Comment by dofm
7 hours ago
> AI is not cutting my hair anytime soon.
This is an absolutely bizarre pitch for labour replacement for the very obvious reason that the rate at which the world's hair grows is not going to increase and nor are we going to suddenly discover a great need for new high maintenance hair styles to increase the work available.
There are clearly at a first approximation enough barbers and hairdressers already to cut the world's hair at the rate it is growing.
Ok, are there enough doctors? seems really weird that you left out the other jobs I mentioned
They are all actually quite a lot like the barbers/hairdressers thing! We're more or less getting along with who we have.
Essentially every single medical school in the USA is vastly oversubscribed with qualified applicants, as far as I am aware. And most specialist residencies are too.
But you know you can't just become a doctor, right? You don't just lose your job and become a doctor, or a trained nurse the next day. That is a ten, twelve year lead time thing for doctors, two or three for a nurse, and it favours the young. People who lose their jobs mid career essentially never become doctors. Some do become nurses, but it still favours the young.
Plus, even if there is a shortage beyond that, and in general pratice there is, we don't need hundreds of millions more doctors around the world, I suspect, but that is how many jobs AI threatens to displace according to the FUD. We maybe need a few tens of millions more nurses.
And if you expand the healthcare and training system to train up and employ more people — where does the money for that come from?
People who simultaneously go along with the idea AGI will eliminate large swathes of human labour but somehow magically think everyone will find a new job so there is no retail and service demand collapse or tax revenue collapse are everywhere, serving up the tractor analogy, which is where we started in this thread. It's horseshit.