Following the announcement by BT (privatised UK telecommunications giant and sponsor of prestigious sporting gigs despite their crap customer service record) announced that 5k jobs would go due to their tech developments. In other words if you thought their customer service was shite to date – watch this space.
Goldman Sachs anticipates the loss of 300k jobs
globally due to the impact of AI.
Are we really going to stumble into this very
predictable dystopia the way Britain strode into the obvious long term harm of utilities
privatisation and more recently the entirely foreseeable catastrophe of Brexit?
The answer seems to be yes. We’re doing it.
Many years ago I got sick of asking the bank clerks
who constantly harangued me about online banking, why they were working so hard
to unemploy themselves. A year ago I had a conversation with a depressed clerk in a branch which was about to close (one of 5 in
my area) and the idea that the wholesale closures were the entirely predictable result of
years of insisting on customers banking on-line never seemed to have occurred
to her. It’s also worth pointing out that online banking has marched hand in
hand with the exponential growth in easy and extensive bank account fraud.
I’ve had literal stand up arguments in Lidl about
self-service tills replacing traditional tills (see blog 218). Call me crazy but
if I’m going to hand over hard gotten money I want to be treated like a human
being and be served by someone earning a wage.
I presume at some point the mega companies will
realise that when they have unemployed everyone for profit, there will be no
one to buy their shit?
Our chances of remaining below crisis-level global
warming are now in the rear view mirror so it seems the four horsemen of the Apocalypse
are pretty much on siesta.
I argued against the evils of privatisation of
utilities and public services in the 1980s. Most of those horrors have
surpassed even the most extreme predictions.
On this blog I have so many posts on how humans are
working incredibly hard towards their own economic and environmental destruction
I feel I am my own stuck record;
Blog 12 Armageddon
Will Not Be Televised sets the scene but then there are posts 18/30/36 –
skip to 108 – 147 – 158. Global Danse
Macabre or Living in The Penisic Era
– 167. Try - 171 Privileged White Men Keep Getting It Wrong.
Really getting to it 202 – The TAT Economy or 208 The
Cannibal Economy
See blog post 263 (I may not keep this promise) and
so on – take your pick.
310. Extinction
- Why Are People Still Choosing The Blue Pill?
354. Post-covid
The World Must Ditch Slum Economics With Its ‘Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’
363 Debt Is Compulsory
- Reality Is Redundant
Or more recently -
417. Fantasy Futurists
are Failing The Human Race
428. Born in 1899 Macfarlane Burnet understood.
Why don’t we?
It’s all packaged up, sci-fi dystopian fantasy form, in my novella -
In my more hopeful moments I suspect incompetence may
save us...
I recall many years ago (2004) in the UK we were
told to ditch our analogue radios as the BBC was going digital. Everything
would be digital. On that basis I went out and bought myself a brand new very
nice analogue radio at knock down price. I kept it for over 15 years and still
use an analogue radio.
It’s the same reason I wonder why so many are taken
in by conspiracy theories. Many of them require so much planning and
secret keeping and global co-operation all on a scale I’ve literally never seen
accomplished.
Ironically, if humanity is to be saved from itself –
it may be due to our ineptitude and inability to work together…
*
I’m breaking for the summer as I have some festival work based on my children's poetry anthology and hope to crack open the new anthology I put on hold for house renovation.
Meanwhile do check out my other books all listed here My BOOKS or
check them out via your own favourite online book store.