Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
> Everyone seems to forget that if everyone followed the “AI-proof career” advice to become a plumber, electrician or carpenter - then there’d be so many of them that the pay would go down considerably
The demand will also drop through the floor because the people who previously had the well-paying white collar jobs who are a large amount of the non-corporate customers for trades people will be gone, so they can no longer afford to hire you. The corporate customers will have far less need for facilities other than data centers because they won't have nearly as many meat employees to house, so the demand craters there too.
And some amount of the other people fleeing to the trades will have taken up your specific trade, and why would they pay someone to do something they can do themselves.
So you'll have massively increased labor supply as everyone flees to these "AI safe" jobs and massively decreased demand due to a flattened low-wage economy where almost everyone is trying to scrape by on a trades job.
If the AI labor disruption is big enough to cause a serious problem for all knowledge workers, I don't see how it doesn't take everything else down with it. The entire economy as we know it just spirals into chaos leading to, probably, violent revolution.
Exactly this I've been saying also. It’s completely obvious and I don’t understand how this argument is not brought up more frequent. If AI would take let’s say 50% of IT jobs there'd be a huge drop in consumer demand that’d send shockwaves through the entire economy…
Me too. I am personally much less worried about typical AI doomsday scenarios like bioweapons or mass hacking swarms. I am sure those will happen, but will be relatively targeted (even if that means huge numbers of casualties). But something like unemployment of nearly all working age people across humanity is really an apocalyptic scenario. I can't imagine how terrible it will be that no one has any drive or ambition any longer. We can already see the signs of this future coming, with AI use destroying education, and the staleness of modern culture.
JSR_FDED · · focus · HN ↗
georgemcbay · · focus · HN ↗
The demand will also drop through the floor because the people who previously had the well-paying white collar jobs who are a large amount of the non-corporate customers for trades people will be gone, so they can no longer afford to hire you. The corporate customers will have far less need for facilities other than data centers because they won't have nearly as many meat employees to house, so the demand craters there too.
And some amount of the other people fleeing to the trades will have taken up your specific trade, and why would they pay someone to do something they can do themselves.
So you'll have massively increased labor supply as everyone flees to these "AI safe" jobs and massively decreased demand due to a flattened low-wage economy where almost everyone is trying to scrape by on a trades job.
If the AI labor disruption is big enough to cause a serious problem for all knowledge workers, I don't see how it doesn't take everything else down with it. The entire economy as we know it just spirals into chaos leading to, probably, violent revolution.
king_crimson · · focus · HN ↗
gWPVhyxPHqvk · · focus · HN ↗