This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Imagine that millions lose their jobs due to AI. Is there a way for those who have lost their jobs to effectively declare war on AI?”

Well, that’s pointless.

People will not lose their jobs because of AI but because corporations save money on labour costs.

AI is a tool, and the argument that ammosexuals love to barf up applies here: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

AI doesn’t kill jobs. Capitalists kill jobs because they can and are incentivized by it within a system that worships personal wealth above all.

We, as citizens, kill jobs through our apathy and through our empowerment of those who prioritize their material benefits at the expense of the many they can exploit.

We bring this upon ourselves by not having a coherent social development roadmap. We allow our societies to grow by chaos rather than responsible systems management strategies.

We empower our leaders through a reactionary process of social development rather than a strategically reasoned and proactive process.

Sadly, authoritarian regimes are far more successful along this vector than democracies because their decision-making is limited to small, centralized powers.

This is part of the reason that the public has been increasingly questioning the value of democracy while looking toward authoritarian models to solve our problems for us.

Sadly, the solution for democracies to be far more effective in mobilizing social development in a coherent and unified direction is entirely contingent upon the quality of the education the public receives.

For instance, the transition to a fully automated society is an inevitability. There is no point in resisting it. We would all be much better off by leaning into it and demanding we adapt our systems to manage the transition better so that we can mitigate collateral damage.

Instead, we are experiencing a chaotic transition led by random powers following personal visions motivated by personal benefit rather than social good.

If our education systems provided a more comprehensive insight into social development, much of the public would be engaged in the political process in strategic rather than reactionary ways.

We would be more unified as a people in identifying trends and developing coherent strategies for successfully managing the challenges we face.

Instead, we are burdened by a dearth of education that reduces a population into cheerleading camps driven by emotionality that can be characterized as juvenile reactions against authorities. Considering how democracy means each person is a governing authority member, this is beyond an asinine apprehension of how one’s government works or how it can be made effective.

Democracy demands engagement, yet our apprehension of engagement is limited to how many likes one gets on one’s post. That’s not even remotely resembling engagement.

That’s like claiming every celebrity walking a red carpet and waving at the throngs is socializing with friends.

Sadly, part of the problem has been deliberately cultivated by the capitalists who want us distracted enough from the sausage-making process to allow them to remake human society into their image.

They have been succeeding remarkably within the U.S. as it has become a dystopian corporatocracy that prioritizes gun sales over the lives of children and billionaire profits over the healthcare needs of citizens.

The public has been so conditioned to prioritize profit at all costs that they will fight to preserve a billionaire’s right to kill people for profit.

We can’t govern ourselves in a democracy if all of our time is focused on survival and profit-churning. Most of us don’t care to be involved in the decision-making process, which would be okay if we could trust our information systems to prioritize informing people over chasing profits.

Instead, we have media that has become a singular, massive entity of public influence predicated upon churning conflict to maintain attention justified by revenue increases.

Instead of informing the public on issues of criticality to the future of the people, we have this kind of incendiary rhetoric from an attention whore indulging in shock stupidity to justify their salary increases by ginning up the rubes to create conflict.

Less than one hundred years ago, this kind of crap would be shut down immediately because it would be considered a precursor to war.

Instead, the attention-seeking mentality justified by the profit (and power-seeking) motive does not care about the casualties created by irresponsible language.

The value of human life has been downgraded, if it ever mattered to society, to a level that’s no greater than the Roman arenas when people were killed for entertainment.

If we don’t start asserting some standards on coherent behaviour that cultivates the best of us as a species, we will continue careening headlong into chaos.

Humans can take only so much abuse before they break. Everyone can break, and people like Watters are playing with fire. There’s no way he will be safe again crossing the border into Canada because of his disgusting language. Some might argue that any aggressive response against him is unjustifiable, and that may be valid, but it doesn’t change how humans behave when aggrieved. I’m confident few Canadians will give him a warm reception for his remarks if he ever crosses the border. At best, at least from my perspective, he’s earned a bloody nose for his garbage.

This kind of bullying rhetoric is toxic to society and is a betrayal of the social contract.

The acceptability of this nonsense and its prevalence is why we have no coherent strategy for managing our transition into a fully automated society. The acceptability of this kind of incendiary distraction from critical information the public needs to make proper decisions to minimize casualties in our transition will create unnecessary casualties. This kind of thinking is what permits bigotry to determine outcomes that dramatically affect lives.

This kind of nonsense is why this question exists in so many forms everywhere and why I’ve already answered this question in several forms by now.

The issues are not complex, but they are made so because we’re not talking about them where we need to be talking about them. We’re allowing jackasses to troll for reactions in “respectable mainstream media” that we would mute and block online if they were individuals and not expensively dressed and cosmetically pampered media personalities.

We are being betrayed by the Fourth Estate each and every day — and to the degree that a majority of the world now believes the U.S. is a tragic case of end times for a nation that has become so corrupt, it can never be trusted for leadership in the world again. However, anyone may parse the 2024 election, and one cannot ignore the role of the media in installing a monster in the top job for the nation.

If you genuinely want to declare war against the loss of jobs, then you need to take it to those who benefit from displacing jobs. You need to start pressuring the billionaires and the corporations they benefit from while ripping off the public through tax avoidance schemes.

Instead of war, you should demand responsible management for an unavoidably dramatic and traumatic societal transition by insisting on the only sane solution to this period in human history, UBI, as a starting point toward sanity in our social development.

The worst thing about where the world is at in this transition is that the next four years are being defined by a parasitic presence seeking to empower further those who are disempowering the working class while replacing workers with automated solutions to toss millions out onto the streets to fend for themselves.

We must stop blaming AI for job losses because it’s just a gun in the hands of mercenaries.