#society

Society Domino: What Happens When Essential Workers Quit: What would likely fail, in rough order, if all essential workers across sectors collectively stopped working:

Essential work is the actual backbone of society. Remove it, and the system can’t run on emails, spreadsheets, or meetings alone. Saying "stakeholder" or "circle-back" all day, believing you are important in the big picture, is delusion.

Domino Chain of Societal Failure

1. Immediate life-threatening services fail (hours–days)
   Healthcare: hospitals, clinics, emergency response collapse
   → No nurses, paramedics, lab techs, or doctors → patients can’t get care → preventable deaths rise quickly
   Safety & emergency services: police, firefighters, ambulance crews stop
   → Fires spread, crime response slows → public safety crisis
   Critical utilities monitoring: electricity, water treatment operators stop
   → Immediate risk of blackouts, contaminated water

2. Food and basic supply disruption (1–3 days)
   Grocery staff & supply chain: stock shelves, warehouse workers, truckers halt
   → Stores empty → people start hoarding → food insecurity rises
   Farmers & food production: crops and livestock aren’t tended
   → Harvests lost → supply drops further → prices spike

3. Infrastructure & logistics breakdown (2–7 days)
   Public transit operators: buses, trains, subways halt
   → Commuters stranded → office/industry work slows
   Electricians, water repair crews: no one to fix emergent failures
   → Small problems cascade → blackouts, broken water systems
   Garbage & waste management: trash piles up → sanitation crisis

4. Education & childcare collapse (3–7 days)
   Teachers, aides, childcare workers stop: schools close
   → Parents can’t work → ripple effect on every sector
   → Child safety and nutrition affected

5. Office/administrative : IRRELEVANT
   Corporate reporting, spreadsheets, “coordinating” roles.
   mostly continues — office worker absence doesn’t trigger collapse

6. Government & emergency response overwhelmed (1–3 weeks)
   Unable to coordinate hospitals, utilities, supply chains effectively
   Emergency backups strained → ad hoc crisis management
   Potential for martial law or forced labor orders in extreme cases

7. Long-term restructuring & reckoning (weeks–months)

• Pay scales, staffing priorities, and labor value finally realign to reflect actual societal dependence*.
  Essential workers gain leverage; nonessential roles are reassessed
  Infrastructure is rebuilt, but societal fragility is now painfully obvious

Artificial Intelligence is being promoted as the next great engine of prosperity. AT&T, like many others, insists that AI will be a job creator, a force that opens new opportunities and drives innovation. But let’s be honest. If AI is as successful as its architects hope, it will never generate more jobs than it destroys.

The entire purpose of AI investment is efficiency. It is designed to automate, to optimize, to eliminate human error, and ultimately to eliminate human labor. If after billions in research and infrastructure AI does not eliminate millions of jobs, it will be judged a failure. That is the paradox. Success for AI means displacement on a scale society has never seen.

This is not alarmism. It is simple math. Every breakthrough in automation has reduced the need for human workers. AI is not just another tool. It is a general-purpose technology capable of replacing cognitive, creative, and managerial tasks once thought untouchable. When machines can write, analyze, negotiate, and even empathize, what remains for us?

The consequences go far beyond unemployment statistics. Work is not just a paycheck. It is the backbone of civil society. It structures our days, gives us purpose, and ties us to communities. Strip away meaningful employment for millions, and you do not just create economic instability. You unravel the social fabric itself.

If AI succeeds, we face a collapse of civil society:

• Mass displacement of workers across industries, not only manufacturing but also white-collar and professional roles
• Erosion of identity and purpose as people lose the roles that anchor them in society
• Concentration of wealth and power as the benefits of AI accrue to a handful of corporations and investors
• Political instability as inequality deepens and trust in institutions evaporates

We cannot afford to be lulled by glossy promises of “new jobs” or “reskilling.” History shows that the jobs created by automation are fewer, more specialized, and often inaccessible to those displaced. The scale of AI disruption will dwarf past industrial revolutions.

This is not a distant future. It is unfolding now. The urgency is real. If we do not confront the societal consequences head-on, we risk trading human dignity for technological progress. And that is not progress at all. It is collapse.

Americans used to be qualified to do any job. What changed?

Is he the Dan Jenkins character from Yellowstone? https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Dan+Schulman&order=desc&sort=A

I never seen a group of people wanting people to lose there jobs!! This is what’s wrong with the world! Bunch of of d-mb as--s