It is especially sad that VC money is currently being spent on developing AI to eliminate good jobs rather than on developing robots to eliminate bad jobs.
Why should we treat these office jobs any differently?
US manufacturing jobs went overseas.
What went overseas were those areas of manufacturing that was more expensive to automate than it was to hire low paid workers elsewhere.
With respect to your final question, I don't think we should treat them differently, but I do think few societies have handled this well.
Most societies are set up in a way that creates a strong disincentive for workers to want production to become more efficient other than at the margins (it helps you if your employer is marginally more efficient than average to keep your job safer).
Couple that with a tacit assumption that there will always be more jobs, and you have the makings of a problem if AI starts to eat away at broader segments.
If/when AI accelerates this process you either need to find a solution to that (in other words, ensure people do not lose out) or it creates a strong risk of social unrest down the line.
Interestingly at the same time as all those jobs disappeared and got automated there were surges of people into the workforce. Women started to be routinely employed for all but a few years of child birth and care, and many workers came from overseas. Yet, white collar unemployment didn't spike. The driver for this was that the effective size of the economy boomed with the inclusion of Russia, China, Indonesia, India and many other smaller countries in the western sphere/economy post cold war... and growth from innovation.
Just as "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", "Any sufficiently omnipresent advanced technology is indistinguishable from the mundane". Chat GPT will feel like your smart phone which now feels like your cordless phone which now feels like your corded phone which now feels like wireless telegram on your coal fired steam liner.
"We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer. “
I am not working in that field, but as an outsider it feels like the industrial robots doing most of the work on TSMC's and Tesla's production lines are on the contrary extremely advanced. Aside from that what Boston Dynamics or startups making prosthetics came up is nothing short of amazing.
If anything software seems to be the bottleneck for building useful humanoids...
Basically, it is 1000x easier today to design and build a robot that will have a conversation with you about your interests and then speak poetry about those interests than it is to build a robot that can do all your laundry, and that is the exact opposite of what all of us have been told to expect about the future for the last 70 years.
On the bright side, it is looking more and more like terraforming will be possible. Probably not in our lifetimes, but in a few centuries time (if humanity survives)
Barring something like fusion rockets or a space elevator, it's going to be hard to really do a whole lot in space.
More accurate would be something like "reducing labor costs increases return on capital investment, so labor costs will be reduced in a system where economy organizes to maximize return on capital investment". But our language/vocabulary isn't great at describing processes.
Better phrasing may have been
"...happily assist, confident our own jobs will remain secure."
What is "coming for our jobs" is some feature of the system, but it being a system of which we presume to be, and hope to remain a part, even though ultimately our part in it must be to eliminate ourselves. Is that fair?
Our hacker's wish to "replace myself with a very small shell-script and hit the beach" is coming true.
The only problem I have with it, even though "we're all hackers now", is I don't see everybody making it to the beach. But maybe everybody doesn't want to.
Will "employment" in the future be a mark of high or low status?
Damn good question.
Also, +1 for beach metaphor.
My (ignorant, evolving) views on these things have most recently been informed by John and Barbara Ehrenreich's observations about the professional-managerial class.
ICYMI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
The "hit the beach" part requires that you hide the shell script from the company owners, if by hitting the beach you don't mean picking up empty cans for sustinence.