We have a place outside of the city, with fruit trees and a blueberry bush, which we purchased years ago, at the end of the season, when they were basically dead. We have a green thumb, so we went for it, and nursed it back to life. Our bush is now flourishing. The fruit come ripe in July, one by one, then all at once when it hits peak season. It’s behind a fence to protect it from the animals, but birds are a different story. Try as you might, birds always find a way to get to the fruit, and we do our best to scatter them.

We needed to go into the city for a few days for meetings, just as the blueberries were beginning to hit their prime. We expected that the birds would have a field day in our absence, but we were looking forward to enjoying at least a few berries.

We were wrong: the ripe berries had been picked clean.

So it is with AI and the constant refrain, widely echoed in the media, that AI will be taking our jobs. Eventually, all of them, if you buy into the inevitability of this, given what the media is saying.

Like the bird devouring our berries, tech lives by its own set of rules and as for respect for humans? The very concept of this is laughable when it comes to the birds, but do we give tech the same pass?

“Why Are We Pretending AI Is Going to Take All the Jobs?”

So wrote Matt Stoler in Big. “Yes, generative AI is transformational. Will it eliminate most entry-level jobs? That depends. Will we continue to demand excessive returns on capital? If so, then we’re in trouble.” This one is a must-read as Stoler goes point-by-point on how it’s politics and the close relationship between government and tech that’s the problem. For example, we have been told, that AI is taking the jobs of newly-minted college grads. Yet Stoler includes a chart on how jobs for new grads have been declining since 2015 – long before AI entered the zeitgeist, what to speak of the fact that, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, there’s a labor shortage in the US.

“If you look at jobs that are supposedly going to be replaced by AI, like accounting, you’ll see that years ago, before AI hit, there was already significant pressure. The reason had nothing to do with AI. Salaries suck, workload is high, and the prestige of the profession has declined as accountants have less power to stand up to the dishonest corporate leaders they are supposed to audit. These are preexisting political problems,” Stoler writes.

Charging til It Hertz

“There are other aspects of the introduction of generative AI suggesting that the new systems themselves aren’t doing the transforming. Hertz, for instance, is using AI systems that over-estimate damages to rental cars, with the frustrating additional feature that customers can’t complain to anyone because customer service is also now handled by generative AI. That’s not an engineering story, it’s a story of customers being unable to sue for deceptive conduct because of mandatory arbitration agreements. It’s also a monopoly story; Hertz consolidated the rental car industry in the early 2010s, so consumers and workers have little choice. Is it truly important that Hertz now also has AI as a tool to reportedly annoy and cheat customers?”

Cheating through tech is a long-standing practice, with little being done to curtail it

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella recently announced the layoffs of 9000 employees. Taken at face value and given all of the AI-scare headlines of late, one would assume that this is a result of the combination of belt-tightening and the employees being replaced by AI. Not so!

“The belt-tightening stress contradicted Microsoft’s stock closing price that rose by 21% this year, crossing $500 for the first time…It has been alleged that Microsoft has submitted more than 6000 H-1B visa applications since October 2024 and laid off more than 220,000 employees over the past year,” Financial Express reported.

This just in: “Microsoft to stop using China-based teams to support Department of Defense,” wrote Ars Technica. “The tech giant has relied on global workforce to support federal clients,” and hire cheaper labor, of course, so is it AI that took those 220,000 jobs at MSFT, or are we looking at the same playbook: they were replaced by cheaper offshore teams. A report from ProPublica has claimed Microsoft was using these engineers to maintain the Department of Defense’s computer systems, with ‘minimal supervision by US personnel’. “The workers were supervised by ‘digital escorts’, barely-over-minimum wage workers who are often less skilled than the engineers they oversee,” Yahoo! News reported. Again, cheap labor.

“We’ve seen a technology substituted for politics story before, many times. Napster and file sharing were blamed for killing record labels. Today, streaming means labels are bigger and more profitable than ever, only artists and consumers have lost power, because the legal framework is different. But now we’re seeing that it’s the law, not the engineering, that structured what ‘jobs’ are in music,” Stoler continued.

“There are other elements of theft and or unfair behavior that too often go unremarked in the “AI conversation.” The technology itself is engineered through political choices. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on AI and copyright, showing how firms like Meta steal the intellectual work of authors and exploit it, without compensation. And I don’t mean they buy the books and feed them into a learning algorithm, they literally used pirated work to train their model, which their own employees question as possibly illegal.”

The argument is often given the AI will cure cancer et al, given full integration, of course. Truth be told, “Ultraviolet blood irradiation (abbreviated as UBI or UVB) is an “intravenous therapy that represents a safe, non-toxic, low cost and drug-free method of treating most blood-borne viruses and it offers hope to those who suffer from viral infections and related conditions,” such as cancer. Dubbed ‘the cure that time forgot’ by the American Journal of Surgery, UBI was first used in the 1940s and 1950s to treat diseases including pneumonia…tuberculosis, arthritis, asthma, and even poliomyelitis,” CMN Advanced Cancer Treatment reported. But there was more money to be made/pilfered through antibiotics and other, much more expensive treatments. Never underestimate the power and influence of Big Pharma and not sure whether it was ‘the cure that time forgot,’ or that Big Pharma has a long memory, too.

As to AI taking all jobs, given how Hertz is utilizing the technology to essentially cheat consumers and even as “Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket, as Forbes reported, “to boost its profitability,” does the ominous prediction come down to it being simply the latest iteration of unbridled corporate greed?

Like the birds at our blueberry bush, tech lives by its own rules and knows no boundaries. We’ve often reminded you that AI is a tool that, it seems, is increasingly being used as a cudgel.

We’ve also often also reminded you of the dangers of surrendering all your information to tech and the response is often, ‘what can you do,’ as people race to embrace yet the latest shiny new thing, caution be damned and we’ve seen where that has gotten us – and now where it’s taking us.

“We live in a world where intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, where machines can process, analyze, and create without awareness, without feeling, without the lived experience that shapes human judgment. No human will ever calculate faster or generate text quicker than AI. But speed and execution aren’t magic; they’re mechanics,” Shelly Palmer opined and we can’t help but wonder, given Hertz’s AI move, if there will be a backlash that will give rise to human-centric and -powered mom-and-pops. There are places where people can’t simply be replaced – without repercussions – and when AI will lose much of its luster as people come to realize that at the end of the day, AI is not a panacea, and many AI implementations are simply for the birds. Onward and forward.