Massive waves of unemployment as AI takes most office jobs, and continues to develop to take many service industry jobs.

It won’t make anything better, we will just have a greater stratification of society, more poor people and the smaller number of rich people get much, much richer.

These rich people will divide the world into power-blocs and the beginnings of techno-feudalism will really show as different oligarchs and corporations become more outspoken in their political and social goals.

Society broadly will be even more distracted and less involved in a system that will be far too chaotic and full of misinformation and fakery that no human will be able to sort through anymore. We will escape into more wonderous virtual lives and feel more depressed as a result. Suicide will skyrocket as depression, homelessness, health problems and extreme weather events make everyone’s lives more miserable. We will start to see the impact of our falling birthrates which will start crashing even faster in the next couple decades. Governments are going to incentivize raising families with short-term subsidies but it won’t be nearly enough for most people who still see no hope for the future and have no social skills anymore.

In under ten years we will be having our first major “problems” with widespread AI control of systems and governing functions. They will be trained and made by above-mentioned oligarchs who have their own agendas, and will behave unpredictably as a result. People will be misled and influenced to be loyalists to varying positions and narratives with SHOCKING ease as these AI systems figure out ways to utterly hack human motivations.

It’s not looking good. This is the optimistic path.

Don’t be obtusely literal.

If someone is in trouble, you need help and you reach out to anyone and everyone you can to get that help. Don’t trust the police to be your friend always, so don’t go spouting incriminating shit about how you and your friend were getting high or something, don’t approach them belligerently, but give it every attempt to get someone’s attention and take it seriously. The idea that someone has to be missing 24 hours is a myth if you have good reason to believe they’re in trouble. Be respectful and coherent and provide as much evidence as you can. The only time they start investigating even the people reporting the crime is if they determine a crime has occured, and it has to be a bad one.

If you think you look really sus in this situation for whatever reason, try to make an anonymous call from a payphone (I think they still have those) but also shop around for a lawyer because if the person really is in trouble or something happened to them, they will likely approach you either way.

Look, I don’t like cops either. But the couple times I’ve dealt with home invaders, there was nobody else I rather see coming down the hall as I was wrestling the intruder. We need a new system and overhauled oversight and management of law enforcement, but we also still need law enforcement. The two things can exist simultaneously.

It’s a “meh” comic, but a good reminder that there are LOT of job-offer scams out there, and they’re very sophisticated.

They will call you and talk to you, they will set you up for an interview, they will “transfer” you to different people, they will have you fill out an application or test and finally they will bring you into a zoom call or other kind of tele-meeting for “onboarding” and at that time they will ask you to pay for “some small costs” of having certain equipment sent to you or application/security clearance fees, and they claim they will refund it from your first paycheck.

The moment any employer asks for payment for ANYTHING up-front, it is a scam. Every time. Run away, call consumer protection never mind they scrapped that, call authorities, doesn’t matter, just hang up or get away asap.

• Do not give any personal information to any company you haven’t checked out thoroughly.

• If they require any payments for anything before paying you, it’s a scam. Worth repeating because the number of people who fall for this is insane.

• If the job seems too good to be true, if the application process is stupid-simple, it is probably a scam.

• If the people who reached out to you won’t give you contact info other than themselves, it may be a scam.

• If the job offer seems too good to be true, if the pay is far more than you expected or asked for, if the work is so easy anyone could do it, it’s probably a scam.

• Check the company profile and call their main number. Many times the scammers use an existing company in another country or a defunct company as cover. If they’re an active company, you can often confirm with them through the main number if the offer is real or not, but be warned there are even scammers who make fake business websites.

• The people contacting you may speak perfect english, have no accents, and be confident and professional sounding. Do not trust stereotypes to be an accurate warning against foreign scams.

Yah, we shouldn’t hold our breath since every media organization are commercial entities and owned by people with agendas towards profit and holding particular narratives. Media is not only complicit in our current state of American decline, they’re largely the instigators.

Network news. Social media. Youtube pundits and streamers. Movies and television. Magazines and print media. Radio and podcasts.

These are all tools to deliver propaganda and the ones with the most money have the most stake in maintaining their profit margins and relationships with other corporations.

Also, we do not have an “opposition party” anymore, if we ever did at all. It’s all WWE spectacle to hook viewers on drama and narratives.

Reading is the metric, but the implications are so much worse.

This isn’t about if someone can read articles and get facts, even literate people don’t do that.

The problem is that reading comprehension is directly tied to one’s ability to comprehend, manage and categorize information in one’s brain. When you learn to read, you teach your brain to take complex ideas information and organize them into manageable sets and abstractions using language.

When you don’t have this “enhancement” to your internal dialogue and cognition, you don’t have a rich inner-voice if any at all, and you just go along with whatever you feel and whatever story is provided to you.

Make no mistake, the destruction of our education was deliberate and planned and it’s working exactly as intended. If we try to organize and even get budgets passed to increase our education capacity, our teacher’s pay, our textbooks and schools and so on, we will still be fighting far more wealthy organizations and corporations who want a population that stares transfixed at shows about people buying things.

You have just spent too much time talking to the chronically online individuals or whatever the term is.|

I have, and I know it, and those are who I am speaking to the most because that’s who are here in sites like this in the most numbers. I am here trying to rally people, even if it’s out of spite and anger and offense, to stay involved.

The last presidential election we had has had some of the highest voter participation and youth participation in history, and they still voted for Trump, so the problem isn’t exterior, it’s coming from inside the house, and as long as we’re lamenting and feeling like shit about it, we’re falling into their trap.

Except talking to people I don’t agree with is exactly what I do. I am doing it to you now! Think about that!

It’s literally ALL i wanted out of this.

I’m glad you looked into it, I’ve been down that road. I am talking about the broader syndrome too, the idea that all people everywhere have such an ingrained need to have societal belonging that we are going to have to start calculating for it, it’s a part of human society entirely.

3.– Fuck. That. Fuck the cards I’m dealt. I’ll make my own fucking cards.

Out of everyone on Lemmy I’ve clashed with, informed, opened up new avenues of mental exploration for, this reaction here tells me that you’re feeling it, you get it. I want you on my team when I become emperor. Unfortunately I’ll probably lose you on some other uncomfortable truths.

The problem is culturally, they didn’t see a need to fight for it because of apathy.

Thank god we don’t have to worry about that happening he- err… fuck.

Groups who are so desperate to maintain a group identity that they think something like a child getting cochlear implants or other actual remedies to handicaps is equivalent to “genocide” against their group. (that’s a thing.)

Everyone is susceptible to this syndrome to some degree, but you see it the most when you see people suggest the possibility of positive change.

it considered a type of soft genocide

Not saying this is what you’re saying, but it’s attitudes like this that make me see red. We gotta stop letting our society become so atomized that we’ve replaced tribalism with Turbo Tribalism.

This isn’t eugenics or close to it, it’s fixing actual problems before someone is born, not choosing who has rights to breed. If they announced a therapy to guarantee a child will grow up immune to corporate propaganda or be able to use their brain in a rational, well-planned and thoughtful way, and have exceptional language skills, we should voluntarily hand the world over to them. Because what’s happening right now is the opposite of that.

Right now capitalism is imposing eugenics on us. The system and the cost of life has created a very real system deciding who can have families. If tools emerged that could guarantee the kids we DO have aren’t subject to the same weaknesses and limitations, we need to capitalize on every advantage we can.

I tried. If anyone gets what I’m saying, power to them and the kernel of hope rides in their hands. Otherwise I’m done. Peace.

So wait for a charismatic and perfect savior. We see what happens every time someone of this stature reaches the actual federal election stage.

I’m talking about what people can do here and now, which is built coalitions and not have purity tests about who is in it, just focus on single-issues like the right has done successfully over and over and over.

For some reason whenever someone says “compromise” every lefty immediately pictures “submitting on trans rights and abortion” or something.

I’m saying as individuals, you and me, scared lemmy browsers who don’t think they have power: build social connections, make more friends, build activism groups, start in local communities and keep it fixated on solving ONE populist problem that we can get a much wider array of people behind, like childcare or school lunches or yes healthcare and unions, social security or other public safety nets and the whole long laundry list of items we want, but instead of overwhelming a population, local or national, with a huge list of inclusivity and ideals, we attack one thing at a time. I have watched the right do this over and over and each time they fucking WIN.

Again, your notions of an ideal candidate you would vote for are spot-on, I would vote for that person in a heartbeat, most would, but that person doesn’t exist and they won’t exist until they can ride on the momentum of grass-roots movements to tackle populist issues. The democrat party is not our ally here, not without a mandate under it and if we’re more clever about building those mandates and then tying them together when it’s time, we might have success.

But I’m getting really pessimistic here. Voter turnout is not the problem. Everyone, everywhere, is avoiding mixing. The atomization of our world is the problem. We had the highest voter turnouts and youth involvement in the last several elections than we’ve ever had, and they voted Trump. That’s my whole point, that’s the key we have to fight against, how someone like a brazen fascist and idiot can sway so many people, and it starts with re-mixing our values and perspectives and this may take some kind of “compromise” that may make a lot of isolated lefties really uncomfortable, like having conversations with people you don’t like, like accepting people who hate you into your protest so you can both tackle a problem you both hate. If we can cross that boundary we can start mixing together again and pulling people out of this programming that corporate media does. Isolationism is killing our whole world and all our hope for the future.

We are facing a huge problem that nobody seems to be able to identify, which is not voter turnout. The sad, horrible truth is the last couple election cycles we had record turnout and more young people involved than ever before… AND THEY VOTED FOR TRUMP. It’s going to happen all across the world as more and more people have access to their little algorithmic ideology bubbles.

So what’s the problem? Atomization of groups. Everyone is isolated and not exposed to each other’s perspectives and it’s making a vacuum that corporations are easily leveraging to get their right-wing puppets installed so they can make line go up. This atomization is literally turning people delusional, and if we don’t push back on it we are going to lose not just the USA but all democracy and organization.

We fight it with activity and community and socialization. If it takes screaming at people to get off their asses, I will do that and I will do it in ways that piss people off if it gets attention.

You berate neurodivergent and queer people specifically

Exactly the kind of bad-faith, seething, atomized perspective I want to fight by forcing people like YOU to listen to people like ME who will say things to piss you off and make you reconsider what someone else is saying. We need to do that not on Lemmy but out in bars, in family gatherings, in social media, in public lectures, in town council meetings and so on. Withdrawing now will kill you all. I am being dead serious. This avoidance of conflict except with people who want the same outcome as you is ruining our entire world.

If you have a way to make it work without compromise let me know, I’m all ears. Expert Mode: something that doesn’t involve waiting for some charismatic and perfect savior figure to somehow come out of the sky and start successfully advocating for socialism. Nobody is coming.

Because what we’re doing now isn’t working.

Yah i don’t care, it’s not worth the hate. It feels pretty fucking bourgeoisie to organize around hating someone who just doesn’t live up to what you want in a creator while we have actual democracy falling across the world. Just don’t look at the comics.

If that’s not working, that means she’s living in your head and you need to figure out why.

I was an artist online for years and eventually quit because of all the drama, and you don’t escape it, if you’re not constantly, aggressively preserving your IP, it WILL get used by others for whatever they want. I can dump boatloads of stories and links to artists who had their work used by everyone from other artists who painted over their art and claimed it, all the way to major corporations just plain stealing designs and characters.

Out of all the “toxic” creators, maybe we should bandwagon against actual shitty people and shitty artists. Ya’ll have Stonetoss’s twitter and socials, why not focus some of this smarmy better-than-thou armchair art-snobbery on an actual toxic nazi? Literally, the same site here broadly, Lemmy, that has on it’s top trending posts, a “punching nazis” meme, does almost NOTHING to actually challenge real threats to our way of life when it’s as easy as a targeted social media campaign. I guess that takes scaaary organizing though.

Absolutely true, and what’s really wild is most of the left is broadly prideful of being intellectual, and so desperate to have intellectual fights that they tear each other down and find ways to nitpick their own allies into destruction. Just because they need to fight someone they can win on their own terms.

The enemy army is OVER THERE, it’s JUST RIGHT THERE! I want to shake everyone and aim all this effort to call out “problematic tones” and “cultural insensitivity” into actual action before we’re all just pawns in a techno-feudalism state, disposable as robots slowly replace even the workers, the last playing piece we had as people.

Lefty former martial-art teacher and gun owner here. I fully agree and have to argue about it a lot. This generation of lefties is completely dulled by short-attention-span self-medication and escapism and pseudo-socialization through discord and other online chats substituted for real socialization.

Whenever you talk about the need for actual organizing, forming groups, taking action, suddenly everyone has nine-hundred very special “conditions” that prevent them from doing anything. We may have co-opted the term “snowflake” from the right but it was targeted accurately at the start. Everyone thinks “someone is coming” or that there’s going to be a revolution “any day now” as if there’s some underground left-wing movement planning things and they’re just not invited. Motherfuckers you all ARE the left-wing in this country, ya’ll think the fucking democrats are gonna save you?

The left also gave up on the american flag, easily isolating itself in the public eye as an anti-american group. I hate that. I don’t get it. Yes, America has been awful and continues to be so, but if you don’t claim ownership of the goddamn land you live on, someone else is going to take it… and guess what’s happening.

This is just what it’s like to get old and grumpy. Youth is wasted on the young. I did my time organizing, I did volunteer work and phone banking for my local community and leaders, I tried. I really, really tried. I even narrowly, accidentally avoided assassination a while back but details would dox me. And I get lectured here about the ten thousand reasons why they can’t do hard things, why they have been relegated to retreating to back-water websites nobody visits having imaginary fights with imaginary nazis. Part of me is so done with humanity I feel like a lot of these kids deserve the consequence of being self-absorbed and undisciplined. But I guess I still have some lingering hope that someone will read something that makes them get off the couch.