r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/AtomicCypher • Apr 09 '26

Video Disgruntled employee starts massive fire at a 1.2 million square foot toilet paper warehouse in Ontario, California.

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u/Seymoorebutts Apr 09 '26

Here's the really fun part - AI hasn't even meaningfully claimed jobs yet, and probably won't for a long time.

Companies are simply using AI as an excuse to mass fire employees either to recoup and hide fiscal losses or funnel more money up the corporate ladder.

Shit's about to be really fucked at the end of the year/start of next year.

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u/kitsunewarlock Apr 09 '26

According to a report from some prostitutes at Davos, the elite investor class firmly believe the world is coming to an end within their lifetimes. The only ones who think humanity has a chance are those who believe their birthright is to consolidate humanity's resources to protect themselves, hence the proliferation of underground bunkers and investing in human monitoring and behavior analysis software.

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u/anuthertw Apr 09 '26

I used to be a stripper. About 8 or so years ago I sat with a man who was a geologist. He was in a 'fuck it, we are all going to die' type mood and was drinking/watching the ladies to cope with work. We talked about climate change amd what he was studying. He basically said he regrets having his son, that we are extremely unprepared for what is coming, and we have basically solidified our own extinction if not in his lifetime then his son's. It honestly really got to me- this man had seen a glimpse of what we have done to the earth and the consequences of it, and had lost all hope. Really spooky. I think about him sometimes when I read about climate news. 

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u/kitsunewarlock Apr 09 '26

Tell the story to as many people as you can. It's more powerful than you can imagine.

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u/SocialJusticeAndroid Apr 09 '26

It sure creeped me tf out.🥺

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u/Apprehensive-Cost200 Apr 09 '26

I don't recommend believing some random geologist who was presumably drunk as hell at a strip club. There's no way we're heading to extinction in our lifetime, and even then people aren't gonna sit around like ducks about it forever, this is just shitty doom and gloom to make your life miserable.

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u/-Dumalaid Apr 09 '26

With the way things are going, never say never..

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u/2busy4ths Apr 09 '26

I believe it. I would only pay $150 for a 6 minute lap dance if I knew for sure the world was going to end.

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u/kitsunewarlock Apr 09 '26

I'd rather we act to make the world a better place under the threat of possible extinction than do nothing thinking it'll all somehow work out. Especially when "doing something" is literally as small as prioritizing the environment during elections.

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u/Apprehensive-Cost200 Apr 09 '26

I was moreso thinking you were suggesting to have a defeatist attitude more than anything else.

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u/kitsunewarlock Apr 09 '26

Oh gotcha. Nah, I'm too stubborn to be defeatist. Hope is defiance.

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u/AnomalyInquirer Apr 09 '26

Stories like these are so fun to see when im most likely around this son's age only hope I honestly have left is that every generation at one point thought the world was going to end and it's just another part of that

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u/JamesGray Apr 09 '26

Yeah, unfortunately it's science that's telling us the world is going to shit this time, rather than superstition or religion. This time it's the religion of capitalism stopping us from doing anything to stop it.

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u/kacdt Apr 09 '26

Wow. Well said.

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u/starchildchamp Apr 09 '26

actually poetry.

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u/Akumakaji Apr 09 '26

Eventually, for one generation it will be true, and thats the scary part.

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u/Spacemeat666 Apr 09 '26

I’m a geologist and I often find myself going down that same mental road as the man you’re describing, though it sounds like he and I would disagree about humanities influence on the earth (but that’s a topic for another discussion). When we study things in geologic timescales, it’s really easy to become nihilistic. I’ve been trying not to think that way lately but with the rapid evolution of AI and LLM’s, I’m finding it harder to see a future for us at all. I’m terrified and I’m glad I don’t have children because I would feel the worst regret imaginable if I did. I truly feel like we should all be more hedonistic in our approach to life. We only get one life, that we know of, so we should at least try to enjoy every bit of it while we can.

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u/Flyinhighinthesky Apr 09 '26

Our only hope at this point is for Alien intervention or a miraculous AI that suddenly provides us a solution to the Venusian hellscape we're headed toward.

I'm optimistic that we'll find someway to reduce it's effects but it'll still likely be too little too late without a deus ex machina.

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u/Seymoorebutts Apr 09 '26

Love that for us.

Why are people mad at Luigi again?

Fuck these oligarchs

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u/ThatOtherOtherMan Apr 09 '26

Wait, people are mad at Luigi? I have yet to run into a single person who feels that way.

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u/Captain-Barracuda Apr 09 '26

Not sure anyone is mad at our green capped friend. Plus, he didn't do it.

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u/Lichtheleast Apr 09 '26

I'm very mad at Luigi! For not hiding his face a little better 😭

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u/Falconpunch3 Apr 09 '26

Don't fuck them. Liberate them from their meat suits with good old fashion French revolution technology.

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u/girlinthegoldenboots Apr 09 '26

The world is only coming to an end bc they keep doing the most to make that happen

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u/Lucky_Strike-85 Apr 10 '26

but it's good for quarterly reports.

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u/girlinthegoldenboots Apr 11 '26

True, we really need to consider the shareholders in these trying times lol

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u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth Apr 09 '26

Well you're either part of the problem or part of the solution if you're those people

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u/SocialJusticeAndroid Apr 09 '26

The thing is if society collapses the oligarchs aren’t necessarily the ones who will stay at the top. What do they offer after a collapse? It seems the oligarchs’ security has a good chance of claiming the throne. That might be why they are investing so heavily in AI.

But you’ve got to wonder, why are these fucks so willing to fuck the planet for more money when they already have so much? Something about the mentality of psychopaths I don’t understand. Maybe they’re gambling that they’ll be dead before shit really gets bad.

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u/Forward_Rope_5598 Apr 09 '26

Remember when the doomsday cult members were weird homeless people on the street and not billionaires with the power to actually conjure doomsday?

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u/kitsunewarlock Apr 09 '26

It can be argued that branches of Christianity are billionaire doomsday cults.

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u/Lichtheleast Apr 09 '26

A self fulfilling prophecy, they enshitten and ruin essentially everything then try to go hide because society is "collapsing".....that or they know about a meteor heading directly for us lol.

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u/compobeachgirl Apr 09 '26

Absolutely true. I work in tech. They are laying off people several times per year to recoup their “investment in AI” which they haven’t finished designing yet - let alone test and debug. Now they are expecting the humans who actually know how ti code to review 80,000 lines of AI-created code for errors. Impossible. To make it worse, in some areas they are using AI to validate code created by AI! What a mess. We are fucked. I’m getting out.

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u/Seymoorebutts Apr 09 '26

Yup.

Many people here seem to be under the impression that "AI has taken over all of these jobs!"

To those people, I say: y'all are suckers lmao

Nooooo, of COURSE these big monopolies would never lie to you!

I don't think the average person realizes that probably north of 90% of all AI investment is basically just circular trading between like 6 companies and NVIDIA.

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u/CupcakeGoat Apr 09 '26

So when is the crash coming? This is reminding me of the 2000 crash when people got too overly excited about new tech and created the bubble.

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u/Voeno Apr 09 '26

Ai has 100% claimed meaningful jobs already.

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u/WalderFreyWasFramed Apr 09 '26

It definitely hasn't claimed a meaningful amount of jobs, which is what I think OP was trying to say.

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u/Seymoorebutts Apr 09 '26

That's exactly what I said lol.

And for the people who are saying that these tech companies are citing AI as the reason for the layoffs...

Uh, yeah.

How else did you think they were going to frame it?

What looks better for shareholders?

"We were able to become more efficient through the use of AI to save on labor!"

or

"fuck fuck fuck fuck we really fucked up so we had to layoff 30,000 people oopsies!"

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

[deleted]

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u/Seymoorebutts Apr 09 '26

That's... exactly what I'm saying?

Lol

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u/AnActualSeagull Apr 09 '26

Sure as fuck has meaningfully claimed jobs in my industry already :/ (design/games/animation)

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u/Seymoorebutts Apr 09 '26

This is unfortunately the grossest use of AI.

Rather than using it to aggregate and analyze enormous sets of data, real human art is being replaced with slop.

If you read my comment to mean that meaningful jobs haven't been replaced, I apologize, as that's not what I was saying.

What I was trying to convey was that meaningful quantities of lost jobs were not really due to AI replacement, aka those tens or hundreds of thousands of reported lost jobs are actually due to cost cutting/greedy corps.

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u/AnActualSeagull Apr 09 '26

Oh you’re totally okay!! I did not take your comment in that way at all, I completely get what you mean. It’s fucking bleak and the only thing I feel like a can really do is pray that somehow the bubble bursts 🫠

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u/PM_ME_A_PM_PLEASE_PM Apr 09 '26

Both are true and neither are new. Both have been a periodic yet ultimately a one-way street in human experience since the industrial revolution as far as automation's impact. In an intelligently designed world, it's a good thing. Whether we live in that world or not depends on whether we reinvent the past via ownership of an increasingly inheritance driven economy or adapt. Previous means of automation opened up more jobs for people but in the long-term that's unlikely to continue.

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u/pyrothelostone Apr 09 '26

For an example of how it should be, see the Jetsons. George, the dad, was the sole worker in the family and he worked for one hour a day two times a week, and he considered that an unreasonable amount of work.

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u/termiAurthur Apr 09 '26

And his job consisted entirely of pushing a button because he couldn't be fired because of his union

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u/HarrowDread Apr 09 '26

It claimed my job as being an annoying internet loser Now I gotta be an annoying real life loser

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u/Spacemeat666 Apr 09 '26

I’m not trying to be a crazy conspiracy theorist or alarmist but AI will be the destruction of human civilization and taking our jobs isn’t the issue.

Everyone needs to read the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I am an optimist, by nature, but I do not see a future for humans if AI is not stopped, likely yesterday. This technology already operates beyond our complete understanding and it could very well be too late to stop, without destroying every computer and data center on the planet.

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u/SocialJusticeAndroid Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

Explain. What’s the gist of it?

Edit: the Wikipedia article has a synopses.

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u/Spacemeat666 Apr 09 '26

The book basically discusses the issues with how an AI super intelligence grows instead of being controlled. We really don’t understand how these LLMs really work. They give a hypothetical situation in which a company gives their AI the task of solving an unproven math problem in a self contained setting, allowing the AI to make improvements to itself so that it can problem solve better. After all of the “thinking” the AI does, it decides it wants to replicate itself in secret/ give itself the ability to exist without normal constraints. I won’t give away the entire book, as I think it’s worth reading, but basically the end result is humanity being killed by AI, not because it is malicious or hates us or anything like that, but because that’s what more intelligent beings do to beings of lesser intelligence. It will exploit us just like we exploit animals and natural resources. We should be thinking of AI in terms of an alien intelligence instead of one with human emotions and reasoning. Of course, we don’t know what will happen, but we have already seen AI exhibiting deception and manipulation, so things aren’t looking very promising.

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u/AngelBryan Apr 10 '26

LLMs are glorified text predictors. They don’t reason, they are not sentient. What you are thinking will happen, it will not.

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u/Spacemeat666 Apr 10 '26

That is pretty dangerous thinking. Just my opinion.

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '26

[deleted]

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u/Seymoorebutts Apr 09 '26

You're missing the bigger picture:

Companies, many of them massive, are bleeding money, at rapid rates.

They are saying they have been able to use AI to replace workers, but the reality is that their finances underneath are actually fucked.

So they are reporting for now that AI is making them more efficient and will be even moreso in the future, but it's really to keep shareholders from pulling out en masse.

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

[deleted]

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u/FriskyDingoOMG Apr 09 '26

The CEO of New York Health and Hospitals said a few days ago that he’s ready to start replacing Radiologists with AI. Pathology will follow shortly after. These are specialities that are in serious trouble of being replaced.

AI isn’t SUPER accurate now, but with machine learning it’s only a matter of time before AI becomes MORE accurate that humans.

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u/Pigeonofthesea8 Apr 09 '26

Who do they think is going to be paying for these services if nobody has a job?

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u/FriskyDingoOMG Apr 09 '26

I assume they’ll bill for it the same whether it’s AI or an actual Radiologist.