Nawww is the little piggy boy scared we’re gonna come for him?
Good.
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
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 ?
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…
But what do those forklift drivers and cashiers do?
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.
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.
The thing is, none of these bunkers are built by billionaires. Would be real unfortunate if they had some design flaws in them lol
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Douglas Rushkoff
Author, media theorist, and cool guy
Does the Team Human podcast
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
The first thing people will do when society collapses is head to where the billionaires live to raid their stockpiles.
If any are successfully defended, I propose we simply push a bunch of rocks on top of it.
Shit next to the intake vents. Make that spot the communal toilet. Lets see how long the filters last
The really funny thing about Spez is that he’s far from a power player in the tech scene, nowhere near the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg. But he so desperately wants to be that he actually just looks sad and pathetic in the process.
Wtf is he going to do with his stockpile of motorbikes during the apocalypse? Start a Mad Max biker crew? What a fkn loser lol.
I just want to know the evidence for the motorcycles. Is it really a “stockpile” of them, or is he a rich bitch and likes motorcycles like jay leno likes cars?
I agree. Many people are imagining, “instead of using his vast wealth to fix the world, he dedicates all his money and mental energy to an elaborate bunker that will ensure his survival in a specific apocalyptic scenario he believes is likely to happen.”
It might be more like, "amongst all the random wealthy-person shit he’s bought, there are guns and motorcycles (because he thinks they are cool) as well as a pantry full of canned food (because everyone should have an emergency kit and you never know).
But I could be wrong.
He’s just going to the next tier of cuck that provides bikes for the raiders that get in his bunker. They should keep him alive as a manservant when his little apocalypse plan falls apart.
I can just imagine this as a scene in a fallout game. Lonely old rich fuck hidden away for years. You ring the intercom and he’s so excited to hear another voice that he invites you in. Starts spewing shit opinions. You eventually realize he could’ve helped stop the apocalypse but built the bunker and profited instead. Look at all the loot. Inform him he can either become a smear on the wall or caretaker of your new place.
Little french maid costume?
And a large pineapple
He will flee to musk’s compound in Texas at the first sign of trouble, trying to be part of his harem
He did what musk ask if him on moderating reddit twice, which let 2 waves of massive bans, plus the ongoing shadow and. And I heard they changed something. Recently to catch even the more sophisticated ban eveders
The rich would rather live in an apocalypse than let workers have some more of the wealth that the workers themselves have created.
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?
“Gas goes bad.”
-Phillip “Tandy” Miller
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.
Would rich people want to live in a world where there is no one else to enslave?
They will always find someone to enslave
Yes, but one would think in an apocalypse bunker the pickings are slim
I’m pretty sure the zuck bunker has separated quarters for security and service staff. They ain’t going down there alone bro.
Mutiny will come pretty soon once the staff realize they can just dispose of the suckyberg
In a bunker, class consciousness happens on speedrunning mode.
I mean we say that, but look how happy people are to just go with the status quo just because ‘it could be worse’ or some variation.
May not matter. Authoritarian mindsets might be quite happy enslaving just one other person. Here’s a documentary about it.
That’s why its one wannabe oligarch per bunker.
They than get to (try) to play god with everyone they so generously allowed into their ‘fiefdom’ without any known opposition.
Waiting for robot slaves, assuming they don’t follow the path of cylons
It’s ok, they’re gathering supplies for the people. Once things start it’ll all be in one convient place to take.
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 patienter they’ve created thus preventing said apocalypse from taking place…
But then number go down
That would require empowering the poors and they can’t be having that
Yeah, like these attention whores will stay in their bunkers and not come outside, like the ppl constructing them wont target them first to get themselves a fortresss, thats what id do if I made them and we had an apocalypse, id leave myself multiple backdoors
thier BODYGUARD will be the ones to turn on them first, either tha tor thier harems , or thier slaves. take a lesson from indian govt in the 70s, when the ghandi(ghandis family) govt was in power, the pm was murdered(blown up with a bomb) by her sikh bodyguard because the pm decided to persecute them.
this is whats going to happen to these billionaires, they would have to be paranoid as putin to escape potential threats.
I always find it funny that people imagibe that in an apocalypse a modern fossil fuel vehicle would be any good. Unless you know how to modify the engine to use realistically self-producable fuel you will be able to run it for only a few months before all the fuel in the world degrades and starts destroying/not running the engine. Better off getting electric vehicles as electricity is actually easy to produce.
Batteries are for sure harder to make than petroleum.
Better to get a horse and a mule.
Unrelated? How would that apply to cars?
Cars can be converted to run on wood gas.
As I said, You would need to know how to modify your car for that.
This video walks you through on how to convert a vehicle to run on wood gas. I should have posted this instead of the link I posted.
I am sure there are instructions written down in case of no electricity.
A bicycle isn’t a bad thing to have in an apocalypse. Not difficult to maintain, considerably faster and more efficient than walking, basically no infrastructure required.
For sure, but there would be use cases for bigger vehicles, especially if you don’t want to be on the run but rather rebuild
Sure, but if I’m stocking a ragnarok bunker I’m going to stick a Trek in there.
That would be a nice vault to loot.
The crappy thing, is that while they plan on a possible collapse of soceity, they could just as easily plan on what to do about all the displaced workers created, by all their technical solutions seeking problems.
Just don’t ask about the dusty old box of VHS tapes.
