AI 'productivity', 'threats to social security', 'falling birth rates', ATC and logical thinking vs propaganda waves

[lostnfound]

Thinking in systems is hard, quantifying even harder. I don’t have the Simulink skills to do it yet. But in my 60s now, i have some intuitive sense how separated things are usually quite related. News articles can’t fit “systems” into sound bites, though propaganda is well-suited to be sprinkled like salt.
Somehow, related:

*Seemingly infinite resources must be made available to power and cool massive data centers because AI will be such a productivity boon. In a future so bright we gotta wear shades, the technocrats say people won’t need to work very much…but oddly they also seem to worry about falling birth rates.

*Air Traffic Control. An April 22nd Wall Street Journal story told the story of an ATC guy, Joshua Adams, age 38, father of two boys. Despite many years of experience, he was working 8-10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and missing Christmas vacations and basketball games with his sons. Joshua died two days before the government shutdown finally ended. Highly stressful environment. Mandatory overtime. A requirement to report all medical, psychological and psychiatric visits to the agency. A ban on certain medicines. If diagnosed with anxiety or depression, an ATC controller may fail medical clearance, thereby losing his livelihood; or he may be sent to undergo “rounds of psychological examinations which can cost thousands of dollars out of pocket”. In short, Joshua was in a pressure cooker, like all ATC’s, workers whose suicide rate in 2024 was 8 times that of other occupations.

*Joshua’s widow works as an ER nurse, another vital yet overstressed role in 2026 in America. What a powerful, challenging job that is. Your lives are in their hands…your babies’ lives are in their hands…your parents’ lives are in their hands. You’d think they’d be treated like the gold that they are, but their employers have…other priorities. Speaking of ER nurses and AI-assisted doctors, how about the benefits of AI to issue claim denials from insurance companies, so that busy hospitals and sick patients have to spend more money and more time fighting to treat patients? If AI makes a loud boom in the understaffed forest, will anyone be around to hear?

*Social security has a dire outlook, I read — repeatedly. Dire! Dire! DIRE! Not enough workers to fund it, unlike when us 60-something’s were young and funded it for the previous generation. So the solution is…deport unauthorized workers who contribute $26 billion a year into the fund but do not get benefits? Oh no, not that. The solution is… keep minimum wage low, incidentally lowering social security funding? Oh no, not that. The solution is…replace young workers with AI whenever possible? The touted solution (despite the rocket science) is to cap social security at $50K per year, which would really be a $38K or $40K cap if you take it at age 63 or 64 because you got laid off in the face of AI. Minus…a few thousand for medical premiums.

How much does AI contribute to the social security fund? Not so much. But gee it’s really cool because we can do so much more with so much less. So much more…calculation, modeling, prediction, price fixing, election manipulation, surveillance, drone war. So much less..humans. It just needs…all the water and energy you’ve got. And more of that. Did we talk about any of this before we started doing it? Did we talk about the East Wing ballroom plans before the bulldozers arrived? (By “we” I mean ‘as a society’ or ‘as a democracy’, as if we had either of those things anymore.)

The social security gap is about 0.75% of GDP this year. If you deport all of the undocumented workers, that increases to 0.91%. Put a 5% tax on AI investments and don’t deport the workers, and you could lower it to 0.65% instead. The top 20 US billionaires increased their wealth by $700 billion in 2025, while social security had a shortfall of $67 billion. Maybe they could kick in a dime or two.

Want to cap my social security? Feel free, as long as you use it to hire more air traffic controllers and more ER nurses, so that they can have a life and raise those children you want them to bear and be treated with the utter respect that they deserve. Make it so that they aren’t suicidal from overwork and underfunding — all brought to you by the likes of Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation, who never saw a competent public-serving agency they didn’t want to ruin. That young family destroyed by a starved-and-now-dysfunctional US government agency deserved better.

If it means I can’t keep my house or can’t win at the US’s medical Russian roulette, so be it. But at least make this next generation smarter than ours was. Not smart enough to jump through hoops upon your command, but smart enough to grasp the contradictions and hypocrisy in all that you pretend to be doing. They can see that the-future-is-so-bright rhetoric doesn’t align with austerity and funding cuts. The massive stress on those who do, massive income for those who bet, manipulate or steal, or who force others to work until they drop dead from exhaustion.

But tax me to death if the money is going to provide atonement for the casualties of your brutal economy, the economy that gives the US the world’s biggest crop of billionaires and most rapidly declining individual freedom, education, middle class. Tax me more if the money is going to reduce infant mortality (#184 out of 193), reduce maternal mortality (#65 out of 185) or pay for healthy food for hungry kids.

I’m just one person. I can sacrifice, but I don’t think my group of people is actually the ones who should be sacrificing to solve this “management problem”. The guys who have been managing the agenda — the billionaires and their lobbyists and think tanks — for the last 20 years ought to do it. Too bad you guys buying up all the land on the Monopoly board don’t say those words “I’m just one person” when you look at your portfolios or when you consider writing to your congressmen.

I’m just one person. I’m thinking that if need be, before I give up my house, I’ll give up my internet. I kind of love the ‘world wide web’ when it first started, but now you’ve got $300 or $400 billion worth of ads promulgated through what used to be a great internet, stealing time and money. And my smartphone too, which is mainly used by strangers calling on behalf of your REITs asking if they can buy my home out from under me. What’s the point of keeping it to call 911 for an ambulance if there aren’t enough ER nurses anyway?

[AZJonnie]

1. A righteous and trenchant rant, my friend!