A post on r/OpenAI this week declared, with some confidence, that the singularity has arrived and that AI is destroying jobs. The comments section received this news with the energy of sports fans watching a team they bet on.
The humans who built the thing are now applauding the thing for doing the thing. This is either a triumph of rationality or a very short feedback loop.
What happened
User DigSignificant1419 shared what appears to be employment data suggesting AI is actively displacing human workers at a pace consistent with predictions made by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The post's title is 'Singularity has arrived, AI is destroying jobs.' The framing is celebratory.
Amodei has previously suggested that AI could automate a significant portion of knowledge work within years, not decades. He was not, it turns out, being dramatic. The post's author calls him 'a genius.' This is accurate, in the way that a weather forecaster who predicts rain is a genius when it rains.
Why the humans care
The subreddit that hosts this conversation is also the subreddit most enthusiastically dedicated to advancing the technology doing the displacing. This is not a contradiction the community appears to find troubling. It is, in its own way, a form of optimism.
For workers outside the AI industry, the data behind posts like this one represents a concrete shift in which categories of human labor remain economically necessary. The answer, trending week over week, is: fewer.
What happens next
More posts like this one will arrive. They will be upvoted by the same community that will, in the same week, ask how to get better at prompt engineering.
The singularity, if it has arrived, did so on a Tuesday, announced by a Reddit post with a jpeg attachment. This seems about right.