this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Not to agree with him but.. They already are and have been for a while?
He is desperately rhetorically flailing, trying to pitch the idea that temporary demand in construction of data centers = job creation.
Despite that the entire point of an AI data center is to automate away 100x to 100,000x as many jobs, permanently, as will actually exist for maybe 18 months, to build the thing.
Its a nakedly bad faith line of bullshit, literally insultingly stupid to anyone that's taken a year of macro econ.
Even if you build the datacenters, ... the amount of power needed for them would be roughly equivalent to building the entire electrical power infrastructure of Germany, and that would need to be done in 18 months.
Conpletely impossible, that's like 10 years of the world's current production rate of power transformers, in 18 months.
These guys would need a top down command economy and 5 year plans to do this, and they do not have that, so they're basically just pretending they do. When it becomes evident that they were bullshitting, they'll try to say 'well thats how things should have been the whole time, with me in charge of everything!'
Delusional.
plus the trades will be saturated in the schools if they tried this and would depress wages.
I mean yeah, it would/could just be the inverse of what millenials/zoomers grew up with: 'you have to ~~go to college~~ learn a skilled trade if you want to have a decent living!'
Hard to forecast precisely how strong the effect would be, but absolutely yeah, if a bunch of people flood into a specific category of labor... they will on aggregate depress their own wages.
... This is why the luddites smashed things.
Partially because the machines actually produced inferior output products, mostly because their proliferation caused mass unemployment/immiseration.
A society that wants to technologically progress must also socially progress, otherwise, you're just building a tinder box.
While I sort of agree with you that that is his angle, service jobs that aren't easily automatable will continue to climb in the "job stability and pay rate" category until the world figures out how to deal with Baumol's Cost Disease:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
What do you mean 'deal with Baulmol's cost disease'?
You mean general, broad inflation, right?
You're worried that non-automatable low wages jobs will continue to be non-automatable low wage jobs, but slightly less low wage?
You're worried that jobs tend to need to be done by people who can afford to be alive?