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Comment by laydn | Hacker News Reader

The general consensus seems to be that low income and low skill workers will be affected real soon.

I don't know where we currently are in the hockey stick curve in ML/AI development, but if it keeps developing at this pace it will soon start hitting high-skill and high-income workers, and then we're going to have a huge economic problem.

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I see high income, high skilled workers being affected earlier. There's nothing to automate away the cleaner I'm hiring to clean my house once a week.

Except without the high income job, you can't afford the housecleaner.

So the house cleaners won’t be automated away, just unemployed because nobody can pay them.

And the high skilled worker unemployed they’ll both downsize their house and have time to clean it themselves

And we all lose as a society, as we waste a little bit more specialization.

But society needs to afford the garbageman, the janitor, the person who fixes the street lights.

Most work done is like this, still, even today. It may be replaced down the road, but an AI model won't help someone take out the trash.

I doubt that because low income/low skill jobs almost all involve doing stuff in the real world

Cleaning, food prep, labor, retail, etc…

It’s jobs that exist in the digital realm that are way more likely to be automated in the near term

Most low-paid workers are safe for the time being, since they do jobs that cannot be done by LLMs, for example, cooking, cleaning, caring for children, driving, etc. The current AI wave threatens only mid- and higher-income workers, for example, junior analysts in finance.

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