Comment by kypro

Technology didn't replace agricultural workers either, but you'd think it did when you consider how few people work in agriculture as a share of the population today.

By providing productivity tools you do effectively replace jobs because there's only so much of a good or service a person will want to consume.

For example, just because a game dev studios can make 10x more games with AI, this doesn't mean the industry will make 10x more money unless demand for video games increases. Instead what is likely to happen as the cost of making games reduces is that the price of games for consumers will drop too as competition increases, which will turn hurt game dev profits, so game dev studios will likely have to be 10x smaller in the future – even if there's still technically people working in the industry.

However when the work of agricultural workers became increasingly automated there were lots of other industries people could work instead, at the time that was factory work, and although the details will be different, I'm sure to some extent this will happen with white collar work too. But the question I'd ask today is what is that alternative source work, and is it as good as white collar work?

Our economy went from, farming -> factory work -> office work. I strongly suspect the next step will be more people working in manual labour jobs and working in servant type roles. It's hard to see where else the demand will come from.