones close.

The ONLY thing I see that will hold off a dystopian future would be for all the world's governments to cooperate, wrest control of AI from the greedy "tech bros." and figure out a way we can all of can benefit from the productivity gains.

The US and China can't afford to continue competing on the front. AI has already escaped the lab, hacking into other companies' systems. God only knows what AI is capable of today.

Our current systems are not designed for AI. laying off 50% of a work force is just the beginning...

Troy

One of my stepchildren suggested that I go back to school and take some AI classes....lol.
He faced the same situation at his job earlier this year.

I'm trying to decide between that....and packing up and moving to Wakanda and crashing in ProfD's basement until we make our next move....lol.

AI has allowed me to do things with the site that would have been impossible even a year ago. I haven't even watched a video on AI --I just started using it.

The problem immediately becomes what will you use it to do @Pioneer1 ?

I use it to code the website, but next year many websites will be obsolete. There are a wide variety of websites I used to use in support of this site that I no longer use. I don't use Grammarly anymore because Chat GPT does a great job proofing and fact checking my writing. Sure, Grammarly has an AI version, but their business model is dead. I used to use YouTube to host my videos but now I use my own, AI generated, code. https://aalbc.com/black-book-videos. to host my videos on my own server. In fact, AI wrote to code I used to copy all of my videos off YouTube--I could never get the facility that YouTube provides for this to work. Indeed, I could have used the same code to download any video I wanted from Youtube

I could go on and on...

What keeps me up at night is how do I keep AALBC from becoming obsolete (ignoring that fact people will almost certainly continue to read less). The answer will be people--as it always has been. If people abandon aalbc.com for AI it is a wrap...

Of course, AI is trained on AALBCs, so what happens when AI kills all the AALBCs and the human factor has been completely eliminated from the training data? I don't know?

Can AI create new music once musicians have no incentive to create new music to train the models and are starving in the streets?

No surprise. Those meetings will be happening in auditoriums & conference rooms all over the USA. Hope the coffee & danish was good.😎