Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers. If you look at the work performed by office workers in the 1960s and compared it to what people today do it'd be almost unrecognizable.
They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that actually created more white collar jobs because those capabilities meant more was getting done which meant new tasks needed to be performed.
I don’t like this argument because 1) it doesn’t address the social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment and 2) there is no law of nature that a job lost here creates a new job there.
On the first point, unemployment during the Great Depression was “only” 30%. And those people were eventually able to find other jobs. Here, we are talking about permanent unemployment for even larger numbers of people.
The Luddites were right. Machines did take their jobs. Those individuals who invested significantly in their craft were permanently disadvantaged. And those who fought against it were executed.
And on point 2, to be precise, a lack of jobs doesn’t mean a lack of problems. There are a ton of things society needs to have accomplished, and in a perfect world the guy who was automated out of packing Amazon boxes could open a daycare for low income parents. We just don’t have economic models to enable most of those things, and that’s only going to get worse.
What makes you so concerned about rapid onset of we haven’t seen any significant change in the (USA) unemployment rate?
And there are some laws of nature that are relevant such as supply-demand economics. Technology often makes things cheaper which unlocks more demand. For example, I’m sure many small businesses would love to build custom software to help them operate but it’s too expensive.
A good analogy would be web development transition from c to java to php to Wordpress. I feel like it did make web sites creation for small business more accessible. OTOH a parallel trend was also mass-scale production of industry-specific platforms, such as Yahoo Shopping.
It’s possible that both are true. “Why” questions tend to be mathematically overdetermined. There are many correct explanations (equations) and fewer variables than equations.
I'll preface this by saying I agree with most of what you said.
It'll be a slow burn, though. The projection of rapid, sustained large-scale unemployment assumes that the technology rapidly ascends to replace a large portion of the population at once. AI is not currently on a path to replacing a generalized workforce. Call center agents, maybe.
Second, simply "being better at $THING" doesn't mean a technology will be adopted, let alone quickly. If that were the case, we'd all have Dvorak keyboards and commuter rail would be ubiquitous.
Third, the mass unemployment situation requires economic conditions where not leveraging a presumably exploitable underclass of unemployed persons is somehow the most profitable choice for the captains of industry. They are exploitable because this is not a welfare state, and our economic safety net is tissue-paper thin. We can, therefore, assume their labor can be had at far less than its real worth, and thus someone will find a way to turn a profit off it. Possibly the Silicon Valley douchebags who caused the problem in the first place.
The classic example is the 50's/60's photograph of an entire floor of a tall office building replaced by single spreadsheet. This passed without comment.
Anecdotal, but AI was what enabled me to learn French, when I was doing that. Before LLMs, I would've had to pay a lot more money to get the class time I'd need, but the availability of Google Translate and DeepL meant that some meaningful, casual learning was within reach. I could reasonably study, try to figure things out, and have questions for the teachers the two or three times a week I had lessons.
Nowadays I'm learning my parents' tongue (Cantonese) and Mandarin. It's just comical how badly the LLMs do sometimes. I swear they roll a natural 1 on a d20 and then just randomly drop a phrase. Or at least that's my head canon. They're just playing DnD on the side.
They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that actually created more white collar jobs because those capabilities meant more was getting done which meant new tasks needed to be performed.