It’s almost like we should strike now before they have a chance to run and hide.
For real though… Why are so many people freaking the fuck out over AI? Sure. A robot can replace a forklift driver or a cashier. But there are an insane amount of jobs still that robots or ai can’t replace for decades upon decades yet. But people believe that chatgpt will somehow create megabot blue collar workers within the next few weeks
But what do those forklift drivers and cashiers do?
Is your vision for the rest of us merely a few weeks ?
Or can you see past June 2025 at all from where you sit ?
I agree that AI is overhyped and these billionaires are dumb out-of-touch psychopaths. All these people are in a kind of fascist/accelerationist cult (e/acc, Dark Enlightenment, etc). They’re also trying to focus on automating the well-paying white-collar jobs away now. It was possible to automate fork-lift drivers away decades ago (I’ve worked in a factory that did just that), it’s just usually cheaper to pay someone a low wage to do it.
Because whether or not AI can actually do a certain job is irrelevant when the c-suite thinks it can.
I’ve become convinced that the c-suite doesn’t even care of they think AI can do a job. If they can convince investors and/or the board that they should dump money into it and their golden parachute, that’s good enough.
Now, if only there was a term for intentionally misleading people investing in your leadership into thinking something is much more capable than it really is and running with the cash…
You’re underestimating:
- The speed of progress of the current generation of AI
- The number of jobs that AI can already replace.
- Just how many fuckin’ people are forklift drivers or cashiers
- The will of your employers to be rid of annoying, needy employees
You’re overestimating:
- The actual productivity of most people
- Your actual worth to your company
- How much company leaders understand about AI outside of “I can cut headcount by a lot”
I think the part that most people miss is that it’s not about being a 1:1 replacement. With proper use of the AI tools we have now, it’s not at all unexpected for one person to be able to do the job of many by overseeing the running and output of AI agents. AI isn’t going to replace whole industries (yet), but it is absolutely going to replace half of the members of a lot of teams.
I think the thing I haven’t quite sussed out is… Well, let’s take Wal-Mart and Dollar General. Wal-mart and DG both have this weird niche of being both major employers for rural areas, as well as depending on nearly their employee base as customers. If they automate all their jobs away, who do they think they’re going to be selling to? My guess so far is that all these MBAs think that certainly their customer base won’t run out of cash by having their jobs automated away.
Seems to be the case for a lot of industries, even if not as blatant. The economy thrives when people have the means to buy products. You can make production as cheap as you want, you’re not making much profit if only the 1% can buy them.
Even Henry Ford understood this, and paid his automobile factory workers well so they could also be his customers.
Ford might have been a bastard, at least he was a smart bastard who didn’t let the idea that someone might benefit from something that also benefitted him stop him. Which is a major problem with the current batch. And I know he was a fascist. He was bad, somehow people strive to be worse.
Company’s aren’t some kind of “world conspiracy”. They don’t work together much besides what they have to to make more money.
Company A doesn’t care whether company B suffers because people don’t have enough money to buy company B’s products because company A doesn’t pay their employees properly.
Company A only thinks for itself, and if paying employees less is saving it money, then that’s what it will do.
Walmarts and such are actually a special case because their employees will typically spend their money back at the very same company. But that’s the exception, not the rule. And also we’re talking about white-collar labor being automated, not so much cashiers and such.
How’s this prick planning to reach the bunker in case of societal collapse/apocalypse?
I’m sure he’ll find unpaid volunteers to carry his ass, that he’ll sell out once they reach the bunker.
/s
The rich would rather live in an apocalypse than let workers have some more of the wealth that the workers themselves have created.
Electric motorcycles? Do preppers have an understanding of how gasoline absorbs water from the air and is substantially worse within a matter of months? Even with stabilizer, you get a few years out of it, tops. What are you going to use for the rest of your life?
To be fair, the writers of post-apocalyptic Hollywood movies don’t understand it, either.
Create your own gasoline refining plant in your bunker and crank out fuel as you need it? Should be fine because motorcycles don’t use a lot of gas. But you would think if you had tons of money you might put some solar panel stuff in storage as well just in case
Could always set up a refinery of sorts.
And while gas absorbs water from the air, I’m sure there is an expensive way to if not outright prevent it, than slow it down way more than current mass adopted storage.
Off the top of my head i imagine some sort of giant glass tank involving vaccums and check valves would at least extend the usable life by a fair amount.
And while there are a lot of popular motorcycles whose gas mileage is little better than a car there are also a good amount with amazing gas mileage.
There’s also the possibility of converting the motorcycles to alternate fuel sources like propane or natural gas.
Or as these people are just rich assholes indulging in their fantasies they may really take their cue from movies.
“Bring cycles, guns and Huel” just doesn’t have the same ring to it
Insane strategy, Silicon Valley execs. Sell the thing that you believe is gonna cause the apocalypse so you can afford to have apocalypse insurance. That definitely needed to happen…
This is it… how about these dudes stopped preparing for the apocalypse that they themselves are causing, and instead changed the reality they’ve created, thus preventing said apocalypse from taking place in the first place…
But then number go down
That would require empowering the poors and they can’t be having that
deleted by creator
People are crazy and we are ruled by the crazy
I say that when the billionaires retreat into their bunkers we should all cover the entrances and vents with a couple hundred layers of concrete.
There are things called bunker busters too
Those are too fast. I prefer to let them rot.
They’re just building latrines for future civilizations.
I don’t remember who said it, but I think about this comment a lot:
All these billionaires would rather spend their wealth building bunkers for when their actions cause social collapse, instead of trying to prevent social collapse in the first place.
Because becoming a billionaire itself contributes to society’s collapse. They are opposite goals.
And they all already have, insane, there is our trickle down economics at work, they would rather hoarde and spend every last cent on a bunker right before they drop dead from old age than give back to the world
To be fair, what could a single billionaire do? They are far more powerful than most, but they would have to cooperate with other billionaires to make that change.
There are 3000 billionaires. Who is going to stick their head out if the necessary changes will be opposed by many billionaires as well as huge parts of the regular population?
It would be better for society to improve itself instead of waiting for a solution by the billionaires. Difficult while being trained to be a consumer, but possible.
They might start fighting turning on themselves
The solution is to cull billionaires. They can lose their wealth or their heads, either will make a better society
These assholes always fantasize that their wealth and accumulation of luxury items will grant them the leg up to become rulers during the social collapse. They don’t realize that in case of a social collapse the world won’t immediately look like Mad Max, and they certainly aren’t Immortan Joe. It will look more like Children of Man. Very slow and very gradual and with a lot mass governmental violence, not small arms violence.
Further, they don’t have what it takes to survive off the land, nor the intimidation to warlord after.
Other than a pensioners its difficult to imagine someone more dependant on the systems.
No wilderness survival skills, how do they know which berries to eat and which will poison you, or which animal carcass have a ton of parasites you should never eat, never eat a carnivore or an animal that eats mostly carrion.
The thing is, none of these bunkers are built by billionaires. Would be real unfortunate if they had some design flaws in them lol
Many Bothans have died to bring us this intel.
Probably won’t protect them from things like direct conventional bombardment of bombs or even bunker busters. Or even a nuke
Doesn’t need to be any design flaws, a few minutes with a welder and/or a truck load of concrete at the door once they’re in there would render the whole billionaire problem “solved”, Hotel California style.
Given we’re talking about the total collapse of society, the goal in such an event would be less “keep the billionaire in” and more “get all the food and ammunition he’s hoarding out. And any women.”
The women will likely just open the door for you to get away from the creepy weirdos inside
lol any woman in there being kept under the implication would be happy to kill them and get out, the bunkers would eat themselves from the inside
Douglas Rushkoff
Author, media theorist, and cool guy
Does the Team Human podcast
I don’t think they necessarily “prefer” it. It’s more just that they have what is an unimaginable amount of money in comparison to us, why not invest to preserve your long term survival?
They have already dealt with the normal shit the rest of us have to. They have a house, car, enough money for them and their families to never work again, to do whatever hobbies they like with no restriction.
If you are someone with a worth of a billion, this bunker development will cost something like 10m. That’s 1% of your wealth. It would be the same as the median American spending $1920 in pure relative terms, but probably would have an effect more like $500 on their real finances (again, every other need has been financially met long, long ago)
Well, because I’m not a sociopath I think preserving the world’s ecosystems is more important than a few years at the tail end of my life. Doomsday bunker with a Mad Max stockpile wouldn’t occur to me as a thing to actually do.
Okay, cool. Probably so do a lot of billionaires, at least from a pure pragmatic POV of them not wanting their skull cracked open. The point is that for a tiny portion of their wealth, they can insure against a lot of more realistic severe problems (unrest, riots, communism arising in the US, war, assassination, widespread famine), in addition to more extreme and less likely problems (doomsday, machine uprising, environmental collapse).
Frankly, were I a billionaire and able to see the choices Trump is making to make the average civilian in America jobless, penniless and hopeless, I would also be making a bunker in the wilderness or distant nation.
Or you could use your indescribable wealth to prevent the things you need a bunker for.
Yeah but you can’t though. Like let’s be real, you have 1bn, you’re not Elon Musk or Bill Gates level - and even they would not be able to stop an angry Donald Trump
It’s more than enough to inject a little fear into the ruling class.
Not enough to fight the bigger fish, but 1 billion dollars is more than enough to make public works that aren’t just a front (all these assholes have some foundation that is, at best, a zero sum charity), making better community spaces so they’ll actually see you as a “good guy” instead of yet another fucking greedy asshole.
New Zealand mostly
Just people building their own tombs. Being a part of society is what keeps you alive. They already crossed the boundary by essentially removing themselves from it. It’s already over for them
If an apocalypse happens I’d rather be in the bunker with all the goodies instead of outside with the roving gangs vying for control.
The worst criminals would be in there with you.
Where are you getting the gas, Steve? Gas is only good for a few months in storage without treatment and a couple of years with it. Have you never read a fucking book?
Petroleum distillation is incredibly simple. Give me a couple weeks in a junkyard with a welder and I can have your crude refined to any weight distillate you want. People were distilling petroleum fuels a century before penicillin was invented.
Fuck piss baby spez. But of you should see the crude “refineries” around the world run with just a tank, heated by the same crude inside, with just a long pipe as a condernsor that people manually water cool.
Key words in that sentence: give you those things. I doubt the lord tech bro could do any of that if the apocalypse happened tomorrow.
Even the janky version requires skill and knowledge, and if he doesn’t have the crude then both are useless anyway. Building a hole in the ground with motorcycles doesn’t help you when you depend on a highly connected world to fuel and maintain it.
“Gas goes bad.”
-Phillip “Tandy” Miller
Just collecting shit for badder men really. Dumb.
Gee, it was really considerate for these folk to collect all the shit our bandit rover band needed all in one place. Shame we had to eat all of them though.
Eat? No thanks. I don’t need that billionaire prion disease
I read a book called Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven many years ago about a comet hitting the Earth. There was a scene in the book, after the impact, where a rich guy manages to finally reach a place up in the mountains where he has supplies stashed, only to find that his employees have claimed it for themselves and won’t let him in because he’s basically useless in the new world of survival.
If you were working for Huffman or Musk or any of the rest of them, and a there was a huge society ending disaster, would you let them in when they showed up or would you just shoot them down with their own guns? I know what I would do. I can’t imagine anyone letting them in.
people like musk, thiel,altman have built complexes in other countries( mostly thiel,NZ) in case billionaires finally becomes the target they richly deserved, how are they going to staff thier complexes? with harems of women in cas thiel men, and slaves, willing to go with them.
Being hired as security at a billionaire’s Hawaiian apocalypse bunker has got to be the best job imaginable. You get paid to live in a tropical paradise in case The Worst should happen. If The Worst actually does happen, you just go inside the bunker and lock the doors, and if the billionaire shows up, you don’t let him in. Easy peasy.
That is such a great book.
And yeah, fuck them. I would absolutely never let them in.
Now ask yourself why these guys are suddenly so obsessed with AI, chatbots, and getting rid of roles previously staffed by humans.
Which is just a thousand times fucking funnier to me given that i’m someone with actual technical knowledge who works in the industry as opposed to a kholed nepo baby with parental funds.
I hope the virtual doorman hallucinates that they’re a radioactive dog or some shit
lol
A delivery guy I know couldn’t make his (scheduled, daily) pickup at an Amazon warehouse because the robot security didn’t recognize him that day (despite being the usual guy, with a badge).
So yeah, that probably will be the most likely scenario.
if they want a cylon staff go for it.
It doesn’t even have to be so combative.
Imagine being thrown together with 99 other survivors of the apocalypse and 1 of them was musk.
There’s going to be medical people and trades people and farmers and naturalists and even people with governance experience from community groups et cetera.
Imagine how utterly useless a billionaire would be in that context. Their entitlement would make them worse than useless. Like I’d rather be stuck with nanna who is just a drain on resources rather than someone who’s only skill is self interest.
Nanna is the keeper of the stories and the only person who has the entire new testament memorised.
Cory Doctorow’s Masque of the Red Death novella (named after Poe’s story of the same name) explores this theme a lot, especially how short sighted the rich can be and how well the poor band together to rebuild.
Here’s the free audio book:
Ooh, free Edgar Allen Poe book? Are you trying to be my new best friend?
well it’s not EAP, its CD - but using an EAP title. Sure we can be BFFs, but ill need a credit card number and PIN code
Ah, I shouldn’t have skimmed your post. Thanks again, I’ll give it a listen.
Didn’t read the book but I get the scenario after a hypothetical world changing disaster, it’s going to be a ratrace for high ground. It’s a false sense of security to believe hoarding cash or guns or vehicle would be your ticket out of it, it’s called pride and hubris.
A motor/car can’t swim. Weapons are a sign of hostility. Cash could be useless. Even having access to an escape satellite doesn’t guarantee you’ll be hit by space trash or cosmic plasma streams. The Road is a example how depressing the aftermath really is.
The Road is a good example; this thread also has me thinking about the Amos and Clarissa arc after the meteors hit in The Expanse.
I had gone quite a long time without thinking about The Road.
Day ruined.
That would be a nice vault to loot.
