Perhaps I sound a bit like a broken record sometimes, saying something like, “Buy gold – protect your financial future”. But there’s a reason that I keep repeating that clarion call. It’s because a tidal wave of economic change is already bearing down on us – and it’s a tidal wave that will mean unprecedented financial disaster for countless millions of people. In fact, it’s already meant unprecedented financial disaster for millions. If it hasn’t gotten you yet, then thank God for that, and start doing what’s necessary to escape being drowned.

A tidal wave – a tsunami. I want you to take a second and really picture a tidal wave. See it clearly in your mind – a 100-foot-high wave (that’s a wave more than 10 times taller than you are…well, unless you happen to be over 10 feet tall). If it hits you, your chances of survival are, to put it mildly…not good. The wave has already risen to its full height and it’s rushing toward you, where you’re standing on the beach. And I’ve got more bad news for you: a tidal wave can move at about the same speed as a jet – about 500 mph.

Just a thought…From where you’re standing on the beach, you might want to run like hell.

The Robots are Coming for Us

So, what’s the nature of this monster tidal wave that’s bearing down on us, threatening to completely sweep away our financial houses? – It’s the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing.

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And how fast is it rocketing toward us? – A year or two ago, most people had never even heard of AI. Now, it’s virtually all anyone talks about in the economic marketplace. Every day, every message, every tweet, I get seems to be about how Nvidia, Tesla, Amazon – all the “Magnificent Seven” stocks that make up the overwhelming market cap bulk of the S&P 500 – are developing, incorporating, advancing, integrating…and on and on…AI into their operations.

Say “quantum computing” to most people, and all you’re likely to get is a blank, “I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about” stare. If you’re giving that same stare, don’t feel bad – you’re only in the same boat as 99.99% of the world’s population. The truth is that computer technology is advancing at such a breakneck speed, hardly anyone can keep up with it. But just because you may not understand exactly what quantum computing is, that doesn’t mean that it can’t eat you alive.

Here's the essence of what you need to know – just knowing this much will put you waaaaay ahead of the vast majority of people in the world. AI and quantum computing are wiping out people’s jobs and income faster than I can type this sentence.

Don’t be deceived. Don’t fall for the rosy picture that whoever’s in power in the government is always trying to paint. For example, every month the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) trots out the Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) report. It usually shows something like 200,000 new jobs added to the economy.

Don’t believe it. IT’S ALL BULLSHIT.

First of all, the numbers are phony as a three-dollar bill. They come out with trumpeted fanfare…and then the following month they get revised, nearly always significantly lower. Example: The BLS recently issued a press release confessing, “The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for April was revised down by 57,000, from +165,000 to +108,000, and the change for May was revised down by 54,000, from +272,000 to +218,000. With these revisions, employment in April and May combined is 111,000 lower than previously reported." Surprise, surprise.

Second, the bulk of the remaining “new jobs” numbers are either – 

1. Second jobs that people are having to take to try to make ends meet (so, not cases of unemployed people getting employed – just already employed people getting a little “more” employed as they’re forced to work another 10 or 20 hours a week to keep a roof over their head or indulge in luxuries like feeding their children three meals a day)
2. Part-time, rather than full-time, jobs – meaning they’re not providing anyone with a full-time income

Finally, while hundreds of thousands of new jobs are supposedly being added every month, somehow the unemployment rate keeps creeping higher. It was 3.5% a year ago – it’s now 4.1%. Would the BLS care to explain that discrepancy?

What’s Really Happening – Massive Job Losses

What’s really happening is not hundreds of thousands of new jobs being created every month. The ugly reality is, instead, massive firings and layoffs by the nation’s largest employers.

The only thing that I can tell you for sure about the following numbers is that they’re not up to date. That is, even more people have lost their jobs since whenever these numbers were pulled. But like so much of what’s happening in our world these days, it’s happening too fast to keep up with. Here’s the scary picture: 

Jobs Recently Lost at Major Corporations

• Amazon – more than 25,000 jobs gone
• Meta – more than 20,000 jobs lost
• Google – more than 12,000 employees let go in January, 2023 alone
• Microsoft – more than 10,000 jobs cut
• Citigroup – planning 20,000 job cuts in 2024 (10% of its total workforce)
• eBay – plans to cut approximately 10% of its workforce
• UPS – plans to eliminate about 15% of its managerial staff (approximately 12,000 jobs)
  
  

Companies like Amazon and UPS are drastically cutting their workforces, replacing them with AI-powered robots. UPS just built a new warehouse where 3,000 robots will do nearly all of the work. Walmart, the nation’s largest employer, is ramping up fully automated distribution centers. Amazon’s “workforce” is already one-third comprised of robots. More human employees will be cast aside as Amazon pushes ahead with things such as delivery drones. For financial efficiency, AI and robots are a huge boon for companies. Robots don’t get sick, don’t take maternity leave, don’t need vacations (heck, you don’t even have to give them the weekend off), don’t want health insurance or 401(k) plans, and don’t expect a Christmas bonus.

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A recent survey of nearly 1,000 major corporate executives, done by ResumeBuilder, found that almost 40% of them say layoffs are likely at their companies in 2024. And to what do they attribute these looming layoffs? – Survey respondents say the reason behind many of the job cuts is “replacing workers with artificial intelligence (AI)”.

IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna, echoed that sentiment, saying that he “could easily see 30%” of the company’s employees in human resources and other departments “getting replaced by AI and automation”. 30 percent – think about that! What’s hugely – and sadly – ironic is that IBM is one of the leaders in developing AI software and quantum computing solutions. So, some of the victims of IBM’s AI success will end up being its own employees. Those job cuts won’t be because IBM is doing poorly. On the contrary, it’s doing great. Its pre-tax income has nearly quadrupled since 2020, and its stock price is up by as much as 20% thus far in 2024.

White-Collar Professionals Can’t Escape AI Job Cuts

The rise of AI doesn’t just threaten the job security of blue-collar employees, such as auto and other factory workers. That was the story with previous advances in technology and automation. But it’s a different – and a much wider ranging, with a much wider economic impact – story now. Now, with the advent of AI, white-collar professionals are also seeing their job security rapidly diminish.

Young people are actually being warned by some job counselors, “Don’t go into law!” Why not? – Because by the time they graduate from law school, there may be a huge glut in the profession as corporate law firms shed staff by the bushel. Why should firms pay an associate hundreds of dollars an hour to draw up contracts that an AI program can spit out – with fewer errors – in mere seconds?

Similar threats exist for financial services professionals. AI software can run more extensive and more accurate financial analysis of a company in seconds than a professional investment analyst at a bank can produce after working on it for days. Goldman Sachs is using AI and quantum computing to forecast option prices. JPMorgan Chase is creating the ultimate AI portfolio optimization program. When it’s finished, how many portfolio managers are going to be out of a job?

Up until about five minutes ago, if you were someone with the knowledge and skill to do computer coding, you were virtually assured of being able to land a high-paying job at a major tech firm such as Google or Meta. But now? – Now an AI program can do your work better, light years faster, and much less expensively than whatever Google would have to pay you to do it.

A Google Quantum Computer

The advance of technology has, undeniably, made our lives simpler and easier in many ways. But technological advances are never just pure progress, with no down side. No – there’s always a trade-off with technological progress. Aldous Huxley posed an interesting question regarding the advent of air travel: Is me having the convenience of being able to get from New York to L.A. in just a few hours actually worth the cost of all the millions of lives that have been snuffed out by bombs dropped from airplanes? If that one’s a little hard to wrap your head around, then just consider this instead: Yes, it’s easier and less expensive for everyone to have a coffee table that’s been stamped out, cookie cutter style, by a machine…but what you’ve lost is any chance to own a beautiful, unique, hand-crafted work of carpentry art produced by a master woodworker.

Advances in computing have made it great for me to just hop on Expedia’s website and quickly and easily find the best hotel deal and book all my travel arrangements…but not so great for travel agents. It’s great for me that I can whip out my smartphone and buy a car, complete with financing, all within a matter of minutes…but not so great for car salespeople.

The rapid advances in AI and quantum computing are great for lowering companies’ expenses and overhead…but not so great for the hundreds of thousands of individuals finding themselves suddenly and unexpectedly thrown out of work.

So Fast It’ll Make Your Head Spin

The tidal wave. Think about how rapidly this massive shift in our economic landscape is occurring. It was just a very few years ago that we were constantly reading about all the new employees that Amazon was adding. Now, things have completely flipped - the news now is all about the tens of thousands of people losing their jobs at Amazon to robots.

What is enabling advances in AI – and all the consequent massive shifts in our economy – to happen at the speed of light is quantum computing. Quantum computing is a whole new level of computing power that leaps ahead of the capabilities of the operating framework of previous computers. Quantum computers enable multiple information paths to be simultaneously explored. The extent to which this increases the speed at which a computer can find solutions to even the most complex problems is mind-boggling.

…moving at the speed of light

You can try to understand it this way: With previous computing, if you needed to find a bit of information that appeared somewhere in a book, then the computer would search through each page of the book in succession. With quantum computing, the computer can search every page of the book simultaneously. Quantum computers can answer problems in seconds that even the most advanced traditional computers would take literally decades to solve.

Noteworthy financial advisor, Louis Navallier, describes quantum computing as, “…the turbo charger for artificial intelligence.”

Thus, the tidal wave – the harrowing, breakneck speed at which this massive upheaval in the way our economy operates is taking place. And the harrowing speed at which jobs are being eliminated and people are being thrown out of work. And, again, it’s not just lower- and middle-class workers who are seeing their jobs and future financial security vanish – many of the high-paying careers of the wealthy 1% are now also becoming casualties of AI technology.

SPECIAL REPORT: Look Out! – the Robots are Coming for Us – Conclusion

Conclusion. Hmm…What is my conclusion here? Just this: We are living in a world where life and our society are changing at a never-before-seen speed – a frightening speed - frightening simply because it’s virtually impossible to keep up with everything that’s changing so very quickly. (Here’s another fright factor: You know those AI-generated responses to internet search queries that now appear at the top of search results? – Well, I’ve read through a number of them, and found them (A) littered with factual inaccuracies, and (B) strongly slanted to the woke or Left side. Example: When I was researching unemployment data, the AI-generated answer that popped up actually quoted, word for word, the Biden administration’s oft-repeated talking point claim that unemployment is at “the lowest rate seen for decades” 🡨Not true! The unemployment rate was lower just five years ago, under the Trump administration. For people who don’t know any better, these AI-generated answers to search questions can constitute tools of propaganda/indoctrination.)

We’re also living in an increasingly uncertain world – specifically, a world where next week’s paycheck is a much less certain thing than it used to be. (Relationships, politics, and pretty much everything else in the world are also characterized by rapidly eroding certainty, but at the moment I’m focused on, “Where the heck is my income going to come from?”.)

Lots of good jobs – even some entire professions and industries – are likely to vanish within the next decade. Millions of people will find themselves suddenly bumped out of the workplace by a robot or software program – and with no easy or obvious path back into the workplace. The robots are coming for us. And they’re coming fast. Just a couple of years ago, many of us had never even heard of AI – but it’s now the driving force guiding major operational restructuring at major corporations.

With more and more robots replacing human workers, investing – rather than employment - may be one of the few avenues to pursue for financial security. And in a world characterized by ever-increasing upheaval, uncertainty, and danger, one very attractive looking investment to consider is gold. Something solid. Gold – because it’s one of the few investments that has always provided a level of certainty as a financial safe haven – and we are certainly facing a very, very uncertain financial future.

• J.B. Maverick

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Sources:

https://www.businessinsider.com/layoffs-sweeping-us-these-are-companies-making-cuts-2024

https://www.resumebuilder.com/4-in-10-companies-anticipate-layoffs-in-2024/

https://secure.investorplace.com/?cid=MKT786947&eid=MKT808289&tid=04a76ff242c34b3cb6976dcbe5feedf7&assetId=AST330916&page=2

https://investorplace.com/author/louis-navellier/

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper & Brothers, 1945

https://www.vectorstock.com/royalty-free-vectors/ai-robot-vectors

https://www.cnet.com/pictures/take-a-look-at-googles-quantum-computing-technology/

https://www.space.com/15830-light-speed.html

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