> What should they be doing once all the meaningful jobs are automated away?
My point is that looking at patient's biopsy slides or invoices, for 40-80 hours a week, to find known cancers/viruses, or to make sure numbers match up with statements, is not meaningful work. In fact, I'd argue that any work that can be automated without performance degradation isn't meaningful work for humans.
For the case of pathologists, this frees them up to look more carefully at cases where patients are experiencing symptoms and the cause can't be automatically. That means better patient care for both common and exceptional cases. And, perhaps, when put into use globally, it frees some pathologists up to take other roles in medical or scientific fields, doing something that isn't easily automated.
For accountants, it frees them up to only look at cases where things mismatch, or, well... science, teaching, art, local farming, carpentry, really anything that isn't staring at invoices and statements 40 hours a week. It seems particularly silly to me that anyone would argue "comparing numbers on documents" is "meaningful work."
A pretty popular quote by Stephen Jay Gould: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." I'd assert that many of our world's pathologists and accountants are doing the equivalent of living and dying in those cotton fields and sweatshops, if they're doing work that could be automated.
> Stripping people of their livelihoods is one way to encourage them to overthrow the system, yes. Make no mistake though: the revolution will not be kind to you.
Chill, dude. It's not like I'm making millions building these things. It's all just SaaS software, a sector where profit margins generally always trend downwards as the market for the product matures. Put another way, these companies are nowhere near as profitable as companies that extract our psychological profiles, target content and ads to make us feel miserable, and then use that to sell us stuff (Meta, Google, et al). I could easily go to Meta and make twice what I do now.
Plus, I contribute time and labor to organizations like the DSA, JVP, and local nonprofits, volunteer at my local food bank and for other local organizations, choose to shop at local co-ops and farmer's markets, and more to build the type of economy that can support actual meaningful, not-easily-automated work for humans to do.