Comment by ryandrake
9 days ago
In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining. This time it might be truly different. If one day AI can actually do all knowledge work, there might not be anything left for former knowledge workers to do. There's no physical law that says new technology necessarily produces 1:1 new, different jobs.
Most jobs for most of human history have not been "knowledge work" involving symbolic manipulation. Maybe all the marketers, business analysts and software engineers of the world can take up their true callings as plumbers, carpenters and dishwasher repair people.
You think that all knowledge workers of the world will accept their social and material downgrades without making wave? That they'll all be able to find manual work?
Who knows, maybe we'll come to value manual and caring work once AI can easily do all the moving-electrons-on-a-screen?
The financial and social hierarchy you allude to is not immutable. Programming was once a low-paid, low-status job done largely by women. It's only relatively recently that it's become a lucrative, high-status masculine-coded career.
> In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining.
Labor saving technology does not create enough alternative jobs to employ all those that it displaced, otherwise it wouldn't be labor saving.
Instead, the surplus created by these technologies allows that society to deploy labor on less immediately necessary jobs. These jobs weren't created by the technology, they were always there, but society did not have the resources to staff them (think education, research, academia, merchants, etc.)
This dynamic has been true since pre-historic times, so you'll need some extraordinary evidence if you want us to believe this time is different.