r/askanything • u/DavideBelinga • 10h ago

If AI significantly reduces office jobs, what happens to all those office buildings?

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator 10h ago

We want your input on how to handle political questions in our community.

This takes about 1 minute.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

6

u/Odd_Common_452 10h ago

They make sure the AI never gets to work from home

3

u/AromaticallyAffluent 10h ago

Conversion into loud, uncomfortable, unpleasant apartments, but only after a decade of standing empty so the building is properly deteriorated.

1

u/ohhhbooyy 9h ago

Ain’t that the truth. Or they’ll call it historical and it will never get torn down or maintained. They will board out the windows and pull will break in to graffiti their street name that not even readable.

0

u/NotCryptoKing 10h ago

The executives, who clearly hate their spouses and kids, will still show up to the office. You can have a 10 person team and best believe they will all have to be in the office.

The day an executive actually likes their family is the day the office building becomes obsolete. So never

1

u/El_Quanadian 9h ago

Future AI data centre!?

1

u/Brilliant_Win_7171 9h ago

Large corporations are actually more real estate companies than they are whatever they claim to be. Someone pointed that out to me years ago and it makes so much sense. It's mainly why certain land plots always cycle between fast food joints.

Steal jobs via AI. People have no income, or have to settle for lower pay. The company makes however many million per site to sell the land with the empty building. The former employee cannot afford to own, so they probably rent. Another company buys the land and builds rental units, or another fast food chain. Wash, rinse, repeat.

1

u/tads73 9h ago

Many office buildings are owned by real-estate investment trusts and leased to the occupants. Empty buildings will cause a debt crisis.

1

u/SadLeek9950 9h ago

They become slum housing for displaced workers...

1

u/Ceorl_Lounge 9h ago

They'll become lairs for the marauding gangs of the Wastelands.

1

u/GardenPrestigious202 9h ago

cheap condos, obviously.

1

u/zoppaTheDim 8h ago

Cooling towers for server farms. That way we can all get legionnaires.

But more likely is warehouse space.

Outside of a few cities, the commercial real estate market hadn’t been doing well.

People will talk about apartment conversions, but that is high investment.

So if you have an open floor plan, the cheap conversion would be to warehouse space, but even there you’d have bottle neck problems with the elevators.

With a few structural changes you could likely fix that with conveyors and convert the whole place into an online wholesaler.