The decline of SF?

You have high expectations for AI, which at the moment the AI boom is based on a fancy online tool which people can ask questions to.

In accounting machine learning has already been in play for years, will it reduce accountants much more? not a huge job loss

Customer service has chat bots for donkey years, it will make them a little better but won't be mass replacement

We are at least 10 year and more from AI driven cars, even then it has huge concerns over insurance etc and I doubt it will have a huge impact for closer to 20 years

Maybe, if you are going to make predictions on AI, you might research it.

You seem desperate for mass unemployment, not sure why anyone would be wishing for that, people losing their jobs etc

To have nobody driving the car is 10+ years away. I think you need to take your own advice

Yes you are wishing for unemployment and a crash. Fairly common opinion to be honest, people hate others doing well or even worse doing better than them, the old Irish mentality of "bring them down a peg or two"

If you think AI is going to drive that well you are sadly mistaken.

Well, this is going to be a world wide issue. It will effect countries like China more than the West.

This is how feel.

The stability of FG and FF is too attractive for a lot of people who have a lot to lose.

If you've appreciating assets, you're not going to risk it on socialists (I know SF aren't really socialists).

Also if you look at a population pyramid of Ireland, there's a bulge of people from 35 to 50ish. The majority of these people will have bought their house and settled down.

There's also a lot of talk recently about the transfer of wealth from the boomer generation who will be dying off now. This might help the next gen but property.

All FG and FF have to do is win the majority of the middle class votes and working people who just want stability.

I bet this will be their strategy.

They can use Mary Lou's quote about €300,000 houses against her.

100%.

It's difficult to foresee how big of a problem it will be right now.

I think the major problem will be how quickly it could happen.

In 10 years time truck drivers, taxi drivers and delivery drivers could be obsolete.

That's a lot of jobs right there.

Also how many people will bother buying a car if you can just get a robotaxi when you need it?

This will take millions of car manufacturing and sales jobs in Europe. Germany's economy would collapse without it's car industry.

Waymo is gradually scaling.

We'll have to see where they are in 2 or 3 years.

Will they just licence the technology globally? If so, it'll scale rapidly.

There's so much research in self-driving right now, you'd assume 2 or 3 companies will be scaling rapidly within 5 years.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/transport/2023/10/12/dubai-begins-testing-of-driverless-vehicles-on-public-roads/

The technology is already under trial.

You can get a driverless taxi in california,not sure about other states

But they are definitely on the road in America

Different fortunes alright, as of Friday they are now the largest party in Westminster, Stormont and the councils in NI.

I suspect people wishing for recessions are mostly doing so because they believe it's the only way that they'll ever be able to own a house in this country.

Depends on people's individual circumstances. If they have a bullet proof job (say public sector) and decent savings then they might think they could ride it out. After all, that's what happened with many people after the 2008 crash.

All of those things are true. However many public sector employees were able to get mortgages in that period. They represented the kind of low-risk long term option that banks were still comfortable with giving mortgages to during that time.

Anyway we're getting beyond my original point which was basically to not attribute to malice what can instead be attributed to ruthless self interest. Whether that strategy is misguided is really besides the point.

The vile abuse aimed at the Stoops and Cara Hunter by angry SF supporters for running in East Belfast is the height of irony considering this happened in 1986. Nationalists who rejected violence and terrorism (the overwhelming majority of nationalists in NI) are entitled to vote for the SDLP or indeed anyone else they choose.

They returned two MPs. One in the city and hinterlands of Bloody Sunday, John Hume, and a place that rejected the bombings, shootings, rape, torture and disappearing of people carried out by the Provos and defended to this day by SF.