"Massive Job Losses Will Happen This Year" How to Make Sure You Aren't Next!

Effective altruism drove AI doom narratives

A community of 'true believers' convinced that superintelligent AI will treat humans like ants has dominated discourse since 2023, writing books and attracting billionaire funding while cultivating cult-like behaviors and fraud (as exposed post-FTX).

AI companies weaponized fear for monopolistic gain

Early AI labs adopted effective altruism views to advocate for GPU export bans against China and restrictive regulations that would handicap competitors, though they began distancing themselves after the community's reputation collapsed and politicians turned regulatory attention toward American companies.

Status dynamics shifted toward techno-optimism

Being an AI 'doomer' became high-status in 2023-24, but intellectual counter-movements like the 'Techno-Optimist' manifesto and the Trump administration's pro-AI stance have since diminished effective altruism's political influence.

Current AI techniques are asymptoting

The last major leap in general capabilities was GPT-3 to 4 in 2023; since then diminishing returns have set in for general reasoning, though progress continues in coding and science where binary outcomes allow synthetic data generation.

LLMs are fundamentally inefficient learners

Unlike humans who learn from minimal data, LLMs require ingesting the entire internet and carry massive irrelevant knowledge (e.g., knowing Canada's national animal while coding), making them wasteful compared to sample-efficient biological intelligence.

We are building 'functional AGI' not true AGI

Rather than general intelligence that transfers learning across domains (where coding improvement improves history reasoning), companies are layering specialized intelligences for specific fields, creating systems that feel like AGI but cannot generalize.

Coding agents create 10x knowledge workers

Modern coding agents autonomously execute 3-7 step workflows (researching, crawling websites, building dashboards), enabling non-coders to automate complex tasks and giving marketers/ops professionals engineering-level leverage without writing code.

Resistant software engineers face displacement

Engineers who micromanage AI-generated code rather than working at the systems/architect level are at high risk of job loss, while those who embrace 'vibe coding' and high-level orchestration will thrive.

Decentralized entrepreneurship is exploding

Small business owners (including 80-year-old entrepreneurs) now build custom 'end of one' software solutions for niche markets (like yoga teachers managing payments) that were previously too small for VC-backed startups, creating a new entrepreneurial class despite overall job reductions.

UBI becomes unavoidable but carries risks

While UBI may be necessary to prevent fraud compared to means-tested welfare, it risks creating inflation, financializing the economy into gambling/gaming, and stripping humans of the meaningful challenge required for psychological health.