Dude, too pessimistic, next gen won’t be totally unemployable. Lots of professions up for grabs: roofer (they ain’t sending expensive robots there), anything to do with massage, sex work, anything to do with sports and performance so boxing, theater, Opera singing, live performance, dancing, military (will always need cheap flesh boots on ground), also care in elder facility for aging population, therapist (people still prefer interacting with a human), entertainer, maid cafe employee…
Perhaps we will finally reconnect with each other and quit the virtual life, as everything in the virtual world will be managed by and for other AIs, with humans unable to do anything but consume their content
> Dude, too pessimistic, next gen won’t be totally unemployable.
For what it's worth I agree with you, just with very low confidence.
My real issue, and reason I don't hide my alarmism on this subject is that I have low confidence on the timelines, but high confidence on the ultimate outcomes.
Let's assume you're right. If AI simply causes ~10%-20% of middle class workers to fall into the lower class as you suggest then I'd agree it won't be the end of the world. But if the optimistic outcome here is the near-term people won't be "totally unemployable" because people who lose their jobs can always join the working class then I'd still rather bomb the data centers.
If we're a little more aggressive and assume 50% of the middle class will lose their jobs in the next 10-20 years then in my opinion this is not as easy as just reskilling people to do manual labour.
Firstly, you're just assuming that all these middle class workers are going to be happy with being forced into the lower class – they won't be and again this isn't a desirable outcome.
You're also not considering the fact that this huge influx of labour competing for these crappy manual labour jobs will make them even less desirable than they already are. I keep hearing people say how they're going to reskill as a plumber / electrician when AI takes their job as if there is an endless demand for these workers. Horses still have some niche uses, but for the most part they're useless. This is far more likely to be the future of human labour. Even if plumbers are one of the few jobs humans will be able to do in a post-AI world then the supply of them will almost certainly far exceed demand. The end result of this excess supply is that plumbers going to be paid crap and mostly be unemployed.
I think you're also underestimating how fast fields like robotics could advance with AI. The primary reason robotics suck is because of a lack of intelligence. We can build physically flexible machines that have decent battery lives already – Spot as an example. The issue is more that we can't currently use them for much because they're not intelligent enough to solve useful problems. At best we can code / train them to solve very niche problems. This could change rapidly in the coming years as AI advances.
Even the optimistic outcomes here are god awful, and the ultimate risks compound with time.
We either stop the AI or we become the AI. That's the decision we have to make this decade. If we don't we should assume we will be replaced with time. If I'm correct I feel we should be alarmist. If I am wrong, then I'd love for someone to convince me that humans are special and irreplaceable.
People will just join the military ranks. We will need a ton of meat for upcoming WW3. This will solve the unemployment issue. Also, no need to “bomb data centers”, Russia will use EMP weapon for that.
