If AI takes engineering, medical, and law work away from those professionals - they too could have spent many hours to learn, to then earn little.
Every human has worth, but we all value the type of work differently.
Lawyers are entirely composed of people who can legislate away the threat of AI practicing law (taking their jobs)
And robots aren't known for their bedside manner yet. Also, there's a lot of liability in practicing medicine, which companies would probably be unwise to take on
Law AI will be used for case defense prep, argument creation, research, analysis (essentially what law graduates and non-partner style attorneys do) as cost savings / ROI enhancement. Attorneys will have to specialize in mostly customer facing / court facing roles. This will cut the staff needed to perform those duties.
Real Law AI change will have to be consumer driven.
Medical AI.... with so much malpractice & liability, AI will reduce those risks for practicioners, increase ROI to practiciioners (less payments to insurance), and also require back office practicioners to become more customer facing. Maybe instead of 10 radiologists, you can use 1.
Medical AI will be used on low tier ailments (eg: urgent care headaches, etc) to help nurses see more cases, etc - initially replacing the low end work. Doctors can then have a more normal schedule, but feed a collective AI model to where 1 doctor can then oversee 50...200 cases. Those models will first be rolled out to developing countries until a generation of doctors in the US are dwindled except in emergency care situations.
It's gotten pretty ugly with provinces trying to poach doctors from other provinces, competing with each other to offer incentives to entice doctors from other provinces
But that definition of effort as it relates to the ability to “survive” does not seem useful to me. It takes a lot of effort to manually dig a ditch compared to using an excavator, but you would not pay the person that shows up with a shovel more than the person that shows up with an excavator.
Edit: this is not intended to say your friend does not deserve a better pay to quality of life (QoL) ratio. However, the fact that you have a comparably favorable pay to QoL and they have an undesirable pay to QoL ratio means society does not want more people to be selling that labor, but rather more people to be selling your labor.
My point is that the disparity is such a chasm that my brain can't reconcile it. We aren't talking about ditch digging, we are talking about serving food to the people of Seattle. All the software engineers in Seattle, in my experience, love to frequent dining establishments. Their quality of life is dependent on the labor of people serving them. There's no way I can accept the disparity as "just the way it is." My gut can't take it.
I put “unaffordable” in quotes because eating out is easily replaced by eating at home, or eating frozen dinners, etc, so restaurants do not have the pricing power they might need to allow the food service workers to have decent pay to QoL ratio in a place like Seattle.
The other commenter is not confused about why things are the way they are. They understand these things already, obviously they think about it a lot. You explain it, they agree that things are that way due to the reasons you describe, but that does not explain why the disparity ought to exist.
If you had to pay more at their restaurant then your quality of life (profit) will go down.
I am glad you are still human and your gut cannot take it. Maybe look at using some of your savings to help the chef start a coop restaurant?
We require these services but don't don't provide an acceptable living to those offering them, expecting them to sacrifice their health and comfort for our benefit.
I don't have a solution to how to "allocate" who "gets to" live in a certain city, and it's not in my role or expertise to. But the problem exists currently regardless of that, and what we do have is not a solution.
My guess is yes. Temperate weather, world class scenery, cheap electricity, clean water, a convenient deep and protected harbor, and a productive workforce.
All are subject to change of course, but that combination precludes the existence of businesses with low elasticity of demand (and hence higher value). The luxuries like restaurants and retail follow after those other businesses.
Of course, they do enhance the desirability, and it very well could be that rents are too high in the short term, and that landlords are making Seattle less desirable in the near future, but that is always a dynamic relationship.
Value is defined based on counterfactuals, similar to opportunity cost -- if that thing didn't exist, what would be the effect on the local economy? My suspicion is that if you price all the chefs out of a downtown, no one will like spending their time (and therefore money) there, and it will die. So if the singular act of removing chefs collapses an entire economic engine, then their value is defined as the economic activity before their removal minus the economic activity after their removal.
The answer is very simple. They just need to tear down a small fraction of those endless twisting mazes full of tiny single-family homes and replace them with large apartment buildings like you see in Asia. Right now there's no free market at work, since there are too many artificial restrictions on building.
In Tokyo, you can work part time as a janitor and still live within a 10 minute train ride to work.
Software can pay well because the code you write can service 100, 1K, 1M, or 1B customers.. with some time spent on scaling.
There's not much a single chef can do such that their labor which serves 100 tables/night can suddenly scale to serve 1000 tables/night.
The only way the replicate that kind of outcome in restaurant trade is to for example, open multiple restaurants with investor capital, hire cheaper chefs as your understudy to run each location, while you set menus, standards, and find efficiency on things like procurement, accounting, lease deals, etc.
Other options are to move more aggressively into some sort of profitable takeaway menu, selling food kids, branded merchandise, etc.
I think the difference between labor and engineering is that most engineering (and software development) is a precursor to charging rent. Lets look a bit closer:
The marginal cost of software is zero. Therefore, every commercial software package is collecting rent for its use - SaaS being the most blatant (but honest) form. They will ostensibly be using the money to fund future versions of the software, but the efficiency of that effort is not terribly relevant - profits can be had, and high pay to developers.
In product design and manufacturing, the engineering effort goes into designing a product and plant to produce it. The key thing the business looks at is something like ROI (return on investment). Since the lifetime of a product isn't certain, anything that goes beyond the planned lifespan is pure profit. One could view the business as collecting rent on the equipment/process that makes the product.
At the highest level, investors are looking for a return on their investment. The investors don't actually have any part in the transaction between the company and its customers. Only when raising funds do investors bring anything to the table. After that, people trading stocks bring nothing and are looking for ROI. It's probably not correct to call ROI rent, but it's got some similarities.
So the low-end labor guy is getting paid to do work. All our fancy office jobs are building systems to generate revenue for someone. That may be the primary reason those jobs pay so much better. One is labor to an end customer, the other is labor to the money-making machine that is a large company ;-)
On a related tangent, perhaps engineering should not be considered a cost center but an investment.
and multiplied by fiscal and other policies: those who couldn't afford buying now need to pay 5-10 times more compared to wealthy who could afford buying house 10 years ago and another 5 years ago and lock loan interest.