Comment by dismalaf
1 month ago
The fields that "AI can't touch" are shit fields that have already been decimated by globalism and immigration. Like cool, farmers, cooks, baristas, plumbers and manual labourers are safe from AI for now. But most paths to a middle class lifestyle are being closed off...
You're right and it's actually even worse than that. If X% of the white collar jobs get replaced by ai that means there are X% more people competing for the "safe" jobs. Over time the "safe" jobs will pay less and less adjusted for inflation because the job displacement is increasing the labor supply making your labor less valuable.
The "safe" jobs will get squeezed in two ways.
Like you said there will be more people trying to do those jobs causing devaluation on the supply side, but at the same time overall demand will drop because there will be less people with comfortable white-collar jobs that make up a lot of the demand for the work those jobs perform.
Exactly. I've been thinking about the demand issue for a while now too. It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor. If you permanently remove a massive chunk of labor from the white collar sector that will cause a massive drop in consumer spending, which will impact company revenue, which will in turn put pressure on their ability to spend on the ai causing the displacement in the first place. Unless they monopolize all labor and cause a paradigm shift in how economies fundamentally work I don't see how they're not just shooting themselves in the foot.
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