It won't get that far.

It's physically impossible to build out the datacenters required for the "AI is actually good and we have mass layoffs" scenario. This Anthropic investment is spurred on because they've already hit a brick wall with capacity.

$40B goes a long way, but not for datacenters where nearly every single component and service is now backordered. Even if you could build the DC, the power connection won't be there.

The current oil crisis just makes all of that even worse.

Doesn't that just draw out the AI revolution by a few years? I don't see why it would stop anything though.

Imagine a scenario where someone claimed that it was physically impossible to replace all the buggies with automobiles because everything was backordered and there were labor shortages. Surely the replacement still happens eventually though?

A drawn out long change simply doesn't have the major societal upset that imminent mass-unemployment has.

With how much scale AI datacenters want and how the Trump administration has made supply problems significantly worse, we'd be talking decades, plural.

I don't think lowering the rate a bit is going to be sufficient to avoid major upsets. If (arbitrary example) every software developer were forced to switch jobs over a 10 year period that would still be an extremely disruptive sequence of events. And I don't think there's any scenario in which software developers are widely impacted but other industries somehow aren't.

Digitization was already fairly disruptive and that involved much smaller changes than what we appear to be facing while also taking place over something like 30 years or more.

We pretty much already had the layoffs, at least that's my perception.

The next level of layoffs is probably still 25 years out.

There's layoffs, certainly.

But all the economic indicators suggest those are "bad economy" layoffs dressed up as "AI" layoffs to keep the shareholders happy.

The real “AI layoffs” are all the people that are PIPed because their colleagues are better at leveraging AI.

We must have a very different view of the world because in my neck of the woods companies are desperate for senior talent. And it's become even harder to find seniors now that everyone has access to a machine that can create the appearance of experience.

> The next level of layoffs is probably still 25 years out.

Hasn't even been 25 years years since the previous layoffs before the current ones.

Do you mean as in there will be no happy ending / reset and no another century of prosperity?

I mean as in living through the industrial revolution would have been wild. So whether we have an AI revolution or an AI bubble it's bound to be a roller coaster.

And that's without accounting for the various wars (and resultant economic impacts) that are already in progress. A large part of what drove the meat grinder of WWI was (very approximately) the various actors repeatedly misjudging the overall situation and being overly enthusiastic to try out their shiny new weapons systems. If one or more superpowers decide to have a showdown the only thing that might minimize loss of life this time around is (ironically enough) the rise of autonomous weapons systems. Even in that case as we know from WWII the logical outcome is a decimated economy and manufacturing sector regardless of anything else that might happen.

> minimize loss of life this time around is (ironically enough) the rise of autonomous weapons systems

I think that just means the relative civilian loss of life will increase once again.

What strategic merit is there in targeting civilians or life critical infrastructure in a fully automated battlebot scenario? Perhaps it's naive but I would expect stockpiles, datacenters, and any key infrastructure on which the local semiconductor fabrication depends to be the primary targets.

Look au Ukraine for answers and how russians target almost purely civilian infrastructure and civilians in terror campaigns every single day and night, same as nazis did to Britain in WWII. With exactly same results but they just double down and send more drones next day.

russia is really and empire of the dumb and subjugated serfs at this point (again, history repeats), but they are far from only such place.

Dont expect more, most people are not that nice when SHTF.

The current reality doesn't match your expectations. Russia is using automated warfare to strike what are primarily human life-critical targets.

The aim of war is to make political change and gain control of opponent. it is much more valuable to capture datacenters, infra and semiconductor fabricaton than to destroy and rebuild it.

Bubble or revolution - not a dichotomy.

Bubbles like the AI bubble are a game theoretic outcome of a revolution. Many players invest heavily to avoid losing, but as a whole the market over invests. This leads to a bubble.

Imagine you're a typesetter and they just invented computerized printing.

These kinds of comments are so confusing to me, is the work you do day to day really so trivial that you can be wholesale replaced by an LLM?

90% of the actual code writing? Yes. The actually valuable part is coming up with the ideas for what to do.

There isn't going to be a great reset where everyone goes back to coding by hand any more than we're going back to typesetting by hand.

We're not talking about the LLMs of today but whatever shows up 2 years from now and then again 2 years after that. Don't look at the present state of things but instead project the trend line.