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Tom Thurley's avatar

My apologies, that I don't have time yet to read your article as I am working hard at 72 making carbon untaxed firewood for heating. I can take a break to respond to the headline. The Canadians who are doing what they are supposed to be doing are all working hard. Some of the remainder are being overly coddled, enabling their "busy" work - read free drugs, activism, misspent public funds and political capital. Therein lies much of the issue. Always follow the money trail.

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IceSkater40's avatar

I think the decrease in output is less related to adoption of AI and more related to the coddling that has occurred as the far left beliefs have swept through society. People are arguing on facebook about universal basic income because they believe that there isn't enough work to go around, and that it would somehow solve all their financial woes, rather than seeking a job, furthering their training, and working hard. I know this may sound harsh, but I've lived in poverty and relied on government assistance for many of my early adult years. And yet - I was able to move myself out of that position through hard work and determination, despite disability significant enough to have led to me collecting CPP Disability for many years. Education is power. Motivation and believing that you can change your world (internal locus of control) is power.

Could AI have benefits? Sure, maybe. But will those benefits appear in the absence of individuals who are motivated to make their own decisions and control their own lives through hard work? No. I had a friend many years ago, chronically unemployed, because she wasn't willing to work for the wage I was working at. She chose to not work, and really not even look for work, because nobody would pay her enough.

When people think they're "too good" to do certain types of work, and that spreads through society, THAT is what reduces GDP and leads to many unfilled jobs. Yes, inflation is a problem. Unemployment, at the moment and for a few years now, has not been a problem of lack-of-jobs, rather it has been lack of people willing to take the jobs after the amount they were able to make through the government's covid payment program. SO many problems we are facing economically right now can be traced back to the covid money having been accessed with too much ease, by many who didn't qualify for it, and then all that extra money went into the economy and led to demand that far outpaced supply - leading to inflation and increasing the money supply at the same time as the government was running large deficits and decreasing the supply of loanable funds.

My work is using some AI in a limited capacity - it's actually very limited in what it can do well so it's not heavily used. BUT I don't think lack of AI is the economy's biggest problem. The lack of sufficient numbers of people who are willing to take responsibility for themselves and work hard is the larger problem. And that is one that will require a shift in societal values to address - AI won't be able to fix that. It starts with educators who don't undermine capitalism by promoting command economy ideas. and with legacy media who does a better job at providing context when reporting corporate earnings rather than just giving the accounting profit and making people feel that CEO's are sitting on billions of profit because of inflation. The average person doesn't understand how the economy works, or that there are economic costs to running a business that don't show up on a balance sheet - and these are important things.

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