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Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

They don't have to take jobs completely. Every job these tools make 5x, 10x, 100x more efficient, that'll be fewer workers needed for the same output. Those tasks will be rolled into other jobs (I expect a lot of that—consider how we're all secretaries now), department headcount reduced, whatever. Unless demand also rises tremendously because costs plummet, which it may for some things, but surely won't for all.

Everyone's job? Yeah, sure, that's probably some time off or never gonna happen, depending on how things shake out.

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> Unless demand also rises tremendously because costs plummet, which it may for some things, but surely won't for all.

Maybe, maybe not. Demand has always risen in the past. Historically 90+% of us were manual agricultural labors, generally unfree at that (i.e., serfs or slaves). Nowadays machines do almost all that work, yet we don't have anything like 90% unemployment (yeah, there are still farmers, but not 90%... plus the farmer isn't grubbing in the ground with a stick in the blazing sun, Mesopotamia-style. He's riding in an air-conditioned combine harvester with a fridge full of tasty beverages and an internet connection).

We've absorbed a lot of workers into lengthier education and various jobs programs (the MIC and the military itself; in the US, the horribly-inefficient healthcare sector) at enormous cost, following suspiciously well with the timeline of eliminating many of those other jobs. Would the US have seen such a great postwar boom if we'd disarmed again, or would unemployment have shot back up? What if we'd not had the GI bill to stick a bunch of 22-year-old ex-GIs in college for a while, keeping them out of the workforce? If a four-year degree hadn't become the new high school diploma, and wasteful healthcare spending not expanded and funded tens of thousands of jobs that aren't a net-benefit to society, right around the time computers began automating away a lot of jobs? I wonder.

IMO we're paying through the nose to keep all this automation from being a disaster, we're just doing it in ways that aren't as obvious as an outright, robust welfare program.

Yep, one of the worst possible outcomes of AI currently (skipping the entire AGI kills us thing) is by drastically increasing informational efficiency, hence replacing most of our high paid jobs, while not significantly increasing resource efficiency. You would have a massive decrease in wages while not having deflation in any other metrics.

That's when it decides to do some population control.

This is when things like 4 day work weeks and expanded vacation time via regulation actually make sense. We've become so much more efficient? Reduce the amount of work allowed to achieve full time employment to force the efficiency into more leisure time. Of course, the conundrum there becomes outsourcing and nations being incentivized not to do so to build their economies. We may be trapped in a tragedy of the commons leading us to slavery.

None of the required changes will be made in our current corporate kleptocracy. We are going to see massive unemployment that will cripple the economy as a whole. Not the utopia we should have. The pause for me is to figure out the redistribution from the spoils of efficiency.

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