[SlinkyOnStairs]

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.

[fc417fc802]

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?

[SlinkyOnStairs]

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.

[fc417fc802]

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.

[fallat]

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

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

[SlinkyOnStairs]

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.

[bitmasher9]

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

[Spivak]

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.

[embedding-shape]

> 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.