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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

The fact that most of these "everything will be fine because we still need some humans in the loop" arguments never really talk about is that AI doesn't need to replace literally every white collar job to cause massive economic damage.

The unemployment rate during the peak of the Great Depression was 25%, not 100%.

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It will probably be a lot worse since white collar workers (especially the ones that AI is targeting, like banking, software, etc since they are super high margin jobs to automate) traditionally make and spend more than the average worker.

These are the people getting mortgages and sending kids to private school and whatnot. If their spending power suddenly drops to 0, its probably going to be pretty bad. I wonder what the housing market would look like in these cases.

I wish I could upvote you more than once. A 20%, permanent, reduction in the white collar workforce would cause the worst recession since 2008.

Exactly.

Clearly, some white-collar jobs will be replaced. Hard to argue against that, given it's already beginning to happen. So the question becomes what is the eventual rate of conversion and what is the subsequent economic impact over time? I don't think anyone has a credible handle on that, except to note that it won't be zero.

The fundamental truth is that we need less people to keep things running as they are running right now.

But who's to say that things will be 'running as they are now' for long? And who knows what a new economy will look like?

If and when that transition occurs, I think the job market will pick up.

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