Important Takeaways:
- …We live at a time when the development of artificial intelligence is growing at an exponential rate. AI can already perform lots of tasks better and far more efficiently than humans can, and it appears to be just a matter of time before AI can do virtually everything better and far more efficiently than humans can. So once we get to that stage, why will the elite need us? Throughout human history, the wealthy have needed the labor of the poor. But if AI will soon be able to do almost all of the labor that we have been doing, what use will we be?
- The elite certainly don’t need our money, because they already control almost all of the wealth.
- In America today, the top 50 percent own 97.5 percent of all the wealth and the bottom 50 percent own just 2.5 percent of all the wealth…
- The richest half of American families owned about 97.5% of national wealth as of the end of 2024, while the bottom half held 2.5%, according to the latest numbers from the Federal Reserve.
- Much of the country is just barely surviving from month to month, and meanwhile the percentage of the wealth that is owned by the top 0.1 percent has risen to a brand-new all-time record high…
- The top 0.1% expanded their share of total wealth to a record 13.8% at the year’s end, up from 13% in the same period of 2020.
- For a long time, the rich needed the poor to work in their factories and run their businesses.
- In fact, Bill Gates says that humans will soon not be needed “for most things”…
- Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed “for most things” in the world, says Bill Gates.
- That’s what the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist told comedian Jimmy Fallon during an interview on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” in February. At the moment, expertise remains “rare,” Gates explained, pointing to human specialists we still rely on in many fields, including “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.”
- But “with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace — great medical advice, great tutoring,” Gates said.
- We are creating ultra-intelligent entities that can absorb vast quantities of information in the blink of an eye.
- Gates believes that we are entering an era of “free intelligence” in which many doctors, lawyers and teachers will simply become obsolete…
- In other words, the world is entering a new era of what Gates called “free intelligence” in an interview last month with Harvard University professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks. The result will be rapid advances in AI-powered technologies that are accessible and touch nearly every aspect of our lives, Gates has said, from improved medicines and diagnoses to widely available AI tutors and virtual assistants.
- “It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,” Gates told Brooks.
- Alarmingly, one recent study discovered that lots of jobs are already being eliminated…
- Researchers from Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research, and Imperial College London Business School studied 1,388,711 job posts on a major (but undisclosed) global freelance work marketplace from July 2021 to July 2023, and found that demand for such automation-prone jobs had fallen 21% just eight months after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
- Writing jobs were most affected, followed by software, app, and web development work, as well as engineering jobs. The large language models that underpin tools like ChatGPT are trained on large amounts of text to predict the most likely next word in a sequence. The model forms a many-dimensional map of words, phrases, meanings, and contexts, and in doing so develops a remarkable grasp on language.
- It has been estimated that 60 percent of all jobs in advanced economies are at risk of eventually being eliminated by AI.
- So what will all of those people do?
- Already, we are seeing very alarming signs on the fringes of our society. Homelessness is at the highest level ever recorded, and many food banks around the country have never seen more demand than they are seeing right now.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Trump shared the figure during Monday’s Cabinet meeting at the White House.
- “First of all, many companies are now moving into the United States. They’re coming back. Some of them left us from many years ago, decades ago, and they’re all – it seems they’re all coming back,” he said.
- “We have probably identified maybe $4 trillion worth of companies moving back or going to move back. Many of them have announced. It’s going to be tremendous jobs, high-paying jobs, too,” he added.
- Trump noted the semiconductor industry in particular and criticized the CHIPS and Sciences Act of 2022, which he said did not incentivize domestic microchip production as it provided large subsidies to companies already worth billions.
- “You gave billions of dollars to companies that already have many billions of dollars that just… said, ‘Thank you very much.’ It was no incentive for them to use it,” Trump said of the CHIPS Act. “But what is good is the tariffs will make it so that they want to come back. That’s why they’re coming back.”
- Trump stressed that domestically produced goods do not face tariffs, which is an incentive for companies to manufacture in the United States.
- The president also touted automobile investment announcements in the United States with his return to office:
- Honda is coming in with a massive plant to Indiana. But there are many plants that are happening, and literally, some have started already. General Motors is already redoing plants that were half abandoned, or they have plants that weren’t being fully utilized… They and others are going to be making parts and other things in those plants so that it’s one-stop shopping, finally.
- Plans for the latest auto investment in the U.S. were revealed on Monday when CNBC reported Hyundai, a South Korea-based company, was set to “announce a $20 billion investment in U.S. on shoring that includes a $5 billion steel plant in Louisiana.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- What Is Going To Happen To Our Society As AI And Robots Take Most Of Our Jobs?
- For years we have been warned that AI and robots would revolutionize the workforce, and now that day has officially arrived.
- For example, Amazon has been using various types of simple robots to perform certain tasks for years, and now highly sophisticated humanoid robots are being deployed right alongside normal human workers…
- Designed by Agility Robotics, which Amazon has invested in as part of its Industrial Innovation Fund, Digit is only the latest of a string of warehouse robots the company has introduced over the last several years. However, most of the other warehouse robots have been cart-shaped or robotic arms, not humanoid like Digit.
- Digit costs about $10 to $12 an hour to operate right now, based on its price and lifespan, but the company predicts that cost to drop to $2 to $3 an hour plus overhead software costs as production ramps up, Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton told Bloomberg.
- So this trend is only going to accelerate during the years ahead.
- In fact, Goldman Sachs is projecting that AI could take as many as 300 million full-time jobs during the years ahead, and most of them will be white collar jobs…
- As many as 300 million full-time jobs around the world could be automated in some way by the newest wave of artificial intelligence that has spawned platforms like ChatGPT, according to Goldman Sachs economists.
- They predicted in a report Sunday that 18% of work globally could be computerized, with the effects felt more deeply in advanced economies than emerging markets.
- That’s partly because white-collar workers are seen to be more at risk than manual laborers. Administrative workers and lawyers are expected to be most affected, the economists said, compared to the “little effect” seen on physically demanding or outdoor occupations, such as construction and repair work.
- On Friday, the BLS told us that the Establishment Survey indicated that the U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs last month, but historically the Household Survey has been much more accurate, and it showed that the U.S. economy actually lost 683,000 jobs last month…
- And as I shared with my paid subscribers a few days ago, the BLS report also showed that the number of full-time jobs in the U.S. dropped by 1.531 million during the month of December…
- Meanwhile, bankruptcies are surging all over the country.
- In fact, the number of bankruptcy filings in the United States in 2023 was 18 percent higher than it was in 2022…
- But what we are experiencing at this moment is not even worth comparing to what is coming.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Banks Terminate 60,000 Workers In One Of The Bleakest Years For The Industry Since 2008
- The collapse of three US regional banks – First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank – marked some of the largest failures in the banking system since 2008. Central banks contained the “mini-crisis” earlier this year with forced interventions and the mega-merger of Credit Suisse and UBS. Despite the interventions, global banks still axed the most jobs since the global financial crisis.
- A new report from the Financial Times shows twenty of the world’s largest banks slashed 61,905 jobs in 2023, a move to protect profit margins in a period of high interest rates amid a slump in dealmaking and equity and debt sales. This compared with the 140,000 lost during the GFC of 2007-08.
- “There is no stability, no investment, no growth in most banks — and there are likely to be more job cuts,” said Lee Thacker, owner of financial services headhunting firm Silvermine Partners.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Trucking giant Yellow shuts down: The 99-year-old company which has almost 30,000 staff and 12,000 big-rigs ceases operations immediately – despite $700M COVID bailout
- Trucking giant Yellow collapsed on Sunday, ceasing operations immediately and leaving some 30,000 workers without jobs.
- The closure is the biggest in terms of jobs and revenue in the U.S. trucking industry, according to The Wall Street Journal – which first reported its shutdown.
- The company, which received $700 million in federal COVID relief funds in 2020, is preparing to file for bankruptcy and is in talks to sell off all or parts of the business.
- The nearly 100-year-old firm is known for its competitive pricing and has more than 12,000 trucks shipping freight across the US for brands including Walmart and Home Depot.
- But in recent years it has struggled under the weight of debt and had a highly contentious relationship with the Teamsters union: on Sunday, each side blamed the other.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Revelations 18:23 ‘For the merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.’
Important Takeaways:
- Brace for Economic Shockwaves and Empty Shelves as Railroad Strike and New Energy Spike Could Hit Hard
- More than 100,000 railroad workers are threatening to walk off their jobs this week over worker pay, health care, and other issues.
- Unions are now negotiating with the nation’s biggest freight railroads, including Union Pacific, CSX, Norfolk Southern, BNSF, and Kansas City Southern, and have announced eight of the 13 tentative agreements needed to avert a strike.
- The deals that have been announced so far have closely followed the Presidential Emergency Board’s recommendations that called for 24% raises over five years, $5,000 in bonuses and one additional paid leave day a year. But the two biggest unions representing conductors and engineers have been holding out because they want the railroads to go beyond those recommendations and address some of their concerns about strict attendance policies and working conditions.
- If a deal is not made, then passenger service, supply chains, and jobs could be affected, costing the economy an estimated $2 billion per day.
- Bloomberg explains the impact on the supply chain would be huge because trains transport 28% of all U.S. freight.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Proverbs 22:8 “Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity, and the rod of his fury will fail.”
Important Takeaways:
- Trudeau Goes ‘Totalitarian’, Threatens to Freeze Truckers’ Bank Accounts and Destroy Their Jobs
- Trudeau invoked emergency powers, allowing the government to seize cars and trucks, suspend their insurance, and even freeze truckers’ personal and corporate bank accounts.
- Trudeau threatened truckers saying, “You don’t want to end up losing your license, end up with a criminal record, which will impact your job, your livelihood, even your ability to travel internationally, including to the U.S.”
- The Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the government had not met the standard for invoking the Emergencies Act. Reuter’s reports the Act is only intended to deal with threats to “sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.”
- Heather Wilson, co-founder of the U.S.-based crowd-funding site GiveSendGo is fighting back. “This is probably going to be the fight of my life,” Wilson told Faithwire News. “We’re going to continue to fight for freedom. This is absolutely insane that governments think they can step in and trample on people’s God-given rights.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
(Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc is planning to create 10,000 more jobs in the next few years in Bellevue, Washington, the e-commerce giant said on Friday.
The company has been setting up new offices across U.S. cities on the back of a meteoric rise in its business, thanks to a surge in online orders during coronavirus-induced lockdowns.
Amazon had earlier said it would create 15,000 jobs in Bellevue, located 10 miles from its Seattle headquarters.
In April and May, Amazon hired for 175,000 jobs ranging from warehouse staff to delivery drivers to keep up with the demand.
(Reporting by Nilanjana Basu in Bengaluru)
(Reuters) – Despite “a lot of strength in the economy,” millions of U.S. workers displaced from restaurant, travel, and similar jobs will struggle to find new employment and need steady support from the government, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Thursday, warning a full jobs recovery could take years.
“There is a particular part of the economy which involves getting people together and feeding them, flying them around the country, having them sleep in hotels, entertaining them,” Powell said in online remarks to the Fed’s annual economic symposium. “That part of the economy will find it very difficult to recover…That is millions of people who are going to struggle to find work. We need to stay with those people….We are looking at long tail of probably a couple of years at least.”
(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
GENEVA (Reuters) – Global leaders called for a comprehensive approach to counter the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which International Labor Organization chief Guy Ryder said on Wednesday had plunged the world of work into “unprecedented crisis”.
“Let’s be clear: it’s not a choice between health or jobs and the economy. They are interlinked: we will either win on all fronts or fail on all fronts,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told an ILO summit that will be addressed by dozens of heads of state and government via recorded messages.
World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the summit the world had a special duty to protect the millions of healthcare workers at the front line of the crisis and suffering increasing cases of infection and death.
“Together we have a duty to protect those who protect us,” he said.
The outlook for the global labor market in the second half of 2020 is “highly uncertain” and the forecast recovery will not be enough for employment to return to pre-pandemic levels this year, the ILO said last week.
The U.N. agency said the fall in global working hours was “significantly worse than previously estimated” in the first half of the year.
(Reporting by Emma Farge and Michael Shields; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
