Job redundancy is common in Australia, some 234,000 people in a twelve month period.
It happened to a friend of mine recently, an electrical engineer working in the naval vessel sector - an unfair redundancy in my opinion and he's got an open case with Fair Work Australia currently.
I've always held to the belief that when one is forced to exit their current employment and the door closes behind them, they're left standing in a corridor filled with other doors. Through those doors are other jobs and opportunities and if one opens enough of them something will eventually happen.
These days with businesses, companies and governments accelerating the use of AI and automation though...I don't know - there's fewer opportunities. The doors within that corridor, the jobs and opportunities, are slowly being diminished. Sure, maybe there's a few additional jobs in I.T. here and there but if a person's skillset doesn't match then what? Retrain? It's not that simple.
What if you were made redundant and you're a graphic artist and there were no jobs to go to because AI has filled them. Just retrain huh? Ok, what if I said, you can retrain as an infantry soldier. Would you do it?
It's a huge problem, the way humans seem so quick to replace humans with automation and AI, in my opinion.
So what...there's millions and millions of jobs available in I.T. around the world because of AI and automation? No, there is not.
I think humans are on the wrong path. Replacing humans with AI and automation when the global population is increasing at such a rapid rate makes for a lot of idle people. Are other "new" jobs created? Maybe, maybe not.
Is there an I.T. job for each and every one who's out of work? If so, why are there 670,000 unemployed Australians, 7.8 million unemployed in America and 1.83 million unemployed in the UK? No, there's not that many I.T jobs...maybe they could all join the military, the way things are going we'll all be at war soon anyway.
I'm not sure what my friend is going to do but he's looking for work. He will probably have to relocate his family across the country, his wife will have to leave her job and there's yet one more person in that corridor of diminishing doors. Will she find work? Who knows.
What do you reckon? Is it a bad situation? Is everything on this planet just fine and dandy? Is "AI productivity" worth putting real people out of work and often into poverty for? Do you even care? What "new" jobs do you think will be created? Comment if you like.
Design and create your ideal life, tomorrow isn't promised - galenkp
[Original and AI free]
Image(s) in this post are my own
The situation is similar everywhere job cuts due to automation. I am wondering what will happen in coming years as many students were enrolled to get a computer degree ...I have 7 in my relation. But there will be a limit of IT jobs too at certain point, looking at the AI trend, I doubt more computer professional exist on this planet. ... getting a jobs is tough these days especially when you were asked to leave, the other company may enquire a lot over it...getting a job is uncertain... few of my friends too have get back to farming from a well payinv...they see a good potential in coming years....expecting a good job market in coming years is insane.
I understand that with human progression changes happen, jobs disappear and others arise...but never before in history has the world had so much population and so much automation and AI...so it's easy for some to say, "this has happened before," but it has not. The current situation cannot be compared to the Industrial Revolution.
Anyway, sad about all those doing degrees for jobs that won't continue to exists huh? I hope your family members are able to transition.
We are transitioning slow and steadily...as every other day there is something new comes up...
I can’t see AI creating many new jobs. But given the disturbing figures I’ve read recently about young people aged 18–24 across the UK and EU who are not in education, employment or training (NEET), perhaps we won’t need many. More worrying still is that of the nearly one million NEETs in the UK, with the numbers increasing steadily since 2021, around 30 per cent attribute their status to long-term illness or disability. These people will never work. We're going to need robots...and plenty of them!
So I am selling this truck and having to use my wife Kelly's Meta (Fecescrook) buy sell trade sites. I seen where this person had asked people to solve a math problem without using a calculator and the simple fuks were arguing over the answer because it was one answer for old school math and another for a calculator solving it.
You could basically tell who cheated and used a calculator. Then would argue about how the calculator that was asked not to be used was the correct answer.
a.i. the calculators and all the other things that make us lazy and weak minded like this "smart phone" I am blithering on. They are dumbing us all down. a.i. will accelerate this dumbing a thousand fold to take mankind to the level of worthless, mindless lump of putred puss, lazy and weak minded that they wish to be... Juss My Two cents.
We won't be around to see it's end. But we are seeing the beginnings of it.
Huh? That's all way beyond me. All I know is 2+2=5:)
Tooo... Shay
I musta been drunk. Babbling on like a drunken monkey. Forgive me please as it is the holiday season and insanity is at an all time high. Even if self induced by man made recreational toxicity laden chemical beverages. Toxic??? Drink too much and find out... Juss sayin'
BURP.!!
I must be intoxicated as this is our christmas present...
Meet Shy (Cheyenne) She is a 10 week old Siberian Husky with light Red shades that may darken slightly with age. She is adorable.
Merry Christmas DeeDubbya @deirdyweirdy
I do enjoy your postings. 💕
Am I to understand that you've rid yourself of all those smelly moggies and replaced them with this handsome pooch? 😊😂
The cats own this place. I am gambling on those stinking flea infested "moggies" as you call them letting us have quarter at the Pookyville Cat Ranch.
note the name of the residence for future comment so as to not look like a mentally ill ranting Irish buffoon... Juss Sayin'
Hahaha, but I am a mentally ill and Irish, though I do take some exception to the word buffoon😊😂
And what's in a name? Sure our place is called Victoria Slate Kingdom...and I'm a queen!
Take your shoes off so you can count to 20 type of girl huh?
A rather frightening statistic indeed. It seems there's so much going wrong and precious little going right huh?
We do seem to be in a bad way in thr USA, as our government is running large deficits and they need to increase tax revenue, which mainly comes from working people, but the government also is betting on AI increasing our gross GDP and tax base.
But they seem at odds with each other like your article states, AI is elminationg jobs, which is tax revenue, while the government is subsidizing AI to increase tax revenue.
So the government is going to lose revenu on lost jobs, and hopes to gain tax revenue on AI company tax revenues.
But AI companies are pleading for tax breaks and outright subsidies which sucks because in a way, they want the taxes of working class people, so they can build AI which puts those same working class people out of a job... they literally want working people to finance the demise of their jobs.
It's an upside down, topsey turvy situation.
It's all a little confounding, human behaviour. The results of that behaviour can be seen all over the planet (despite some more delusional folks thinking that everything is ok.)
Topsy turvy situation? Yep.
The wars, religious extremism and terrorism, erasure of histories that don't fit the narrative, decline of person-to-person communication and the rise of "social media" (the propaganda machine), breakdown of the family unit, the way people are labelled and put into convenient categories, the division that governments permit and champion, the smoke and mirrors used to distract the population, open borders that allow/force incompatible people to mix with predictable results, the greed, hubris, pride that rage out of control and is usually promoted...AI...just another feather in the cap of human nutbaggery and another step towards the chaos that'll ensue eventually.
I think depends on where you are working, Anglo-Saxon countries are more towards new technologies so maybe AI impact is bigger... Here for IT it has had no impact yet, no massive layoffs, still lot of jobs... Where I work which is software development and customer care, no Ai has been used at all so far... In the factory where my wife works, assembly lines are still made by humans because they are better than actual "robots"
Our generation should be safe, the problem is for the new ones, every desk job might be replaced, you will have to do the doctor, the barman and all stuff that can't be replaced by a machine
Yep, the next generations are going to struggle massively with overcrowding, diminishing resources, environmental issues, lack of food and basic items, increasing crime rate, widing social class-gaps, degradation of basic services and so on. I'll be dead so it won't bother me.
I've just read an article stating that there are thousands of baywatchers missing here for the next summer, that can't be automated, might be a good business and with some luck you can save some pretty girl!
I don't envy future generations, the world is fucking up not only on jobs, as you say all fields are worsening... Usually when things worsen, a war is done to clean up and rebuild...
Interestingly, about 48% of kids in Australia leaving primary school cannot swim 50 metres or tread water for two minutes...they won't make very good lifesavers huh? It doesn't bode well for the future of lifesaving. I guess Facebook and Tik Tok can't teach a kid how to swim right? In a country like mine where 95% of the population resides very close to the ocean, a river or lake it's fairly scary statistic. Maybe AI can save drowning tourists.
And again lazyness comes in play, why learn to swim when you can sit in the sofa scrolling socials right? Or as parents spend money for swim course, come one the kids are gonna be influencers living in the basement, so who cares of the water!
My son is still little but in summer we go to the sea or the pool, trying to start to teach him how to
It's better to start them young, get them acclimated to the water and all. It used be a thing for every kid here, now parents just don't bother; too much effort to be a good parent for many these dayw it seems.
I don't really know what to expect to happen. Automation of different sorts has been replacing humans on jobs for a long time.
I do feel for those younger that still need to work solid for many more years who's job/skill has been taken over. For me, my company is hiring left and right for the type of job I do, so we are not there yet, but I had wondered for 10 years or more, just when they might come up and say our jobs were going overseas, so there has been that thought hovering for a long time.
I am so close to the end of my working days, well, kind of close, so it would be less devastating for me if my job disappeared. Don't get me wrong, I'd certainly like to be the one that chooses when I leave, but it would have been different 10 or 20 years ago when I still needed to work a long time.
I believe we'll figure it out some way, although I have no idea what way that will be.
Of course, there's pockets where things haven't changed much but I think it'd be naïve to think that because change hasn't happened yet it won't. Not saying you're thinking that, just generally I mean.
I think we're in a similar situation in that it doesn't really matter too much about what's going to happen with jobs; not just yet, but soon, is also my situation. I think it'll effect everyone in some way though. Services are degrading, the quality of human interaction as well...I don't think that's a good thing.
It's not a good thing for sure. At some point, although it will probably be the hard way, we will have to go back some. Probably after the implosion occurs. :) We just can't seem to stop ourselves from making things worse instead of better. (as a whole)
I tend to agree. Chaos will reign, then misery and maybe after that some change for the better. Many will suffer though.
I have to tell you that IT jobs are being eliminated at a rapid pace in USA...
A comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs | TechCrunch https://share.google/MR0GkAZXzWpIidMTb
I'm not surprised, AI can probably handle a lot of those jobs. I mean, we live in a world where humans willing choose to have "conversations" with AI after all. So, maybe there's even less jobs than I expected.
Human slave to AI, is that a job? 😟
I am hoping the time I have left in my industry will not see this same door closing until it is ME closing it.
Autonomous Trucks are still several years out. Will they compete and ultimately end my career. Well the race is on. I only have another 5 years left in me if my eyesight and overall health does not fail me.
So I guess we will see. The next door in my career will hopefully be to the decks and my rocking chair...
Five years isn't long, but is also a long time, if you know what I mean. I have four years and am hoping to self-fund life for six months prior to the actual end. I've been working hard on this timeline and am on track. I'll be travelling then, maybe FL huh?
Meeting You both is on my wish list so hell yeah.
✅
I believe that the advance of AIs has the clear objective of leaving the human being behind, everything automated and without the possible conflicts that a human could generate. Society is doing well? no, because we fail to see the dangers involved, great dangers of large numbers of people without work and perhaps in exchange for a miserable income, restriction of what they can eat and so on. I don't know if you heard that they don't want us to eat real meat, but synthetic meat... I don't think they want to create jobs for humans, they don't care. Where are we going? To extinction?
Yeah, I heard about synthetic meat. Some say insects and bugs. Fuck that.
Anyway, if we had to eat synthetic meat I'd eat the Australian version, much better than Argentinian synthetic meat. 😂
I'm not going to eat those bugs. Here there was flour with bugs in the supermarket, they didn't sell it and they had to take it off the market.
Well... considering that Australia is better in technology, I prefer synthetic meat from Australia.😆
No, things definitely aren't okay, but I am not sure there is a path forward at this point. The masses seem hellbent on taking this road. Freaking morons. I'm pretty glad my time in the workforce could be coming to an end before I need to worry about a lot of this stuff too much. Though I still have that ten year gap I am going to have to fill.
It's the jobs and many other aspects of life as we know/knew it besides. We're going in the wrong direction and yet there's loads of people out there who feel that we are all good...maybe in their little microcosm of a world it may be...but for how long.
Yeah, I don't know what is going to happen. At this point I just hope my wife and I can make it to retirement, but that's kind of dismissive of what the future generations are going to have to deal with.
I think you and your wife making it to retirement is exactly what you should be thinking about and what's important. The future will be in the hands of other people and so their responsibility. The good thing is you have the ability to affect your own future with what you do now and the sad thing is most don't do enough to make it as good as it could be which is what's going to make the next ten, twenty, thirty years and beyond worse and worse in my opinion.
Oh yeah, I always see these stories about people who are realizing they can't retire because they didn't plan well enough. I've always tried to make sure that won't be myself or my wife. That's some good advice just to focus on the hear and now and let the future deal with the future (to paraphrase a bit).
This is the scam facing every corner of the earth from the East wing of the White House to the beautiful Caribbean coast of Venezuela, Assad Jails, the streets of Hollywood, the frontlines of so many conflicts all the way to the little village of Nuuk.
Everything is hunky dory.
As Jensen Huang said last week, he is "super excited about the robots Elon's working on."
Really no matter how crappy the world looks, all I can do is eat the crap and enjoy it.
Yeah, making the most of life is all an individual can do, and the other things...well they will happen or not; things like the USS Gerald R Ford's carrier group fucking up Venezuela. I'll just go on making my life the best I can. But, of course, not much on a global scale is fine and dandy.
I'm personally unsure if AI is truly doing actual human jobs yet. What I suspect is happening is that there was a recession due in the early 2020s and then Covid hit and a lot of money started sloshing around from the US Fed buying up assets, the US giving out all those PPP loans that never had to be paid back, the Aus Govt giving out money, etc. At the time, Amazon was poaching everyone in IT with massive salaries, like, truly insane numbers, and now we're in the hangover period... companies need to reduce their workforce now that there isn't so much money moving around and interest rates are normal, but no one wants to admit that they need to reduce expenses so they're instead saying they've got productivity gains with AI.
On top of that, the big IT firms are literally borrowing money to spend on AI datacenters - so most other projects are getting cut. It's a massive gamble that I don't think will pay off.
The problem with GenAI is that hallucinates 10% of the time. LLMs will always hallucinate because of the way they work. There aren't many business processes that can afford to be wrong 10% of the time, so GenAI isn't replacing workers in large numbers... and I would guess that areas that are using GenAI instead of workers will likely go back to humans when either/or 1.) A GenAI mistake costs companies huge amounts of money... 2.) GenAI companies aren't making the profit they need to pay for the trillions they've invested in the infrastructure, investors aren't subsidizing the costs and they need to charge their customers the actual amount it costs... and companies simply cannot afford to pay those prices.
It's definitely a bad situation... especially because it everyone loses their job then no one has money to buy things... and we need to be electrifying everything to reduce emissions/pollution, and GenAI is taking us in the opposite direction.
I'm somewhat of a simpleton so am not aware of the many complexities that will effect life for human beings moving forward but am certainly aware that there are many and little is being done with enough effort to arrest the backslide.
AI isn't to blame, humans are.
Replacing help-lines and call centres with AI was a human decision. Providing AI medical appointments was a human decision, handing over thinking and decision making to AI (that humans should be making) was a human decision. But I don't know much about that really, just that it's not going to go so well down the track.
In twenty years or so (maybe sooner) I'll be dead though, and someone else will have to deal with the human decisions made now and into that future. Today's kids I guess.
I mean, we can't blame AI because it's just a tool. The news that United Healthcare and Cigna use AI to reject 90% of claims is appalling but it'll keep happening unless lawsuits or regulation make it too expensive.
That does lend into what I was saying about trusting GenAI though... if you demand proof that United Healthcare denied your claim legally, and they can't provide it because they have no idea how or why their AI made that decision, then eventually GenAI won't be efficient or cost-effective to use.
GenAI is a black box... no one ever knows exactly why it makes certain decisions... and I'm not sure that'll work for businesses in the long run.
But I could also be totally wrong because there is definitely a lot of money being bet on its success.
Time will reveal all I guess, the next years and beyond.
All I know, from my own perspective, is that I'd be quite content for the power to go out today globally, indefinitely. A re-set of sorts. Of course, that's just wishful thinking.
Yeah, it might only take a vicious solar flare to make that a reality. I do think at the very least GenAI will drive people offline in the near future.
I think we need guardrails to keep people in their jobs or pay them a wage based on the increased productivity from automation. This might be inevitable.
Guardrails? I don't understand.
Also, how does a company removing a person's job using automation manage to pay them more? They have no job.
AI is good. It was all human's ideology. It has a disadvantage, but that disadvantage can spur of creative ideas in us if we think deep enough. Of course, if the doors are diminishing, then be smart and learn skills that are invoked now so that you could be able to force yourself through. One thing is certain, as long you are alive, you must strive to survive
I think AI isn't good.
But I think AI is trying to make us think like managers and coordinators not like servants and labourers.
AI thinks for us, not makes us think. People that rely on AI to do their thinking are relinquishing their humanness.
Hmmm 🤔
Sorry to hear the loss of the job by your friend. AI is dangerous and can be a human competitor but we need to make everything fair. I hope, your friend will find a new opportunity. Soldier jobs always have vacant positions, I should join but I shall never compromise on my skills.
I think "fair" isn't something that happens a lot in the world we live in.
Fairness can't be hundred percent, it is true but we should compensate it as much as we can.
Interesting. How do you propose that's done?
In my Country! There is a law. If any company abolished someone's job or someone's designation, 1st it will provide a time window so that affected man can find a job in this duration and secondly this company will provide some incentive to the jobber who has been terminated. Is it not interesting and fair? For me, it is fair at least.
Fascinating.