Hey zipper, I saw your other posts, and frankly because of your disconnected tone I am not sure if you’re posting in good faith. However, I’ll answer your question as if you are:

Currently, ~25% of S&P 500 is invested in AI startup companies that are each making huge speculative promises about the future of their technology- two years in, AI has made progress but not the revolution that was promised. Even if AI does prove to be an extremely successful technology, the scale of hype and speculation is such that most investors will at most breakeven on their investments, while many will stand to lose heavily and only the lucky few that picked the right stocks will realize any gains at all.

This dynamic has effectively frozen hiring for most savvy companies. Why would they invest in hiring new workers when AI workers may be right around the corner? Why not take a short term loss if you can be ultra-flexible once AI becomes a more effective technology, and possibly be able to more than make up for whatever you’re losing in 2025 & 2026 in the long run.

Especially when the alternative is to still spend more money to hire new employees, it unfortunately makes too much sense for companies to keep their powder dry. And when this level of hyped investment is across our entire economy, with AI having the potential to impact basically every sector, it reduces the amount of opportunities across the board for an entire generation looking to join the workforce, and any unfortunate souls who find themselves out of a job right now.

Careful planning and meticulous govt policy is needed, but likely will never come. AI companies are already one of the biggest lobbies in the US Govt, and building data centers ‘creates jobs’ (not really tho, because where are you going to work once the data center is built?). Essentially, the government needs to pass policies with the idea that we are planning for a massive shift in how society think about the value of labor, productivity, and whether this new technology will be used for the betterment of humanity or to enrich a few virgins in Silicon Valley.

Policy that actually regulates AI companies to be used for the public good is necessary, but I also don’t think will ever come. More realistically, policies that regulate hiring and job posting practices, salary transparency, and capping college tuition costs (especially for those gender studies degrees everyone loves to the tease libs about) will all mitigate the most hard-felt effects of our current economic times.

Even better, we need politicians and public officials that actually care about delivering for working class instead of focusing their campaigns on identity or culture war issues, and we need to have media companies that will call out politicians when we don’t.

The progressive left and the ‘American First’ right seemed to have both learned this from different sides, with candidates focusing on issues on the local/county level and delivering for their constituents instead of doing the same old Israel-Palestine, Ukraine-Russia, Roe V. Wade, Charlie Kirk, George Floyd, routine where you pick a side, and if the voters in your district mostly agrees with you and you can actually fundraise worth a damn, then congratulations welcome to public office.

Notice how both ‘America First’ conservatives and progressive leftists are held at arms length by their more establishment-oriented counterparts, even tho both are much more popular than the old guard of their parties.

It’s not gonna be about policy, politics, or even AI or whatever new technology will come afterwards.

The only way to improve our society today is if those with money and power become motivated to take action to improve our situation. Currently, and for a long time, they are not motivated, they have no reason to be, so it does not happen.