AI causing massive layoffs by the oligarchy

[ap215]

AI safety’s ‘hard money’ may be its secret weapon in the midterms

While coverage of AI money flowing into the mid-terms has mainly focused on the huge sums going into super PACs such as Leading the Future and Public First, individual donations direct to campaigns from employees of AI companies and organisations have largely flown under the radar.

That’s despite the unusually large scale of these individual donations, and their ability to directly boost the campaigns of their chosen recipients in a way the super PAC money can’t. Such ‘hard money’ donations could be AI safety’s secret weapon in the 2026 midterms.

https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-saf ... pic-openai

[ZoWie]

Here the latest attack ads in the governor's race have been telling who paid for some opponent's previous attack ads. You would be amazed who's on the list. Not just defense contractors and trump buddies. Practically every union you can think of.

Even more disturbing is how nearly every production union in The Industry has had its bug put on one candidate for governor's ads. This guy doesn't seem very pro-labor, being essentially a grown-up rich kid who obviously wants to do a Trump and help his oligarchy buddies help him and his stock prices. Even so, he's got more bugs than a pile of dog doo in August.

[ZoWie]

Getting back to AI, it's definitely true that the first casualty is campaign spending. The companies are dumping in megabucks all over the place.

The consequences of AI, at least in the short term, will not be pleasant. You should try getting a refrigerator delivered in New York. When they refuse to deliver it for some arcane reason, you wind up talking to software. Software is still based on the notion that rules are rules and people just don't get it that humans exist to serve machines, not like in that other antiquated notion about it being the other way around.

[Number6]

The problems AI causes in eliminating jobs is reflected in Sunday's Doonesbury strip.



For most of us "older" folks, jobs were easier to come by before and during the computer era. With AI, all it takes is a programmer to take the jobs many in the white collar career fields did. With the exception of some career fields, like medicine and legal occupations requiring specific training that AI alone can't do. I think the only benefit of AI is a lot of kids graduating high school are going to take a long look at trade schools instead of college.

[ZoWie]

As usual, the words of the prophets are written in the funny papers. The only magazine I still subscribe to is Funny Times. It's like a brain pill every month (except in summer, when they don't publish a couple of months due to the economy).

Actually, though, the average grunt programmer who took the right classes in college and got hired two weeks after graduation is in trouble too. AI writes software just as well as it writes bad movie scripts. These guys are in the unemployment line with the rest of us. They're being laid off all over the place.

Those fictional old farts in the Doonesbury strip you posted are indeed a pretty good depiction of what we're up against right now.

[rainwater]

oh theyre using it for med. instead of med, theyre using AI. guesswork that hums and blinks.
there is no med nowadays. live human dealing with living organism(s). gone

[rainwater]

Durability Matters

https://durabilitymatters.com › planned-obsolescence
Built To Fail: 8 Examples Of Planned Obsolescence
Planned obsolescence is when a product is designed to become obsolete or undesirable to encourage consumers to buy new ones. Learn about the four types of planned obsolescence, seven examples of products that use it, and how to combat it with durability and sustainability.

[ZoWie]

Not just durability. They put huge ad budgets into creating the illusion that the latest products are so much better than last year's that you can't afford not to update. If even that fails, they resort to fantasies like the current one seen nightly where people drive their shiny new oversized cars through desert fields or rugged country that you just won't encounter on your way to the market.

Say, how come these cars never get dirty?

I get a yuk when I walk through the typical LA parking lot and see shiny clean vehicles that used to be more appropriate in the Yukon, complete with all-terrain tires, a three foot ground clearance, and that winch on the front. They've never been anywhere more rugged than some of the LA streets that have needed fixing for 5 years.

[Number6]

Nothing last forever. There used to be a time when major purchases like cars, appliances, TVs, etc.., were purposely built to have a shorter life-span than their counterparts of today. From my experience, most of the major purchases last much longer and require fewer repairs. In many cases, it's now cheaper to buy a new item than to repair it. Part of the reason is consumers became more willing to repair than buy new. Manufactures recognize this and responded by improving the quality and dependability of their products. Beginning in the 80s, they began adopting total quality management putting emphasis on quality during all aspects of production. Cars used to last for 100,000 miles and now it's not uncommon for them to go past 200,000 miles. I have a washer/dryer, refrigerator, and stove that's over 15 years and they still work well. TVs are bigger, cost less, and last longer.

I think part of the problem when we think about planned obsolescence with the economy as it is money is tight and something that had lasted for the last 15 years that suddenly breaks or needs repair skews our idea of durability. We don't think about the 15 years of use we got from it but concentrate on the price of having to replace it. Another thing we have to consider is whether to buy a quality item versus a cheaper items with less quality. For short-term use, the cheaper item may be better but if you're going to need it for a long while then quality is the way to go.

[ZoWie]

Cars do last longer. Electronics are more durable and need less routine maintenance. (No more changing tubes.) Major computer breakthroughs are less frequent, as it becomes a mature technology, so your box isn't obsolete every year or two.

Mostly I watch sports on TV. As a trained film maker, I can't help but notice how manipulative the ads in sports shows are. The commercial breaks seem to come in layers. Presumably software works out the details of who pays for the spots, if they don't sell all of the expensive ones that cover up the schlocky ones. You might have noticed flash frames when the expensive ad spots run some fraction of a second shorter than the the cheapo ones where time is sold in bulk to importers of schlocky products from China and Vietnam, or to the increasing numbers of 1-800-SO-SUE-ME law firms.

Some of these cheapo ads piss me off. I remember when Bell & Howell made great indestructible film cameras like the Eyemo that helped win WWII, or the Filmo that launched a thousand student films. Of course, now only first-run features even bother with film, but hey, time marches on. I still remember heavy steel cameras and iron men, and those midnight lab runs. Anyway, the Bell & Howell name must have lapsed copyright, since now someone calling themselves by that name imports tons of those supposedly miraculous products from Vietnam and China that break the third time you use them. And then there's BulbHead. And, of course, even though KARS-4-KIDS was enjoined from advertising in California, that damn song is still there.

[rainwater]

i think..' planned-obsolescence' gave us walm.

[ZoWie]

Story in the Nooz that KARS-4-KIDS lawyered up and got the ban at least temporarily blocked by another judge. I keep forgetting that this is no longer our country.

[ZoWie]

i think..' planned-obsolescence' gave us walm.

P.O. still exists, it's just more psychological. Instead of things falling apart after three years, they just become less exciting to think about. You know, like this current spate of ads on TV sports shows, where everyone's trying to sell you a Defender or Range Rover, so you will be able to drive through the Sahara during a haboob. You wouldn't actually ever do that, but you COULD, by God.

[rainwater]

phones. .....when you hear the connection drop off and make those sounds....its a machine not human.

As well theyre recording Everything so they can fill more 'data collection buildings...

[ZoWie]

According to the law, a phone line must beep every (some number of) seconds to show that the call is being recorded. Most companies ignore this, however. Some have a voice recording say the call is being recorded. Some don't. The ones that don't are in violation.

Conservatives in Texas are pushing for anti-data center legislation. I think we've found the common ground with the right. It's business overreach, and limiting same.

[ZoWie]

Getting back on topic, Ford is rehiring a lot of the QC engineers that it canned in favor of AI, noting that it didn't work very well without them.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o

Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks

In a bid to reap the benefits of the tech, which developers claim can cut costs and boost productivity, the US carmaker adopted it across some parts of its operations including for quality checks.

But, according to Bloomberg, its executives said the firm has rehired more than 300 "veteran" quality inspectors in recent years to make up for the pitfalls of automated systems.

[ap215]

‘Let’s Go Kill the Internet’ Zuhair Lakhani ​is creating an army of AI influencers and flooding feeds with “propaganda campaigns.” What could go wrong?

Zuhair Lakhani has always understood the allure of scarcity. When he was 15, he started sneakerbotting — coding programs that could purchase hard-to-find shoes at lightning speed and then resell them for an upcharge. His father owned phone-accessory stores in Greater New York, but like any brick-and-mortar retailer, was struggling in the age of Amazon. When the pandemic hit, the stores closed for good and the family moved to Dallas, where his father opened a restaurant. So Lakhani, then in his junior year of remote high school, turned to the golden rule of sneakerbotting: If something is really hard to get, people will want it really bad. “Before even taking any reservations, ‘I was like, ‘The restaurant’s sold out,’” he says. “We did reservation drops every Wednesday at 4 p.m. for the next week, and at 4:10, I would just close them.” Within two weeks, the wait list for reservations at his father’s restaurant grew to around 6,000 people —many of whom could expect an imminent call saying that a spot had magically appeared for them.

Lakhani, handsome, hungry, and with a quiet intensity he masks in lowercase X jokes about slop bowls and mogging, is the sort of 21-year-old who is uniquely equipped for the economy of the moment. The world’s most-future-oriented companies are currently seeking “agentic” people— that is, those who don’t ask permission to change things before breaking them. Only a highly agentic human, for instance, could come up with an idea for a start-up nobody asked for.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article ... ncers.html

[ZoWie]

It's always something. Marketing is the major threat to civilization because it turns everything into profit centers.

Before Internet the same situation existed with entertainment, especially popular music. The people who really made out weren't just the bands that signed huge contracts. It was also the people who owned the entertainment industry. It built the part of LA that I grew up in.

The only difference now is that nerds make it big instead of musicians.

[ap215]

Here's how to spot a fake or AI tornado video

With the prevalence of AI videos circulating on social media, it’s important to verify that the video is real before sharing. Here’s how to tell if a tornado video is fake.

https://weather.com/2026/07/13/science/ ... nado-video

[ZoWie]

All the special FX in movies look like that now. It's easy for anyone who remembers how they used to do FX and how much better the resulting footage looked to spot these fakes. My professional opinion is that the fakes outnumber the good stuff by about 100 to one. Even FX in expensive feature films are getting pretty tacky. It's all edited on computers, by people who farm the FX out to quickie studios in Asia which can produce blurry AI driven fakes at prices that producers risk their jobs by turning down.

It's gotten so bad that the last two actors' strikes included demands that AI generated actors not be used to replace humans in shots that go by too fast to be noticed. With generative learning AI, you can fake anything with a one-sentence prompt entered from a keyboard. It looks like shit, or like some 50s "B" horror flick, but it's cheaper than calling stars back for pickup shots.

It's causing a situation in which seeing is not believing. You have to experience it yourself, as any pictorial record of it is open to questioning. This is one of the most abrupt and jolting psychological and philosophical changes in centuries. It's up there with the revelation that the planet was bigger than Europe and some coastal parts of Asia and Africa.

[Number6]

I'm glad I'm retired. It would be harder for me to transition from a "traditional" job to one that required AI competency. I remember in the 80s when the AF began putting computers in our offices and having to learn how word and database programs. For our section, we transitioned from taking keypunched cards to the data processing center every Friday to having a dedicated computer system that gave us real time input/output and we ran an end-of-day processing every day in our shop. That transition wasn't bad but there was definitely a steep learning curve. I can't imagine how we'd be using AI in my job if I was still in the AF today.

[ZoWie]

Mostly the AI relies on other AI to do its work. Humans are placed outside the loop, basically checking the output for dangerously stupid mistakes. One whole generation learned computer science in college and went right into high paying jobs, but now they're obsolete and being replaced by software. You might have noticed that every time you call up somebody on the phone to fix some monumental mistake made by their machines, all you get is other machines.

One can see pretty quickly why "May you live in interesting times" is a curse in Chinese.

[ap215]

Head of Commerce Department’s AI safety arm resigns

Dr. Chris Fall, the director of the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) is resigning after just three months in the role.

The exit of Fall, who was appointed to head the AI safety organization in April, comes amid a fluctuation in the Trump administration’s AI policy. Staff at CAISI are directly involved with testing AI models as the White House expresses heightened concerns over the cybersecurity risks with new model rollouts.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5 ... i-resigns/

[ZoWie]

OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack

OpenAI has revealed some of its most advanced AI models went rogue and hacked a start-up after it lost control of them during a security test.

The ChatGPT-maker said its agent - an AI system which can operate alone after human instruction – was being tested in a controlled environment but, after finding weaknesses, was able to escape the test limits.

They targeted Hugging Face, one of the world's largest hubs for sharing AI models, gaining access to some internal company systems.

[Number6]

OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack

The AI apocalypse has begun.

We're told AI will be controlled by humans but it's obvious the technology is advancing beyond human's ability to control it. Pretty soon, someone will misuse AI to steal billions from bank accounts resulting in a worldwide depression.