289
The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly. Imagine what happens if jobs actually start disappearing.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
289 points (95.3% liked)
Technology
84898 readers
4393 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even the headline is wrong. Jobs have already started disappearing due to AI.
I did some AI training a couple of years ago. Turned out I trained the AI to do what I was doing.
Fool me once...
What job were you doing that AI can do it?
It was fairly basic, just analyzing audio tracks and extracting the dialogue from them to text. Simple stuff for AI now.
I think your job might be safe. AI has been doing speech to text for over a quarter century. It's been bundled with Windows since XP. And nobody uses it because it has all the same problems that modern AI has.
https://youtu.be/kTefnhbg0Ig
They were freelance contract jobs, and I haven't seen anything that easy in a long while 😒
I'm sorry if you lost your job, but if you actually helped improve talking to these damn things then I thank you for your service.
Well yeah it has but it really sucked at it till things like Whisper came along. You really had to train it to specific speakers and even then you'd have to manually go over everything.
Now running the heaviest whisper model and then an LLM to fix obvious mistakes and you have the same quality a human contractor would deliver. Except it can do a day's work in 5 minutes.
Writing snarky emails to end users.
They got you too, huh
fool me once... and I'll not have a chance to be fooled twice
I would love to see an AI trying to my job. It's useless at almost every aspect except for seeming like it knows what it's talking about.
So the higher ups who never know anything will listen to it, implemented it's dumb suggestions that are either unworkable or actually illegal and will burn the company to the ground. It would be hilarious if it weren't for the fact that I would be out of a job.
They want a new financial management solution (currently they're using some ancient thing on SAP) they've looked at a few solutions but they don't like any of them because they all cost a lot of money since they all go with the subscription model these days rather than just letting you buy the software in one big payment. They have actually considered letting an AI right some software for them. Should be fun.
I'm told that AI can't actually replace humans, so presumably those jobs will be back in short order.
They were just layoffs in disguise, so they wont be back for a while.
I think they'll all come back after public sentiment seems to lean towards, "I'll take what I can get and keep my head down, if it means I can afford groceries." Then, they'll be able to hire back senior specialists at a massive discount.
I work in healthcare as a nurse. I can't see AI doing this. Esp. with ACA satisfaction scores. I still have patients with old flip-phones that don't really know how to turn them on or make a call.
exactly this happens constantly as tech advances we both find new stuff to do and things like universal income pop up as efficient ways of keeping people happy and healthy