(Written by Michael Snyder, originally published here on the Economic Collapse Blog, republished with permission.)
If you haven’t lost your job yet, you should be very thankful. Artificial intelligence and robots are taking more of our jobs with each passing day, and there will be no end to this high tech invasion. Eventually we could get to a point where AI and robots can do virtually everything far more efficiently and far more inexpensively than humans can. So what will happen to the vast majority of the human population when their labor is no longer needed? Will a way be found to quietly deal with “useless eaters” that are considered to be “just taking up space”? For years we have been warned that AI and robots would revolutionize the workforce, and now that day has officially arrived.
For example, Amazon has been using various types of simple robots to perform certain tasks for years, and now highly sophisticated humanoid robots are being deployed right alongside normal human workers…
Amazon recently began testing a new robot in its warehouse operations — meet Digit, a humanoid bipedal robot with a turquoise torso and smiley eyes.
Designed by Agility Robotics, which Amazon has invested in as part of its Industrial Innovation Fund, Digit is only the latest of a string of warehouse robots the company has introduced over the last several years. However, most of the other warehouse robots have been cart-shaped or robotic arms, not humanoid like Digit.
Digit costs about $10 to $12 an hour to operate right now, based on its price and lifespan, but the company predicts that cost to drop to $2 to $3 an hour plus overhead software costs as production ramps up, Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton told Bloomberg.
How are we supposed to compete with that?
No human worker is going to work for “$2 to $3 an hour”.
Plus, robots don’t need breaks, they don’t get sick, they don’t complain and they don’t steal from the company.
So this trend is only going to accelerate during the years ahead.
Even now, there is a McDonald’s restaurant that is almost entirely run by robots…
You may be thinking that robots won’t be taking your job any time soon because you have a white collar job that requires a high level of intelligence.
Well, if you are a white collar worker there is a good chance that your current job will one day be made “obsolete” by artificial intelligence.
In fact, Goldman Sachs is projecting that AI could take as many as 300 million full-time jobs during the years ahead, and most of them will be white collar jobs…
As many as 300 million full-time jobs around the world could be automated in some way by the newest wave of artificial intelligence that has spawned platforms like ChatGPT, according to Goldman Sachs economists.
They predicted in a report Sunday that 18% of work globally could be computerized, with the effects felt more deeply in advanced economies than emerging markets.
That’s partly because white-collar workers are seen to be more at risk than manual laborers. Administrative workers and lawyers are expected to be most affected, the economists said, compared to the “little effect” seen on physically demanding or outdoor occupations, such as construction and repair work.
So how are you going to make a living when AI and robots do almost everything better and cheaper than you can?
Vast number of jobs will be lost during the years ahead.
Sadly, the truth is that the U.S. economy is already bleeding jobs.
On Friday, the BLS told us that the Establishment Survey indicated that the U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs last month, but historically the Household Survey has been much more accurate, and it showed that the U.S. economy actually lost 683,000 jobs last month…
But that’s just the start. Next we turn to the numbers behind the headline job prints which were rather terrible: the monthly nonfarm payrolls (from the Establishment Survey) may have been weak at 216K but the far more accurate Household Survey showed that the number of Employed workers actually collapsed by an unprecedented 683K, the biggest drop since the US economy was shutdown by covid!
And as I shared with my paid subscribers a few days ago, the BLS report also showed that the number of full-time jobs in the U.S. dropped by 1.531 million during the month of December…
Here, one look at this month’s adjustment and it’s literally a shocker: you will not hear anyone from the Biden admin, the mainstream media, or associated economist cheerleaders mention this, but the BLS reported that in December the number of full-time jobs plunged by 1.531 million to 133.2 million, the biggest monthly drop since the record covid crash of 14.7 million jobs!
If that number is even close to accurate, we are in really big trouble.
For some time I have been writing about the tsunami of layoffs that has been happening in corporate America, and at this point things have gotten so bad that even BlackRock is getting ready to lay off workers…
BlackRock, the world’s largest money management firm, plans to announce layoffs in the coming days of about 3 percent of its global workforce, Fox Business has learned.
The job cuts of around 600 employees, which have yet to be reported, are being described internally as routine, according to a source familiar.
Meanwhile, bankruptcies are surging all over the country.
In fact, the number of bankruptcy filings in the United States in 2023 was 18 percent higher than it was in 2022…
U.S. bankruptcy filings surged by 18% in 2023 on the back of higher interest rates, tougher lending standards and the continued runoff of pandemic-era backstops, data published Wednesday showed, although insolvency case volumes remain well below the level seen before the outbreak of COVID-19.
Total bankruptcy filings – encompassing commercial and personal insolvencies – rose to 445,186 last year from 378,390 in 2022, according to data from bankruptcy data provider Epiq AACER.
Joe Biden will deny it for as long as he possibly can, but the truth is that we are in an economic crisis right now.
But what we are experiencing at this moment is not even worth comparing to what is coming.
So enjoy the last fumes of prosperity while you still can, because this ride only goes downhill from here.
