Job openings are still very high, ~30% higher than the average for the last few decades.

We just use AI to justify doing all the same recession behaviors while making it sound like innovation

- not hiring this year > AI is making us productive!

- no wage growth > AI means we don’t need to raise salaries

- layoffs > with AI we can do more with less people

- spending less on offsites, work perks etc > we really need that budget for AI

- not spending money on that new business tool > AI can do it instead

My own personal example working at a small govt contractor in which we had a team of 12 working on an app for 10 years. We lost the re-bid to a smaller team (5 to 6)/budget using AI. We have been informed going forward the company will be following the competition (small teams using AI and bidding like the competition via smaller budget needs).

This impacts vulnerable people looking for jobs and makes job search highly inefficient.

I guess my point is that even if you think AI's displacement of workforce is vastly overblown, be scared of 5% labor impacts.

But I think right now there is a dreadful perfect storm of sorts.

- It's not just LLMs, the social/political environment just doesn't favor risk taking, which means less opportunities.

- The US will be alienated from all its good trade partners for a decade plus at best. They'll still do trade, but the era of relying on US companies, or relying on a stable US consumer base is over.

- The dollar will decline, by how much I don't know but it will. Less buying power for American companies.

- Education is in shambles, and skilled & educated immigrants who can leave the US are doing so in droves. Brain drain will be real, the pipeline to replace them will take a generation, and that is if it was fixed today.

- Historically, there is a natural re-balancing of powers that happens as a result of people getting upset and organizing change or some sort. But the ability of the population to organize meaningfully is curtailed because tech, moderation and surveillance capitalism.

- I won't say too much about the current admin, but things are really scary. Not as in "i'm upset about this" or "so much for democracy" but more like "i'm scared for my life" levels of scary.

- Erosion of trust is huge, you don't take risks if you don't have some trust. consumer spending, loans, business spending,etc... and the erosion of trust is fundamental and hard to repair. Trust is also heavily asymmetric, it costs a lot to obtain, but it takes little to lose it. Once lost, gaining it again is usually orders of magnitude more costly.

let me stop there for brevity, but my point was how the US has never truly been in a situation where the economy is doing bad, and the politics is untenable. You have people who are in power and well incentivized to make things even worse, you can cancel elections and deploy troops better if things are really and truly "bad". When people stop having their basic needs met (and I don't mean health care and affordable houses - but food and shelter), I'm concerned there will not be many ways left where the rule of law and peace can be sustained.

It's one of those things, like "you can't unspill the milk". If things get as bad as I fear, right now, today is as good as it will ever get in the US. What scares me is that Americans aren't terrified enough, those that know better are in catatonic state of "what can i possibly do about it?" - and I mean all Americans regardless of politics.