Comment by RiverCrochet
12 hours ago
Most AI layoffs will be white collar jobs. Voting/party blocs that have large blue collar bases won't care and have already been dealing with similar pressues, e.g. NAFTA and such, for decades. So there's going to be a strong sense of "haha now it's happening to you like it happened to us in the 80s and 90s." It won't be so bad. Cities may become cheap and fun again.
"... they could pass laws establishing and funding retraining programs that teach workers how to work alongside AI systems"
Computers were billed as the entryway to the future to the masses in the 90's and 2000's. So we got things like "send everyone to college" and ITT Tech. That didn't work, but a lot of money was wasted and a few people made a lot of money. This will be a repeat.
Cities aren’t expensive because of white collar jobs.
If a local area is seeing blue collar industry as the future, it needs cheap labor, which needs cheap housing near its plants. Therefore housing near industrial sections of cities needs to get cheaper. Converting tall office builings to dense apartments could happen. Especially if blue collar industries simply buy the empty buildings, assuming they aren't converted to housing for GPUs first.