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War Room guest Steve Cortes says AI is beginning to negatively affect employment in US

Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:07 am
Posted by Bass Tiger
Member since Oct 2014
53518 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:07 am
Market strategist and conservative political commentator Steve Cortes appeared on Bannon's War Room this morning. Cortes shared several charts showing good news and bad. Good news is wages are up nearly 3% YOY over the first 5-6 months of 2025. Bad news is jobless claims are rising as jobs are being cut by some of the biggest employers such as Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, etc. Amazon topped out at 1.6 million employees between 2020-2022, per Cortes, Amazon's total number of employees is now down to approximately 1.4 million. Between intel and Microsoft over 30K employees have been laid off thus far in 2025.

What's the common cause of down sizing with the aforementioned Mega Corporations? All three companies cited advances in automation and AI, many of the positions that have been eliminated are white collar.

In fact, it's now predicted those who will be affected by AI job displacement the most will be the millions of salaried employees who are tethered to computers, do little to no physical labor and who have minimal interaction with a company's customers.

A frequent quip to blue collar workers by many politicians and college educated types in the past, (as their blue collar jobs were being shipped over seas) was learn to code. I think many blue collar types will be telling a lot of college grads with $100k of student loan debt, who have been newly down sized is to grab a tool belt, learn how to read a tape measure, learn to swing a hammer and to operate various power tools.....said differently, learn to work with your hands, well, until Musk's robots take those jobs too.
Posted by oldskule
Down South
Member since Mar 2016
23057 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:09 am to
Elon was worried about this.....this AI will change the world forever!
Posted by SallysHuman
Lady Palmetto Bug
Member since Jan 2025
12260 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:12 am to
There's always going to be employment displacement... and there's always going to be growth elsewhere to make up for it.

The sky will not fall.
Posted by boogiewoogie1978
Little Rock
Member since Aug 2012
19231 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:24 am to
quote:

and there's always going to be growth elsewhere to make up for it.

Not with hyper automation.
Posted by SallysHuman
Lady Palmetto Bug
Member since Jan 2025
12260 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:29 am to
quote:

Not with hyper automation.


I disagree... there will still be jobs, maybe not the same jobs, but work will be available.

This is also a good incentive to reassess the "need" for foreign born workers- if the job market gets too tight, put American Citizens at the front of the line.
Posted by AGGIES
Member since Jul 2021
10409 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:34 am to
quote:

I disagree... there will still be jobs, maybe not the same jobs, but work will be available.


Based on what information?

There have been multiple statements recently that employment will be negatively affected by AI, with tech people out front sounding the alarm bells…. So there should be some support for the argument that it will not.
Posted by SallysHuman
Lady Palmetto Bug
Member since Jan 2025
12260 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:37 am to
quote:

Based on what information?


Elevator operators and Otis.

Also we can always put stricter limits on Foreign Born Workers to create more Citizen space in the job market.

Posted by Taxing Authority
Houston
Member since Feb 2010
62420 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:39 am to
quote:

What's the common cause of down sizing with the aforementioned Mega Corporations? All three companies cited advances in automation and AI, many of the positions that have been eliminated are white collar.
Not sure about the three mentioned. But general consensus is that the TCjA has done more to destroy tech jobs than AI so far. The changes to Section 174 in the TCJA of 2017 are absolutely devastating to tech companies. They force tech companies to amortize software employee salaries over 5 years instead of treating them as an expense—like every other company in the US gets to.

For example, I pay out $600k in developer expenses, I can only deduct $120k of expenses, and I pay tax on the other $480k as income. Which is ridiculous .

That didn’t go into effect until 2022, and a lot of companies (including mine!) got blindsided by it. It’s a six-figure a year hit for me. Cannot imagine what it is for a company the size of Amazon or Microsoft.
Posted by Tiger985
Member since Nov 2006
7406 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:41 am to
quote:

There's always going to be employment displacement... and there's always going to be growth elsewhere to make up for it.

The sky will not fall.


You're in denial.

The world is in a period of transition unlike anything ever experienced in human history. Something that will make the industrial revolution look like a non event.

Absent some sort of natural cataclysm that might ironically set back the technological clock, the human era is ending.

The darkest predictions are likely not dark enough.
Posted by SallysHuman
Lady Palmetto Bug
Member since Jan 2025
12260 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:43 am to
quote:

Absent some sort of natural cataclysm that might ironically set back the technological clock, the human era is ending.

The darkest predictions are likely not dark enough.


I do hope you're tongue in cheek.

Posted by AUCom96
Alabama
Member since May 2020
6563 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:45 am to
quote:

there's always going to be growth elsewhere


Including the welfare rolls.
Posted by Narax
Member since Jan 2023
5473 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:50 am to
So here is a secret.

Most people hired in tech can't code to save their life.
They get slapped in a scrum master role, or a reporting role, or are given mindless tasks of clean this data, which they do badly. Or they are move to test or management.

What's worse is the massive over hiring since 2019 and the WFH epidemic of 2020+ allowed employees to hide behind going to meetings and producing slides and documents but no working code.

What's worse is DEI made non white males untouchable for layoffs, especially with the inability to figure out who was worth firing.

Its all over, even in FAANNG.

AI is making the best people amazingly more productive, it allows us to take a task we would farm out to a junior engineer and feed it into our corporate LLM, and continue in 5 minutes.

Things that would have taken me 6 months now take 2 weeks since I don't need to rely on as many people.

Its also allowed newer people access to way more information so they can help with higher level tasks, or at least get close.
They churn out code way faster.
I have 3 young coding monsters on my team and they all use LLMs built for coding.
It allows me to write and test a 2 hour update in 40 minutes.

But this also means that the gap between those who are good and trying is massive now to those who don't work.

With Trump in office, they feel free to mass fire those employees who really refuse to work.
This post was edited on 6/27/25 at 11:53 am
Posted by SDVTiger
Cabo San Lucas
Member since Nov 2011
92401 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:52 am to
Better get on board with AI or get left behind
Posted by boogiewoogie1978
Little Rock
Member since Aug 2012
19231 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:53 am to
quote:

I disagree... there will still be jobs, maybe not the same jobs, but work will be available.

There will always be "jobs" but AI is going to cut some industries by 80-90% and then what happens?

Industries like Transportation, Finance, Customer Service, etc. are going to be heavily impacted. Can these people move to construction jobs? Sure, but would construction jobs grow if people can't buy what's be constructed?
Posted by Bass Tiger
Member since Oct 2014
53518 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 11:55 am to
quote:

There's always going to be employment displacement... and there's always going to be growth elsewhere to make up for it.

The sky will not fall.


Let's revisit your post in 3-5 years and see where we're at, I'm hoping you're correct.
Posted by Bass Tiger
Member since Oct 2014
53518 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 12:00 pm to
quote:

Not sure about the three mentioned. But general consensus is that the TCjA has done more to destroy tech jobs than AI so far. The changes to Section 174 in the TCJA of 2017 are absolutely devastating to tech companies. They force tech companies to amortize software employee salaries over 5 years instead of treating them as an expense—like every other company in the US gets to.

For example, I pay out $600k in developer expenses, I can only deduct $120k of expenses, and I pay tax on the other $480k as income. Which is ridiculous .

That didn’t go into effect until 2022, and a lot of companies (including mine!) got blindsided by it. It’s a six-figure a year hit for me. Cannot imagine what it is for a company the size of Amazon or Microsoft.


I watched a dude who owns a software development company on a podcast talking about AI and he said in 2024 25% of his company's software development was assisted or wholly developed or by AI, he predicts in 3-5 years most of his company's software products will be largely developed by AI.
Posted by Bass Tiger
Member since Oct 2014
53518 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 12:01 pm to
quote:

Elon was worried about this.....this AI will change the world forever!


The Tesla robot I have seen on Youtube is pretty impressive. That robot appears that it could work in a lot of warehouses right now.
Posted by PeleofAnalytics
Member since Jun 2021
4782 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 12:01 pm to
Computers did this years ago. The amount of manhours it would take to prepare a fortune 500 tax return 50 years ago is likely more than 100s to possibly 1,000s times it would take today. You can make an adjustment to a massive tax return with the click of a button which would take days to run through.

Posted by Bass Tiger
Member since Oct 2014
53518 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 12:03 pm to
quote:

You're in denial.

The world is in a period of transition unlike anything ever experienced in human history. Something that will make the industrial revolution look like a non event.

Absent some sort of natural cataclysm that might ironically set back the technological clock, the human era is ending.

The darkest predictions are likely not dark enough.


I feel uncomfortable agreeing with your post but you're likely more correct than you are wrong.
Posted by Narax
Member since Jan 2023
5473 posts
Posted on 6/27/25 at 12:05 pm to
quote:

I watched a dude who owns a software development company on a podcast talking about AI and he said in 2024 25% of his company's software development was assisted or wholly developed or by AI, he predicts in 3-5 years most of his company's software products will be largely developed by AI.

He's full of shite and he's pandering to investors.

Vibe coding is not currently viable, and mathematically we aren't going to get there with LLMs for large code bases. LLMs cant do out of sequence logic that is required by complex solutions, they fundamentally cant.

It builds small snippets that are self contained.
Its great at that.

Yea he's just pandering to investors.
This post was edited on 6/27/25 at 12:07 pm
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