[roncesvalles]

The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it.

For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities.

We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.

[wrren]

To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.

[JumpCrisscross]

> losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries

Compared with China?

[frm88]

Yes. You can get unemployment insurance payout between 3 and 24 months:

https://msadvisory.com/china-social-security-system/

For example, if the local minimum wage in Shanghai is RMB 2,590 per month, the unemployment benefit would range between RMB 1,813 and RMB 2,072.

https://fdichina.com/blog/unemployment-insurance-in-china/

[roncesvalles]

The belief that there is no safety net is also part of the paranoia that I'm referring to. America is actually one of the most welfarist states in the world.

[croes]

Only if you include those countries without welfare.

If you look at those with welfare the US are pretty bad.

Lots of money but badly distributed

[roncesvalles]

If your judgment of "badly distributed" comes from all the homeless people that you see, those people have fallen through like a dozen safety nets to get to that point and most of them cannot be helped.

You could literally hire a full-time dedicated team of 10 social workers and mental health professionals to care for 1 crazy SF hobo and it still wouldn't turn around their lives, they're too far gone.

You never see the iceberg of people who are successfully helped by American welfare.

[croes]

I mean the efficiency.

How much of the money is for actual help and how much for the companies who exploit the system to enrich themselves.

[anarticle]

A reason for the thick air of paranoia is that now, everyone knows someone that has been laid off. Simply so many that it is starting to hit home. Estimates are near 2008, and if you lived through that you know that help is not coming on a timescale that you could have to massively change your life.

You lose your job, two years go by, time to sell you your house and move. Hiring is a total circus right now as well, being subjected to a five course hiring obstacle course is a lot of time that you're burning your savings and or missing other opportunities. Compare this to nearly any time since 2012 when it was at most three, and maybe ONE was a technical.

Most people do not save in America, and even when you are employed the health care system does not take great care of you. All of this "choice" is presented as capitalism working, but really it's a set of land mines where two large entities decide how much they want to take from you (the hospital, and the insurance company). Since the pricing is opaque and the amount the insurance company pays is capricious, vaya con dios.

The line feels like don't get sick, and your own country has thrown you to the wolves (they're in on it). Similar to unemployment, and the other "safety nets" not managed centrally or well. Massive delays, and your mortgage is due.

Also, you are paying for all of these safety nets all the time when you are making money, but it is deeply gated when you need it. Sorry for the paragraphs, but watching a friend go through this now and it's very wild.

If you're able to save more than 10%/m, you are very ahead of the game.

As for USA losing the Mandate of Heaven, even people from other countries seem sad to see it happening. Informally, two different groups of Portuguese people I've talked to in the last two weeks in Lisbon had a sentiment of "how could this have happened to such a great country?" Mostly due to the extreme news reports coming from the US, ICE, war, rhetoric etc.

[boxed]

> The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it.

Yea, because they are not a democracy, so power concentration and automated violence is a plus, not a minus.

[croes]

Who are "The" Chinese?

Are you both talking about the same group?

[boxed]

I'm talking about the party.

[indy]

Do you think there is a level of guilt amongst some working Americans? A case of "I shouldn't be earning this much money for this little work"

[roncesvalles]

This guilt is baseless and part of this mass hysteria.

I used to work at the American office of a Chinese company. Our counterparts in China earned about half as much as we did in the Bay Area (which is a top-tier salary in China and attracts the best people). On the surface there is really no reason for a Chinese tech company to set up an engineering office in the US. And yet many of them do.

One of my colleagues asked our manager whether he thinks our jobs in the US were stable because the teams in China cost so much less. The manager just said the talent quality is still a bit better in the Bay Area so it's worth it. That sounds like a tautology, but I think there's something deeper.

The problem in America is that a lot of companies have started thinking of talent as a "toll", a cost that you need to pay to get things done. If you think of it as a toll, then your objective becomes how to minimize it. I think that's wholly the wrong perspective.

[Luker88]

> For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away

That is not just an AI problem. AI is just worsening a problem in USA society.

For years in the USA losing your job was not that big of a deal, because there were lots of other jobs to do, and they paid well.

The paranoia comes from the fact that people are discovering they have not saved anything and the jobs they need to merely survive (not even prosper anymore) are less and more difficult to obtain.

Hence the perceived value of the job you have is greater, and losing it looks worse.

The American dream was Homer Simpson, a simpleton with a huge house to his name, supporting a family as the (mostly) single earner. Today Homer would not be able to buy his own house, nor support his family.

Being poor is expensive. You have to pay rent for a house that will never be yours, often replace cheap things that break more often than the more expensive ones.You need money to make money, and that reinforces how money is essentially a zero-sum game. For billionaires to make even more, someone else has to make less.

TL;DR: It's not just AI. Americans are getting poorer. Poor is scary. And they don't have any social net like more socialist countries.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> For some reason

That reason would be the constant proclamation of such by business leaders, and these days, especially by AI company executives.

Just yesterday Elon Musk was in the news again for making noise about the need for a Universal Basic Income, with the clear implication of massive job market disruption.

[roncesvalles]

It's pretty clear that Elon Musk suffers from sadism; edgelords tend to.