However, it's a bit annoying that the focus of the AI anxiety is how AI is replacing us and the resolution is that we embrace our humanity. Fair enough, but at least to me the main focus in my AI anxiety is that it will take my job - honestly don't really care about it doing my shitty art.
An enlightened Humanity could solve this by separating the income from the job, but we live in a Malthusian Darwinian world where growth is paramount, "enough" does not exist, and we all have to justify and earn our living.
I really like programming to fix things. Even if I weren’t paid for it, even if I were to win the lottery, I would want to write software that solved problems for people. It is a nice way to spend my days, and I love feeling useful when it works.
I would be very bummed - perhaps existentially so - if there were no practical reason ever to write software again.
And I know the same is true for many artists, writers, lawyers, and so on.
I'm not too concerned about that being a reality in our lifetimes though.
And I think about that a lot.
Right now, we all own "robots" who spellcheck our words (editor) , research (librarian), play music (musican), send messages (courier), etc.
All these jobs are "lost", but at the same time, we wouldn't have had money to pay these many employees to live in our pocket.
I think it was clear about how language is not thought.
That leads to the intrinsic realization that our physical existence, our observance of reality is what is critical.
Also, AI taking jobs at scale is unlikely, the only place its going to do anything is low level spam and content generation.
For anything which has to be factual, its going to need humans.