u/lughnasadh

"In an interview with Fox News that aired Wednesday evening, Bezos told host Bret Baier he believes AI’s productivity gains could let some people decide, “I can support my family by working three days a week. He claimed families in two-earner households could decide they don’t need a second income and let one worker drop out. The billionaire didn’t offer any specifics on how this could happen."

Wow. That is some epic Marie-Antoinette level trolling. Though in fairness to Marie-Antoinette, she never actually said 'let them eat cake'; that slur had been used on others decades before her time as French Queen.

Talk about vibe-coding economics. Big Tech takes control of the US government, and then leads people to a glorious AI future, but can't "offer any specifics on how this could happen." No shit. Perhaps it's because you're simultaneously telling investors you'll be worth trillions because of all the human jobs you'll absorb.

AI Could Allow For 3-Day Workweeks And Single-Income Households, Bezos Claims

"In a phase-2 randomized trial at Amsterdam UMC, 31 patients with fibrotic liver disease (MASH) took the dasatinib-plus-quercetin combination just three days a week on an intermittent schedule, and 47% showed real fibrosis improvement on paired liver biopsies versus 7% on placebo, with full disease resolution in 53% versus 7%. Single-cell RNA sequencing of the biopsies confirmed the senescent and fibrotic cell populations had been depleted."

Sadly, successful phase 2 trials doesn't automatically mean a successful commercial product. Still, this is promising. It makes me wonder what other conditions clearing out these dead senolytic cells could improve.

Senolytics dasatinib and quercetin in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis: a proof-of-principle randomized, controlled trial

There are still parts of the world where people think gasoline cars you drive yourself are the future. Many people are still in the 'horseless carriages' stage when it comes to self-driving tech. They can only think about it in terms of how the old tech paradigm worked. Tiny cheap self-driving vehicles are perfect for cities. Nimble, no need for parking & cheaper than owning a car.

The Compact EV That Fits Dense Cities Better Than a Scooter or a Car

Rome - human driven taxi prices

​Like it or not, our post-work future is bearing down on us; the only question is how quickly it will fully arrive. We can see self-driving tech will wipe out driving jobs. On robotics current trajectory, it seems likely they will master most unskilled & semi-skilled tasks during the 2030s.

AI's job-shredding has already started. Mark D. Levine, the NYC Comptroller (the city's chief accountant), says AI is bearing down on the city's jobs fast. Entry-level posts are down 40-25% in many fields.

Who will be the first politicians to acknowledge this reality, and propose realistic policies like UBI to deal with it? Some might suspect the progressive left, but I think it might just as likely start on the populist right.

NYC Data, Mark D. Levine, the NYC Comptroller

Were it not for the AI boom, many Western economies would be in a recession. All the signs and economic trends (growing inflation, interest rates, etc.) point to further recession. Recessions are when businesses shed jobs to cut costs. Now businesses have a growing number of robot & AI employee choices. In logistics alone, robotics in the shape of self-driving tech, is soon due to shed millions of driving jobs.

​ The topic of a post-work world seemed sci-fi once, but now it's crept ever closer. It was always bound to end up the No.1 political topic eventually, too; Is the anti-AI backlash another sign this topic's day has arrived?

Jobs in health care. Jobs for women.

"German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday that the plan "combines independence, affordability and climate protection.........It is not just extreme weather events around the world that demonstrate how urgently we need to do more to protect the climate," he said. "If the situation in the Strait of Hormuz determines whether people can still afford their daily commute to work, that is not a good state of affairs."

If there's been an upside to the Middle East War, it's that it's been a giant advertisement for renewable energy. Not just cheaper, cleaner, & better, crucially it means energy-independence, too.

Smart move by Germany. Their industrial and manufacturing base is getting clobbered by China because they stuck with the dying fossil fuel paradigm for too long. Every other EU nation has committed to ending fossil fuel use, hopefully this further accelerates their efforts, too.

Germany sets out plan to phase out fossil fuels by 2045

$6.4 billion annually for ten years would be approx $200k per robot. $20k per year if they have a 10 year lifespan. A bargain for Toyota if they are replacing a skilled worker. I've read a few different reports on Toyota's plans and none of them details Toyota's plans for its human workers. It's normal practice to include a line about retraining human workers and jobs being safe.

Instead, one of those reports details how Toyota will use existing human workers to train their robot replacements. At least they're being honest.

Toyota plans to deploy 400,000 factory robots from 2028

With no end in sight, the Middle East War grinds on, and global petroleum supplies continue to fall. The good news? There's a fuel alternative that's better, cheaper, and the way of the future.

I suspect we are in the last twilight years where places like the Straits of Hormuz and Red Sea matter so much to global trade. You can make electricity anywhere, including your own home. Chinese manufacturers can spare the extra two weeks to sail around southern Africa to get their EVs to market.

The Logistics Industry is brutally competitive. Fossil fuels are already the losing choice, and just at the point EVs need a boost, the world's most pro-fossil-fuel administrations, the USA & Gulf States, have handed it to them.

BYD is entering the European heavy-duty electric truck market with the ETT 44. The 44-tonne tractor unit features a 651-kWh battery and, according to the manufacturer, offers a range of nearly 600 kilometers and a charging power of over 1.5 MW

As the writer William Gibson famously observed, 'The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.' When it comes to 21st century transport technology, that future is happening in China more than anywhere else, and it's happening fast.

In America, the current administration wants to retreat into the old dying tech paradigm of fossil fuels. That's a surefire recipe for failure. In Europe, the politicians at least mostly agree which direction the technology is going; but there they don't know how to protect their industrial base from China's clout.

Car Data - Fix the News

EU faces 300,000 factory job cuts as China ‘colonises’ supply chains, industry warns

The good news is that these, and similar, forces will be going into reverse for fossil fuels, and simultaneously cascading their decline.

The report identifies 5 key areas renewables have self-perpetuating feedback loops.

• Clean electricity as the master cascade. Solar and wind have crossed positive tipping points in many markets; further scaling is now self-propelling.

• Commodity supply chain transformation.

• High-quality marine protected areas, locally managed marine areas and fisheries co-management. Well-designed and well-enforced ocean conservation produces visible recovery of fish stocks and biodiversity within years

• Clean cooking and clean household energy. Around 2.1 billion people still rely on solid fuels for cooking.

• Adaptation enablers. Things like anticipatory action, adaptation finance and climate-resilient infrastructure. Also, governance, monitoring and social tipping, climate-resilient health systems are explicitly identified as enablers of self-propelling adaptation.

Positive Tipping Points: Accelerating system change to repair our planet was developed by the University of Exeter’s Green Futures Solutions team, in collaboration with The Earthshot Prize

"Mice that took semaglutide also did better than control animals on tests that evaluated coordination, muscle function and how the body processes sugar. Moreover, when the researchers investigated a set of cellular and molecular changes thought to drive ageing in the body — including inflammation — they found that their effects were dampened in treated mice compared with untreated ones."

In most rich developed countries average lifespan is about 83 years. If this GLP-1 effect holds true for humans, that would bring their lifespan to 93. Furthermore, the GLP-1 drugs improved the quality of those years.

Taking 65 as a retirement age, then this might double the amount of time a pension could be paid out. People already worry about supporting an aging population in the future, now this "problem" could be more acute. But of all the problems facing humanity, this is one of the best to have. 9 extra years of life is overwhelmingly good news, and we'll learn to adapt, as humans always do.

Can GLP-1 drugs slow ageing? Mouse study shows promise

With both sides at the unwinnable stalemate stage, there's every reason to think the Middle East War could drag on until 2027 or '28. China has long been preparing for the day it might need to get by with restricted oil supplies, hence its prioritization of renewables/EVs on national security grounds.

The knock on effects of this will be to speed further Chinese EV tech development. This will set up a virtuous cycle where EVs (already superior to combustion cars) get even better, and cheaper, and reduce global oil demand even more.

Analysis: China’s CO2 emissions fall in Q2 2026 due to plummeting oil use

The Middle East War seems to have entered a stalemate phase, with neither side able to win/end it. This may persist for some time. People often focus on the loss of global oil supply, but of much more consequence is the reduction in global fertilizer supply. This is already leading to food price inflation, compounded by the loss of wheat Ukraine & Russia used to supply.

The good news?

We have a technological solution to the oil loss; accelerate the renewables transition. And we also have a solution to the reduction in fertilizer: gene-edited bacteria that provide nitrogen to plants.

How will this pan out? Who knows. But there are a few things we can say for sure. Companies are already bringing such products to market, and dozens more are in development. As there's such a desperate, urgent demand for this, fingers crossed this sector achieves rapid success.

How engineered microbes could help feed the world’s crops

Biofertilizer Industry and Research Developments in China: A Mini-Review

Top 50 Global Biofertilizer Companies in The World

OP's main point is that none of these humanoid manufacturers have a real-world product that regular consumers want to buy. The bulk of customers so far are robot researchers. Furthermore, OP says LLMs don't seem to be scaling for embodied AI as they are for reasoning, so such a product is far off.

I'm not convinced.

Firstly, the money going into Chinese robotics is orders of magnitude smaller than the $3.7 trillion going into US AI. If China has a comparable bubble, then surely that's its property bubble.

Second, OP has picked examples of embodied AI failures, but seems to have ignored examples of success. So is this just cherry-picking?

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) reported 140+ manufacturers and 330+ humanoid models by the end of 2025. Inevitably, most of those will fail or be bought up, but the money involved is a drop in the ocean as a proportion of Chinese GDP. That's not the case for US AI, where that $3.7 trillion is 12% of US GDP.

My guess? The cutting edge of embodied AI looks much closer to a viable product than OP thinks. Quadruped robots are already valuable workplace tools, & by 2030 I'd guess people will be saying the same about humanoids.

China’s Overhyped Embodied AI Sector

'Goldbugs' are a type of investor who scorns fiat money & stocks, convinced the only thing that will ever hold eternal value is gold. The problem with this idea? The gold in the asteroid belt: potentially tens of billions to trillions of times more than humanity has ever mined. One day gold will be as cheap and disposable as the aluminum foil wrappers people throw in the garbage.

But how soon?

This research points out that many of the previous barriers; relatively cheap space access and advanced robotics, are already solved problems. The biggest remaining barrier? Data & software. Put another way, the robots & AI learning what to do to be able to asteroid mine. As we are in the era when AI is making quick work of software & data challenges, this brings asteroid mining closer.

Mining beyond Earth with Space Robots: Exploration, Sampling, and Extraction

I've so many head-scratching questions.

• Why is China spending so little to achieve almost comparable results?

• If AI is inherently deflationary, where does the revenue come from to cover this?

• US Big Tech used to rely on global sales (the EU in particular, usually being around 35% of all revenues), but that's shrinking. All the trends are pushing for more tech sovereignty, not less.

• We have centuries of evidence, stretching back to the 17th-century Dutch Tulip Craze, that in Capitalism, booms always end in a bust. Will AI be the exception?

• Even if there is a US stock market bust, AI use will still grow around the world, but how, and with whose AI? It feels like Open-Source is going to triumph in the end. Who knows, maybe that's a sign of the post-scarcity economy to come.

Why Big Tech's AI spending is bigger than you think