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Comment by usgroup | Hacker News Reader

And reskilling makes much more sense when you’re replacing manual labour. Less sense when you’re replacing brains.

The presumption that there are alternative jobs or that a given worker can attain new skills imposes a tax on them they may not be able to pay. There are disabled and unemployed people who cannot handle "reskilling".

i think that youre right.

i also think that "information workers" were always a bit slushy in so far that an average "information worker" will likely have 3-4 "careers" during a lifetime anyway and AI will mostly affect information workers IMO -- or at least affect them first and the most.

The trouble is that if what you're mostly contributing is pushing and processing info because so far it was not automatable, you might find no adjacent fields to slip into.

Most the reskilling will ironically be in knowledge workers who will be forced into skilled physical labor. AI plumbers are a lot further out than most other forms of AI workers.

Morevec's paradox rearing it's ugly head again

Quite possibly. Though if you have that many cheap knowledge workers looking for work, that's quite a lot of brainpower to be dumped into the few remaining unsolved problems in robotics mass production (not that there are many - those robot dancing videos are terrifying, and Cobot arms are getting extremely versatile and affordable). i.e. digital work might be the first to go - but manual would follow quite quickly.

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