The Elite Already Control Almost All The Wealth – So Why Will They Need Us Once AI Can Take Over Nearly All Of Our Jobs?

Michael Snyder is the publisher of , The American Dream Blog and The Truth

Is your job in danger?  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.

It really stinks to be in the bottom half.

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.

But now AI is taking over.

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.

In this particular case, Bill Gates is quite correct.

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.

In a different interview, Bill Gates envisioned a future in which humans would only work “two or three days a week” because AI is doing so much of the work for us…

In fact, he also says in another interview that he thinks humans could work “two or three days a week”, which would leave time for non-work pursuits. Whether or not that would come with the same wage and living standards is, of course, yet to be seen.

That would be wonderful.

But who is going to pay us the same money for working “two or three days a week” that we used to make working five?

It just isn’t going to happen.

Let’s be real.

The truth is that AI is simply going to replace large numbers of us.

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.

We are witnessing so much economic pain, and it is only going to get worse.

Some experts insist that instead of replacing us, AI will simply make human workers more productive.  And in many cases, the productivity gains are undeniable…

According to Nielsen Norman Group, customer support agents using AI handled 13.8% more customer inquiries per hour, business professionals produced 59% more documents per hour, and programmers completed 126% more projects per week. On average, generative AI increased users’ throughput by 66% while performing realistic tasks.

But as AI technology progresses, instead of helping us do our jobs AI will actually be able to replace us entirely.

Sadly, this has already been happening in the field of computer programming…

Computer programming was once a foolproof field—one of those career paths that was always going to need workers, like accounting and nursing.

The industry has taken a severe downturn in recent years, specifically the past two years, wherein a quarter of all computer programming jobs have disappeared. There are currently fewer programmers in the United States today than at any point since 1980, reports The Washington Post.

We are a far more advanced society than we were in 1980.

But not as many computer programmers are needed because AI “can generate code with minimal input and can perform a lot of the routine tasks traditionally performed by programmers”…

AI systems like ChatGPT can generate code with minimal input and can perform a lot of the routine tasks traditionally performed by programmers, and a fraction of the time and for significantly less money.

There will always be demand for a certain number of human workers, but it is difficult to imagine a future where there will be enough jobs for everyone.

So what are those that are left out in the cold supposed to do?

Will we simply be regarded as “useless eaters” that need to be eliminated since our usefulness to society has come to an end?

AI is shifting the balance of power between the elite and the rest of us dramatically.  Needless to say, the transition that is ahead of us threatens to be extremely painful.

Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written eight other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s  books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

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