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Comment by tired-turtle | Hacker News Reader

This is a sensible plan, given your username.

Yeah seriously. Don't people understand the fact that society is not good at mopping up messes like this—there has been a K shaped economy for several decades now and most Americans have something like $400 in their bank accounts. The bottom had already fallen out for them, and help still hasn't arrived. I think it's more likely that what really happens is that white collar workers, especially the ones on the margin, join this pool—and there is a lot of suffering for a long time.

Personally, rather devolving into nihilism, I'd rather try to hedge against suffering that fate. Now is the time to invest and save money. (or yesterday)

If white collar workers as a whole suffer severe economic setback over a short term timespan, your savings and investments won’t help you.

Unless you’re investing in guns, ammo, food, and a bunker. We’re talking worse unemployment than depression era Germany. And structurally more significant unemployment because the people losing their jobs were formally very high earners.

That’s the cataclysmic outcome, though. Although I deemed that that’s certainly possible and I would put a double digit percentage probability on it, another very likely outcome is a very severe recession, or a recession, wear a lot of, but not all, white collar work is wiped out. Maybe there’s a significant restructuring in the economy I think in a scenario like that, which also seems to be in the realm of possibility, I think having resources still matters. Speech to text, sorry for the poor grammar.

It’s definitely possible that there’s an impact that is bad but not cataclysmic. I figure in thst case though my regular savings is enough to switch to something else. I could retire now if I was willing to move somewhere cheap and live on $60k a year. There’s a lot of things that could cause that level of recession though without the need for AI.

I do also think the mid level bad outcome isn’t super likely because of AI is good enough to replace a lot of white collar jobs, I think it could replace almost all of them.

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