Job Seekers Fear AI Replacement and Lack of Government Support
34 posts across 12 communities in the last 30 days; 18% from Hacker News.
“In the near future I think you're fine. So much of the doom is predicated on the idea that because AI can automate something that it will Bro I know people making 75k a year to do work that could've been automated 15 years ago. And that's before you gonisder it can't automate…”
“Just my $0.02: I’m not a socialist (more to the left), but I do agree with many of the points listed in the article.Taking a part of the author’s argument one step further, I believe that any society requiring the violent oppression of its members (creation of underclasses…”
“I mean I like the spirit but not maybe the execution. Social security? Well just raise the phaseout income somewhat gradually and that would take care of a whole lot. One to one humans to robots is too messy and quickly becomes irrelevant and unknowable. Besides that’s just…”
Individuals express concern that AI and automation will displace workers in various trades, leading to widespread unemployment and potential societal unrest. They criticize the government's inaction regarding universal basic income or other support systems for those affected.
SOURCES (60)
“physical labour will still be a t hing as a robot will be more expensive than minimum wage. [re: Everyone’s asking whether AI will replace developers. How is the economy supposed to work if that happens across office jobs?]”
“it doesn't- what are you gonna do about it? [re: Everyone’s asking whether AI will replace developers. How is the economy supposed to work if that happens across office jobs?]”
“I disagree. Everyone should just own some capital. The economical gains from the AI go towards shareholders which one can trivially become one. If AGI can replace all or most knowledge workers, then the dividends per share from anthropic is going to be insane [re: Everyone’s asking whether AI will replace developers. How is the economy supposed to work if that happens across office jobs?]”
“In the near future I think you're fine. So much of the doom is predicated on the idea that because AI can automate something that it will Bro I know people making 75k a year to do work that could've been automated 15 years ago. And that's before you gonisder it can't automate everything I think long term compliance work will stagnate but business analysis and management reporting will thrive simply because there will be so much more data [re: Are we gonna see an accounting boom?]”
“> since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid forIs the post-scarcity in the room with us right now? Right now, the only things that AI is making non-scarce for regular people is making cheap toys and doing menial tasks. But it doesn't put food on the table or cash in their pockets. So where is all this free value from automating everything going to go? The same place it always has, right to the very top.I could understand seeing this argument 5 years ago. But now”
“They’re gonna kill us all off anyway, so you may as well be able to afford to eat while you’re alive. [re: The new class of unemployed, the overly educated unemployed.]”
“Doesn’t matter, AI is going to kill us all [re: The new class of unemployed, the overly educated unemployed.]”
“Maybe...but maybe you will be dead because everyone is dead and the robot apocolypse already happened :P [re: what happens after ai starts mass taking jobs?]”
Agenda 2030 [re: what happens after ai starts mass taking jobs?]
“UBI would be a drop in the bucket anyways. Either share the equity of automation with everyone, or bust. Expecting that the utopia will be achieved with the 99% being devoid of the ability to produce any value is a pipe dream. [re: Luddites and antis are getting louder and louder and might halt AI completely]”
“Why would you train something to replace you for free. [re: AI is taking our jobs, and yall are training it]”
“Because you still needed humans to perform the new imrpoved tasks. Horse drivers to car drivers. Now no drivers. With AI replacing intellectual jobs and robotics replacing manual jobs... What's funny is you don't even need that... you just need to increase worker effeciency with these tools which will lead to 20% unemployment and an economic doom loop... [re: AI Economic Doom Loop]”
“This is based on multiple stories and I can provide references if you would like but data confirms we have lost an estimated 6 million jobs to outsourcing last 20 years and 1.7 million in the last five years to AI for 7.7 million jobs total gone forever. submitted by /u/Deadinside4206966 [link] [comments]”
“Yeah, there will be a rude awakening when the bubble that the anti-ai people are living in bursts. They all drank human exceptionalist kool-aid. Your worries are all legit, so you should maintain some side projects using AI and such to keep yourself in the game. Don't let these redditors misguide you. [re: No AI at work at all, should I be worried?]”
“When that happens, everyone is unemployed overnight. [re: No AI at work at all, should I be worried?]”
“This is the only sensible advice. Grind it out now, get money, buy assets. Once AI automates all jobs the world will be divided between those who have assets and those who don't, as well as those who have good citizenships and those who don't. [re: 5 YOE as a Software Dev, thinking about jumping ship]”
? [re: Bitcoin Miners Built an Empire. AI Wants the Power.]
“Future generations are going to lose so many skills and we will be rendered useless. Best case scenario the AI allows us a place on the planet to essentially be a pet they might put something in the water to stop is reproducing and eventually all die peacefully Alternatively it nukes us 😂”
“Since AI and billionaire companies are taking all the the jobs, when do we get free money? If I don’t have a job by 6pm today i’m gonna start protests. submitted by /u/FinancialJet [link] [comments]”
“Sadly I think you’re right. I’d be curious to see how people would answer my question though. Because I don’t think it’s a matter of if, but of when AI will start replacing jobs on a mass scale. And I think our government needs to be ready before that happens or else we will experience “policies written in blood” all over again.”
“Hi, just wanted to share some ideas I've been having. This is a thought experiment. I'm interested in anyone pulling these concepts apart - exposing flaws etc. Before you ask, no AI was used in the compiling or thought process of any of this. I simply used the numbering as it was a way to organize my thoughts into a logical flow. Also, a caveat - under this system there would still be welfare for those who need it (those who are incapacitated, mentally unwell, have intense caring duties,”
“Just my $0.02: I’m not a socialist (more to the left), but I do agree with many of the points listed in the article.Taking a part of the author’s argument one step further, I believe that any society requiring the violent oppression of its members (creation of underclasses, racism, misogyny, anti child behavior, slavery, stigma of poverty, etc) in order to exist is a terrible system that should be abolished. We cannot know the alternative immediately, and discovering it will be very difficult bu”
“> Please explain exactly how all humanity could be wiped out.Many, many people are slipping through social welfare cracks and suffering as we speak because the cost of fuel is rising[0] and we’re ostensibly helping one another and living-well. People are not durable, and not adaptive in the face of threats to “substrate” that we’ve mostly taken for granted. We are paying (in the small, in the scope of humanity) for tolls that we’ve rung up. Just less than 4000 people in Europe died[1] because th”
“We are about to witness one of the greatest collapses in history, worse than the great depression and the financial crisis. White collar jobs are going away at a rapid pace People will lose their jobs, then run through their savings, then sell their investments which will tank the stock market… then the mortgage and loan defaults come in and cause a domino effect Then they lose their home or can’t make rent, get kicked to the curb. Their families will then starve to death Just go into healthcare”
“The answer to your final question is yes. Much of this is due to AI (especially in your case). Any job built on intelligence/data/numbers/facts/code is no longer valued and will largely be subsumed by AI. Globalization isn't even a relevant threat anymore; in my industry, AI is already supplanting the lower-rung outsourced jobs. A non sequitur, but are you neurodivergent by chance? As an ND myself I'm picking up on those vibes in your post. That comes with its own challenges when job hun”
“Wow I can’t believe I’ve never even thought about the loss of government income from robots. I agree, MAKE ROBOTS PAY TAXES!!”
Can we just remove the salary cap??? There shouldn't be a ceiling.
“I mean I like the spirit but not maybe the execution. Social security? Well just raise the phaseout income somewhat gradually and that would take care of a whole lot. One to one humans to robots is too messy and quickly becomes irrelevant and unknowable. Besides that’s just “taxes on corporations” under another sales pitch. Which again: good. But is the problem with the current system!”
“Actually, this is the easy(er) part. There is already a unit of work for AI, and that's the token. That's a measure of cost, not value. If set of tokens "A" makes a robot that makes widgets earning money and set of tokens "B" makes a robot that, um, does some personal service, many disparities result rather quickly. The king quickly gets all the tokens.”
“Actually, this is the easy(er) part. There is already a unit of work for AI, and that's the token. Beyond that, you can go even deeper and just tax the energy use by AI data centers, which I think is probably the way to go since it will incentivize efficient AI. Now the question you were really asking is how do you find an equiavlend unit of work for humans that you can then use as an exchange rate for a token? And really, I think thats not a useful question. The better question is what'”
“> If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linearThat totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it sig”
“Is there any work being done to find out whether or not the strong anti-AI sentiment in U.S. workforce isn’t psyops?There hasn’t been a wave of unemployments as previously thought of (the recent ones seem more related to inflation) because AI actually seems to create work to manage it, and buying tokens thoughtlessly isn’t cost effective for companies, or providers.So it seems it’s only beneficial for people and companies to use AI, and optimize it for productivity, right? Or am I missing someth”
“Curious to see what folks will be doing. I anticipate the stock market crashing as everyone’s trying to pull out as soon as they run out of savings. Tons of folks are going to default on their mortgages and loans in general. And it won’t just be our field, once software engineers go, so will every other white collar job I know folks here love cheering on AI displacing everyone and get a sick pleasure out of knowing we are “cooked” but people are going to starve and die or commit suicide in masse”
“The tax code is based on human labor, what happens when there is no more human labor? It's all robots and AI doing the job? That's the real meat and potatoes. If people don't have money, they don't purchase. If people don't purchase, companies don't make revenue. If companies don't make revenue, they close down. In the next 24 months we are going to witness some extreme and severe economic pains.”
“Something I've been thinking about as I'm looking for a job and the last time I was AI was barely even usable and people didn't seem to have anywhere near as many issues getting an interview. But now, in 2026, I'm finding posters unresponsive and it seems the few legit jobs out there are so few compared to those same roles just a few years ago. We know that AI has taken a lot of entry level and low to mid level or administrative jobs, however, it doesn't appear that there are”
“What would be needed to give tax breaks for incentivising domestic full time jobs to push back on outsourcing jobs overseas and to ai? submitted by /u/Suitable-Permit472 [link] [comments]”
Thats not really how the economy works, but thanks. The economy is a über-complex system for handling supply-demand. Demand is generated by humans desiring things (food, shelter, furniture, elecricity, medicine, etc.). Supply…
“>Inequalities have been growing for a while nowI never said it hasn't.>either we have less and less smart people, or it just does not work like you think it worksHow do you think I think it works?All I said was that AI will increase inequality as smart people will use it as an amplifier of their skills and intelect to get wealthier. The rampant inequality we already had before AI is mostly due to government fiscal policies revolving around endless currency inflation increasing assets prices of a”
“Given how inequality was less after the various robber baron crackdowns leading perhaps up to 1980 or so, I think the question is if the poorest 80% will band together enough to make enough of a pushback. Though, as you say, I'm not super hopeful on this, because the poorest 80% seems to be against genAI data centers, but half willing to vote for people who invariably give handouts to or cut taxes on the wealthy. (Or greater than that, given the popularity of doing those things among all str”
“Oh absolutely but the average American has no clue what that can mean for them beyond AI is !!!stealing their jobs!!! These slides are designed to maximize profits while installing fear for the big boys to save them from. They don't understand it's not a design flaw”
“In the world where ageism, sexism, racism etc were already playing havoc now comes humanism which basically means if you are human you are not employable and AI gets more preference than humans! Tell me it is not true and set your reminders to come back to this post after 5 years. submitted by /u/notyourregularninja [link] [comments]”
“As a former IT engineer automating as an SRE... All of the jobs will dry out... Labor is all that is left while AI and everyone tries to squeeze every dime out of every last soul, while simultaneously rent prices stay the same and boomers want every last drop they can get, while large corporations drown us all out to the last drop and the economy fails to do anything while we fight useless wars for Israel. Everything in this economy will implode on itself. Nothing will stop it. You have”
“AI eats all of the service jobs. whole lot of college boys who are only skilled at computers now need to compete for labor jobs or truck driving gigs.the STEM guys I referred to burnt out hard but had the money, gumpstion, and ties to the community to say fuck it, let's buy out this coffee shop and make it work.I gather it's been a hard go for them -- post-COVID business recovery is rough -- but now they're making it work.meanwhile most of the posters here will be starting back at square one in”
“Nah, employers are holding wages down due to interest rates and the cost of money. AI is the excuse. Workers have no bargaining power for higher wages without a union, so they are powerless to demand higher wages unless they are in a unique situation. Same reason productivity is going up, rolling layoffs requiring those who remain to do more with less, which increases productivity metrics. Short term profits are being prioritized over on boarding, developing, and training fresh/junior folks.Mich”
“[ChatGPT] ★ 1/5 (v1.2026.244) — Stop using ai before we use all The water on earth and then we will realize that we can’t eat money”
“Three years ago I asked the same question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327092), and the landscape has changed since then. Just say that even the most AI skepticism people will have to admit that with recent models, even open source ones, LLM is already a valuable intelligence resource, at least in the right hands. Of course we are nowhere near AGI yet, but no theorem can assert that AI will not be at least as good as human; neuro-networks can fit arbitrarily complex function. If human”
“Maybe, or maybe the Fed would just print more money to pump up inflation to offset the 1.3% market deflation event.”
“So essentially, it replaces government systems. Possibly no worse than the human versions.”
“Humans: transform everything required for civilization to function into digitized currency and utilities. Also as fast as possible create independent entit(ies) with power over everything in this space with little oversight or control of them. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for us.”
“> human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions ...True.> ... AI can't be allowed to be a decision makerNon sequitur.Part 2 only follows from the Part 1 if you can demonstrate that AI makes more errors, or more severe errors, than humans in the identical situation.And for those situations, I agree with you.But there are already many situations where the AI is making fewer errors than humans, and for those situations, it would be unethical to exclude AI (see Part 1).”
“what i tried to ask you is, what you mean by this."“what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”."What is the point you are trying to make which goes in this direction? Like is making AI jobs so cheap that the economy is collapsing or do you mean thatn AI will not bring any value.These are two suggestions from my side which are complelty contrare to each other.”
“Your points sound more knee jerk than not.What reason do you have that a AI is dumb? It can do a LOT of things today and is already making real jobs for real humans obsolete.A lot of humans write A lot of different things about AI, including AIs taking over the world, AIs being the future etc.Why they keep stealing? To stay up-to-date but the new big approaches are:1. Real human feedback loop of millions of people using it daily out of free will2. Reinforcement Learning (the big breakthrough tod”
“https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2026-09-05/waymos-expanding-autonomous-robotaxi-service-has-supporters-cheeing-its-expansion I know this post is going to end up being flamed, but some of you still don’t believe Waymo cars will replace all of us sooner than later. 29 different organizations advocated expanding Waymo’s expansion in California. Groups noted that Waymo cars are safer for female passengers, as well as bicyclists. While some of your riders may say they don’t trust the au”