To have a horrible feeling about the way things are going and a dystopian future

I'm a working woman, but certainly don't scoff at SAHP, and ideally I would like everyone to have the choice of staying home for a few years while their kids are little. And I care about both men and women, and want both my son and daughter to have teh chance to do what they like, and being in a family does tend to make a lot of people happy. If they want to be single and focus solely on career, then that's fine too.

I think you’re right to be concerned about the direction the world is moving in. And while there have always been terrible men, so many men are being hit terribly by AI. They make up the majority of the NEETs. This is not a male vs. female issue.

As for the future, there is going to have to be more regulations placed on people like Musk and the tech giants. They have got far too much power & influence these days and not in a good way.

Are we getting to end game capitalism? When one man has enough wealth to be richer than Switzerland then maybe.

My view is that they're obviously not very successful at this, given the world seems increasingly full of authoritarian fascist governments. You do know that that harping on about Soros is dog-whistle for right-wing antisemitism, right?

“We were told computer technology would wipe out millions of jobs, young people would never get a job or be able to buy a house.”

and that has pretty much happened. We’ve been in an employers market for 20-odd years and counting because there are not enough jobs, and jobs requiring a knowledge base and analytical skills are the ones that have been devalued the most.

”the only jobs that were lost…” were these ones that you don’t think matter, is that what you meant to say?? Lovely. Also loads of retail jobs went and things like bank tellers, lots of jobs connected to information like journalism have been drastically reduced and drastically altered - it’s basically just rewriting as many press releases as possible
in the shortest time these days, even before AI - and anything to do with translation,…
still as long as it didnt affect you, you didn’t see it I guess.

What's your view of George Soros (and now his son Alex) who has been influencing elections for decades though his funding? Or is that ok because it's aligned with your worldview?

I find the older I get, I don’t care to be around. (NO it isn’t depression, perimenopause, not ND or any other thing people will come up with!!!). I know most people do care to be around.

@WiseMintDeer "What you do see is lots of women who want to not work and be housewives or SAHM but with equal rights, equal access to finances, equality of decision making and the men pulling their weight at home and so on"

What the actual fuck? You have GOT to be a man

It's an interesting hypothesis OP. AI could very well (in fact it eventually will) mean mass culling of the workforce requiring a complete social restructure. Who's going to be doing the restructuring? I think it's perfectly fair to envisage that a seismic societal shift and possible lack of individual resources will affect women the most. They usually do.

“Everybody said computers would take all our jobs but that never happened except to all the people who lost their jobs. But I didn’t lose my job so it didn’t happen.” 🤣
What a gem. Tell that to all of us graduating in the early 2000s who couldn’t get entry level office jobs because they’d all gone, and had a harder time establishing a career/lower lifetime earnings as a result.

Along with not realising that the current jobs bloodbath is due to AI. Which is literally computers. It just took a while for the full effects to become apparent, and some people still don’t see it. Because it doesn’t directly affect them. This is exactly what people were worried about in the 90s!

OP I don’t know if you’re right or not, I’ve never really considered this, but as a thought experiment it’s definitely got some mileage in our current ‘nudge’ culture if certain political parties get power.

I'm less worried about tradwives then the fact we have some men with enough money to buy elections and influence policy even in wealthy economies, and they seem without exception to be dreadful fascists, because I suppose you don't keep hold of that much money without being an awful human being.

I fear slightly, though I don't think it's inevitable, that we are sleepwalking into a scenario where there are few jobs, money and power is entirely siphoned to men like this. If you want to go rant tinfoil hat, apparently some of them have been realising that at this rate, there will have tobe some kind of universal income of there's to be anyone to actually buy their products. But if the world has to come begging to them for the money, then they'll see the opportunity to demand it is conditional, not universal. Can you imagine, if someone like Musk got to make that decision?

I honestly don't think that's s likely, a paranoid thought experiment of mine maybe, but at any rate these guys have been allowed to amass far too much money, which is bad enough - but also they all seem to be racists and misogynists too.

I don't need a grand claim to being special to care about being around.

A worldwide social media ban wouldn’t be a bad thing!!!

No idea what you're saying, OP. I don't feel pushed out of any spaces by traditional men. I don't think AI is targeting women, specifically. Many women don't have bad experiences with men just as many women do. Balanced perspectives are healthy for everyone. It sounds like you're having a really bad day and maybe a break from the news or social media might help bring some perspective.

I think,there is a distinction to be drawn between, on the one hand, doing more to promote the benefits of a functional family and believeing that the pendulum has swung too far to an acceptance of "anything goes" in terms of how people lead their lives.

And on the other rolling back women's rights.

I don't see any reason why recognising the former should necessarily lead to the latter.

As a spices, we are inherently selfish and destructive. We’re nothing special.

The sad thing is that I’d feel very supportive of women staying home with the children if the more sub par men hadn’t demonstrated over and over that they can’t be relied upon not to be abusive / lazy / cheaters /insert failure here. Unfortunately so many have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted to have the best interests of women and children at heart that my heart sinks when I hear of a woman deciding to stay at home with no protection. Of course women are far from perfect too but men’s whole lives tend not to be at the mercy of their earning power.

I’ve been happily married for many years to a wonderful man but do I trust my husband to “lead” the family? No, he’s completely clueless in some ways, as am I in others and we need all the brains and perspectives at our disposal in these tough times. Imagine watching your family being “led” into disaster by some of the questionable specimens on display in the press of late.

"We want safety, protection, to be cared for and bought things. We want to raise children.".

Why wouldn't you want these things? A healthy and sane society would provide exactly the ingredients for this. Your natural instincts have been perverted OP.

Just imagine your quote put in reverse "We want danger, and to be unprotected, unloved and have to fend for ourselves financially. We don't want to be mothers". Seriously.

Fuck that, I'm hanging on in there. Thousands of generations before me surviving plagues and war and famine and ice ages without basic amenities and medicines and god knows what, and then we throw in the towel because it is going to require a rethink alongside ai? No thanks.

Maybe Human Extinction is the way to go!!!
There’s a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

Dealing with AI first - I started work just as the IBM PC was released. We were told computer technology would wipe out millions of jobs, young people would never get a job or be able to buy a house. That the whole population would be down to working a three day week and we should all plan our leisure time because we would be forced to have so much more of it. That was in 1982. I've worked flat out ever since. Never had the chance to work part time. The only people who lost their jobs were typists, filing clerks and accounts clerks. Millions of jobs were created. So I'll wait and see what effect AI really has before I panic.

As for a gradual chipping away at women in the workplace, yes there is a nasty streak of social media bullshit at the moment, but there is nothing to stop us working, going freelance, setting up our own companies etc. Half our customers are female. We have equality laws and safeguards and we need to protect those vigorously.

Sexism was rife in the 80s, yet I have been able to buy my own flat, run my own life, survive a 40 year career, have a child as a single mum, send him to independent school, raise him respectably and never hear a word of disdain, simply because I wouldn't tolerate that nonsense.

My reaction to all the negative hype is to keep calm, carry on and don't give an inch.

It’s certainly true that women are officially viewed as ‘the reserve army of labour’ and women have officially been kicked out of the workplace by official actions in the past (eg end of WW2). Nowadays I’m not sure if officialdom has the organisation to be honest. But good old male misogyny and the patriarchy are acting in its place, and modern politics is dominated by manipulation and propaganda rather than the old post-war rules of freedom of information and informed consent. Yanbu op, not at all. Men are not good friends to women.

Those who operate out of the skill set of ai or, at least, outside of the cost efficiency of ai, will continue to work. How are you using this as evidence that we are on the precipice of a great regression in the equality of men and women that lands us into bucolic cosplaying.

Exactly. They're not trad-wives and I've never met a woman who wants to be one.

What you do see is lots of women who want to not work and be housewives or SAHM but with equal rights, equal access to finances, equality of decision making and the men pulling their weight at home and so on.

Women who seem to think 'feminism' didn't give them equal rights to work, but think 'feminism' made them have to work and they don't want to. But they don't want to relinquish the opportunities or the rights.

It's like any other SM trend. Homesteading got huge during COVID, SM portraying how fantastic it was to grow your own food, have livestock, can for your pantry. Which didn't really demonstrate the huge amounts of labour, time and money that goes into it.

Things go full circle. Factory made bread, food, clothes etc became popular because they were convenient and often cheaper. Same with supermarkets. People were pissed off having to go to several shops over several days a week to buy everything they needed so supermarkets were created and were a blessing. Now people harken back to the good old days when you shopped at a local butcher, baker and grocer.

It's aspirational now to shop at little independent shops, bake your own bread, can peaches, grow a garden but the reality is most people don't have the time, money or even the desire. It's just rose-tinted specs and people forget the high-street died because they couldn't be arsed to go there.

Same thing with trad-wives. It's a social media illusion, not a societal shift.