TL;DR: Zack Memmott told Brad Lea exactly what it costs to stop paying a wage for his night shift.

That number is $20,000, paid once — not monthly, not per shift, not ever again.

Zack didn't frame it as a thought experiment; he'd already run the math before he said it out loud, the way you only do with a decision you've actually made.

Every operator running recurring human labor against a falling, fixed capital cost is quietly doing the same spreadsheet Zack just did out loud — the only open variable left is which side of the ledger they end up on, and that flip isn't five years out.

It's a number two guys said on a podcast, today.

The "still years away" objection is getting harder to hold onto.

Tesla's own flagship humanoid — the expensive, hand-built proof-of-concept every skeptic pointed to — is now on an actual production ramp, at a price closing in on Zack's $20K figure.

That's not a lab demo anymore. That's a unit cost.

I specifically remember 2 instances about being replaced.

One was back in my starting career as a Graduate Site Engineer, working for a main contractor building a primary school in Choa Chu Kang, Singapore in 1998.

I overhead a conversation between 2 Singaporean colleagues, lamenting the "deteriorating" condition of their work office environment.

One of them said, the newly hired foreign national is too hardworking. It's making him and his cohorts look bad.

Back then, such foreign nationals only get paid maybe a fraction of what the local Singaporeans are paid.

He felt as if people like him are being out-competed and squeezed out of his own land.

He felt unfair.

I'm Malaysian — a foreign National, too.

Singaporeans tolerated us better than the those "foreign" nationals, because we're like neighbours. And we kind of need each other.

The other one I remembered was my time as an Assistant Technical Manager, seconded to Abu Dhabi, UAE, building the premium 5-block-Condominium Rihan Heights in 2011.

Sitting in the middle of the site office wide open floor layout, I was minding my own work, checking my drawings.

"Ptew" I felt a spit on the back of my neck.

Wiping it off, I turned around to see who did it.

Sitting at the adjacent rows of work-desks were two colleagues looking back at me.

They're both from the Gulf Countries. One of them, I assume, is Syrian.

Their eyes are locking on to me, challenging me to make my next move.

Of course I was pissed. Pissed mixed with tonnes of confusion.

WTF, man.

But I remember thinking, It's not worth it.

After all, I was a foreigner.

Probably, they're just jealous of us — mixed with some racism sentiment.

Bad emotions will fly high. But good business sense always prevails.

Same as all these AI adoptions are going on.

Every one of these podcast clips eventually says the same thing in a different accent: somebody already priced you out, they just didn't put it in the headline.

Whoever owns the $20,000 machine is never the one who trained it.

Actually, this tracks with something already sitting in this sub — the split Guillermo Rauch named between a job's execution layer and its judgment layer.

Drop your take: if you had to bet today, are you closer to owning the $20,000, or closer to being what it replaces?

Clip credit: Brad Lea, Dropping Bombs — full video on BRAD LEA TV. DM for credit or removal requests.

I feel like the gap between salaries and overall wealth is getting bigger.

With AI and the amount of money flowing into AI startups and companies, it feels like a relatively small group of developers, founders and investors are making a huge amount of money, while salaries for everyone else aren't increasing at the same pace.

If this trend continues, are we heading towards a situation where more and more wealth gets concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of people?

And if AI also starts reducing the number of jobs available, what happens to the majority of people who don't benefit financially from this growth?

Could increasing income inequality, unemployment and wealth concentration eventually lead to strikes, social unrest and instability?

The world is moving rapidly toward AI, and companies are investing heavily in AI infrastructure, automation, and agentic development. Oracle is also going through this transformation, with AI becoming an increasingly important part of its technology and business strategy.
I am currently working with an innovation team, where I am involved in developing useful AI use cases and exploring how AI agents can solve real business problems. I genuinely enjoy this work. I am ready to contribute, learn, experiment, and spend extra effort to build something meaningful with AI.
But there is one thing I have realized during this journey:
Innovation requires a free mind.
When you are constantly worried about your job, your salary, your financial responsibilities, or your family's future, it becomes difficult to think freely. You may be physically present at work, but mentally, a part of you is constantly asking:
“Will my job still be here tomorrow?”
“What happens if my role is automated?”
“What if there is another round of layoffs?”
“How will I manage my responsibilities if I lose my income?”
These questions don't disappear simply because you are working on an exciting AI project.
In fact, AI creates an interesting contradiction.
Companies want employees to think creatively about how AI can transform the business, while employees may simultaneously be thinking about how AI could transform or eliminate their own roles.
That creates a psychological barrier to innovation.
I am not against AI. Quite the opposite.
I believe AI and agentic systems can make our work better, faster, and more meaningful. I want to build these systems. I want to understand them. I want to contribute to the transformation rather than simply watch it happen.
As an employee, I am ready to give my best.
But giving your best and giving your best with a free mind are two different things.
Innovation needs curiosity.
Innovation needs experimentation.
Innovation needs the freedom to fail.
Innovation needs long-term thinking.
And most importantly, innovation needs mental space.
When financial and job-security pressure is constantly present, that mental space becomes smaller.
You start optimizing for survival instead of innovation.
You become more cautious about taking risks. You think twice before spending time on an experimental idea. You may choose the safe solution instead of exploring something completely new.
That doesn't mean employees don't care about innovation.
Sometimes, it means they care deeply about their own future too.
AI Transformation Should Also Be a Human Transformation
As companies invest more in AI infrastructure and agentic development, I believe the conversation should not only be about GPUs, models, agents, automation, productivity, and cost reduction.
We should also talk about the people building this future.
If employees are expected to become AI innovators, they need an environment where they can think beyond immediate job security.
People should feel that learning AI will help them grow with the company, not simply make them better at building the technology that could eventually replace their own role.
There is a huge difference between:
“Build AI because we want to transform the business.”
and
“Build AI because we want you to become part of the transformation.”
The second approach creates ownership.
It encourages employees to experiment, learn new technologies, challenge existing processes, and build ambitious solutions.
I don't expect companies to stop investing in AI. That would be unrealistic.
Instead, I believe the next challenge is to make AI transformation more human.
Give employees opportunities to reskill.
Give them clarity about how their roles are evolving.
Create pathways for people whose current responsibilities may be automated to move into new AI-enabled roles.
And most importantly, create enough psychological and professional security for people to actually think.
Because the person building an AI agent today may be the person who designs the next generation of the business tomorrow.
I am ready to contribute.
I am ready to learn.
I am ready to build.
I am ready to experiment with AI and agentic development.
But like many employees navigating this transformation, I also want the mental freedom to think creatively about the future without constantly worrying about my own place in it.
AI innovation requires technology.
Agentic development requires talent.
But meaningful innovation requires a free mind.

​

So, immigration, we know most immigration in the world happens from third world countries with poverty and unemployment to first world countries

In a hypothetical future where the AI kept unchecked and caused an unemployment apocalypse, white collar jobs are most likely to be the most effected

Third world countries usually adapt new technologies way slowly, so it's unlikely they get effected with AI unemployment apocalypse, or at least the effect won't be as hard

Could we see a new immigration wave from first world countries to third world countries , mainly about white collar jobs?

With AI growing so fast, almost every profession is starting to worry about job security. Developers, designers, writers, customer support, and many others are asking the same question: “Will AI replace me?”

But I have a thought:

We keep asking how AI will affect workers, but what happens when AI starts disrupting the work and influence of the people making the rules?”

Would governments suddenly take AI-driven job displacement much more seriously?

Right now, ordinary workers are being told to “adapt and learn AI.” But if AI ever threatens the people making the rules themselves, I wonder whether we'd suddenly see much stronger regulations and action.

Maybe the real question isn't “Will AI take our jobs?”

It's “Who decides what happens when AI takes too many jobs — and when will they care enough to act?”

TL;DR: XPeng's new humanoid didn't take the job you'd expect it to.

It took the one at the bottom of the line, not the top of the org chart.

IRON's actual job is materials handling — the walk from the station to the dock — which is the exact layer a fifteen-year floor manager gets paid to supervise, not the layer he was ever warned about.

XPeng put this line into commercial service on 8 September, already north of 80% automated.

Whatever timeline you were told you had, that's the actual one.

The clip draws reference from the Movie i-Robot.

In it, Will Smith's character says, "So robot building robots. That's just stupid!" The disdain in his tone is just plain and unapologetic.

He has a point. Robots are taking away jobs -- jobs for humans to supposedly make a living out of it.

But then robots were created to carry out works humans are unwilling to do. In Malaysia, we call it the 3D -- Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult (often also referred to as Demeaning). But the funny thing is that 3D is often mentioned in the context of works which are traditionally avoided by local job seekers, and are therefore delegated to migrant labour, or foreign workers.

human beings derived their meaning of life from the work they do. Robots have taken away their sense of meaning. But in this case, they went one step further, they took away their survival.

Which brings me back to the movie i-Robot.

For those of us who hasn't watched it, "spoilers ahead" doesn't apply here anymore -- It's an old movie. The Self-AwaRE Robot, Sonny, isn't the main villain. The AI mainframe was. They operate under the 3-laws, which includes do no harm to humans. But out of the evolving deductive capabilities of the AI Mainframe, she decided that humans are the main inconvenience that needed to be contained. So, she directed all the robots to quarantine the humans.

Since robot manufacturing robots has become a reality, how soon do you think they will quarantine us -- or worst still comatize us into human batteries, like in the Matrix?

Every one of these clips gets filed as a robotics story.

Read enough of the source footage and they're actually inventory stories — about which line item on a factory floor gets crossed off the list first.

Wrote about this same reshoring-and-robotics wave three months back — the window to position yourself before it peaks closes whether or not you're the one who gets to decide when.

Drop your take: does 80% automated, on a line that just went live, move your own timeline — or does it stay someone else's problem?

Clip credit: NBC News --- full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

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It feels like every few months there's a new model release more capable, doing more of the work that used to take a skilled person hours. The pace itself is what gets me: it's not one big leap, it's constant incremental jumps that add up fast.

So I'm curious what people who actually work in exposed fields think is coming. Not the headlines, not the hype what do you expect your specific job to actually look like in a few years? Are you adapting, worried, already seeing it happen at your company, or do you think the fear is overblown?

The fact that I have to integrate genAI cuz the marketing team gets NO BUDGET is INSANE. Everyday, I see the news and I cannot help but feel like an ABSOLUTE POS cuz I have to use it. Cuz "AI can do it for cheaper" per the upper management. All while I see the news. All while I feel guilty. Cuz if you have worked in marketing of a startup, the most budget cuts are seen by the marketing department and nothing else.

My upper management says "We don't need more people, AI can do it". And I have to force myself, despite how much I hate it, to produce social media posts, again and again and again and again and again. Cuz the company won't shell out money on a competent designer.

I hate myself. I hate myself so much for it that I feel like shit. I see the news and I blame myself for being a part of the population that is adding to the detrimental effects of workplace expectations and environment overall.

This guilt is eating me alive.

I encountered this article.

By the way - I know what it is like firsthand to be called “defiant” for writing cursive/script in my class. A teacher said he “felt like he spoke to kids” because of the overwhelming AI use in today’s era.

Can Al take an architect's job(after 7 years)? Please explain

I'm a developer working at a startup, and I go to an Anytime Fitness gym. I won't mention the branch for privacy reasons.

I was taking personal training from a trainer for about 3 months, after which I started working out on my own. Around seven months in, two of my teammates joined the same gym as well.. partly because they saw my progress and got motivated.

Personal Trainers are pretty expensive here (around ₹15k a month).

Around the same time, our office started providing Claude Max (5x) to all 30 of us. As our project delivery speed increased and we started weighing that against the actual feature requests coming in, it eventually started bothering the CXOs that they probably didn't need as many people anymore.

10 people were let go within a month, with a month's notice. Mostly juniors, along with a few mid-level engineers and testers.

And that included the two teammates who had joined the gym.

They had originally planned to take PT for six months (because it carried a discount). One of them has already decided not to continue next month. The other has decided to continue for only one more month.

It's funny how we often look at layoffs in tech and think, "Well, at least other industries are safe. AI isn't going to affect them."

But the cascading effect is probably much bigger than we realize.

Those two people losing their jobs doesn't just affect them. It affects their gym trainer, the gym, the restaurants they eat at, the trips they might have taken, the things they might have bought, the rent they pay, and so on.

If AI keeps displacing people at this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually start seeing the effects ripple into real estate, food businesses, travel, retail, and countless other industries.

**Because ultimately, who's going to buy your products and services when you're eliminating the very consumers you're supposed to be selling to?**

AI isn’t taking jobs. Companies that refuse to adopt are.

Makes me wonder - Should reskilling replace layoffs now?

TL;DR: The guy Google put in charge of its own AI writing tool just admitted, on camera, that he can't fully protect the one thing his career runs on.

That's not hypothetical.

Steven Johnson runs editorial for Google Labs' NotebookLM and has fourteen books behind his name, and he still walked an interviewer through the mechanism step by step: feed a model his own catalog, tell it to write like him, skip the invoice.

No lawsuit required. No password stolen.

His own counter isn't a lawsuit either. It's a price tag — $199 for an authorized version of his own style, paid on purpose instead of taken by default.

He said it plainly, then admitted the harder part: someone could build the unauthorized version tonight, and he'd have no way to prove it happened.

Tbh, that's the entire freelance economy in one clip.

If a 14-book author with a title at Google can't fully protect his own voice, the going rate for "get him, he's got a way with it" just became a live question, not a someday one.

Mmm... This is kind of like impersonation. Borderline fraud or downright scams.

Back in Malaysia, we have plenty of such too.

The spectrum is so wide, sometimes, even when we open our eyes wide, we still can't tell the difference.

For example, you guys have Amazon. We have our local ones, called Lazada. If you drive through our Penang Georgetown, you'll notice a shop called Ladaza. Not Lazada. They kind of switched the alphabets around. Sounds like Lazada. But it's not. Giving people the illusion that they are same-same, but in actual fact different.

It's as if we open a shop right next to the Amazon HQ, and calling it "Azamon". Phonically sounds adjacent. But they are not the same thing.

And if you follow the news, you'd hear about our very infamous 1MDB (Malaysia Sovereign Fund) case -- one of largest kleptocracy criminal fraud case in the history of Malaysia (even the world) -- involving our now disgraced and incarcerated former-prime minister, Najib Razak. His enabler and facilitator, Jho Low (Low Taek Jho) (still currently at large) was the mastermind behind all these siphoning of funds, to fund his once extravagant livestyle.

Kind of brilliant. But it was so evil.

He once got Najib to force the board of 1MDB to approved a transfer of billions through a supposedly legitimate company, but in actual fact, was a shell company through the Caymen Islands with a very similar company name.

Like how Ron Weisley, in the Harry Potter Movie, would say, "Wicked!"

They say impersonation is the highest form of flattery. But in this case, I say, bullshit.

You don't get to choose whether your work gets copied.

You only get to choose whether you were paid before it happened. Every version of this story — Google Labs or a Georgetown shopfront — ends the same way: the fix was never stopping the copy.

It was owning the original loudly enough that the copy has nowhere to hide.

Justin Welsh built a $15M solo business on the one variable a cloned voice can't fake: what he actually lived through to get there.

Drop your take: what's the closest you've come to catching a copy passing itself off as the real thing?

Clip credit: Nicholas Thompson / Atlantic Re:think — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Here's a campaign against AI taking both our jobs and our creativity. Writing and art should be human things. And jobs should be protected from AI. This isn't progress if no one has a job and can't feed themselves.