This is all broadly true, historically. Automating jobs mostly results in creating more jobs elsewhere.

But let's assume you have true, fully general AI. Further assume that it can do human-level cognition for $2/hour, and it's roughly as smart as a Stanford grad.

So once the AI takes your job, it goes on to take your new job, and the job after that, and the job after that. It is smarter and cheaper than the average human, after all.

This scenario goes one of three ways, depending on who controls the AI:

1. We all become fabulously wealthy and no longer need to work at all. (I have trouble visualizing exactly how we get this outcome.)

2. A handful of billionaires and politicians control the AI. They don't need the rest of us.

3. The AI controls itself, in which case most economic benefits and power go to the AI.

The last historical analog of this was the Neanderthals, who were unable (for whatever reason) to compete with humans.

So the most important question is, how close actually are we to this scenario? Is impossible? A century away? Or something that will happen in the next decade?