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Comment by alex43578 | Hacker News Reader

> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. … Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck

This person can no longer get a customer service job, but why can’t they get another job? Customer service is hardly career with a huge sunk cost in training and with a non-fungible skill set.

If they go get another job, compared to the base case of economy = customer service, we now have economy = customer service (AI) + new job.

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It's easy for anyone to go get a different job as long as the supply of jobs is infinite.

But it is not infinite; eventually, we reach a point where we no longer need additional ditch diggers.

“Demographic and labor market trends in the U.S. point to an ominous scenario. The nation potentially faces a shortfall of millions of workers in the decade to come — especially in the critical health care sector — due to a projected reduction in workforce participation.”

The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, so yes, you should be able to go and get another job.

Give AI a medical license and all those critical health care jobs will literally disappear overnight.

It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.

Why not - after the first automated robotic nurse it seems unlikely the second one will cost more than raising and educating a human nurse.

For a company the costs of raising and educating humans are only a fraction of their taxes, which they might mostly avoid anyway. The costs of employing a nurse (robotic or human) for a year are much more relevant. And there I am skeptical current robotics can hold a candle to (relative) cheap human labor.

Job supply trends towards zero. The ultimate logical conclusion of this train of thought is there is no point in keeping the lower classes alive. Why do we need 15 billion humans if they do nothing but burden you with their maintenance costs? Let them die so that the quadrillionaires can enjoy the Earth with their perfect AI workforces catering to their every need.

The future is bleak. If this is the sort of dystopia I can look forward to, then I would rather have AI simply wipe out humanity as a whole.

On the plus side: In that particular dystopian future, we may actually need more ditchdiggers for a time so that the dead may be buried.

In Azimov's Robot series the society that chose to live with robots gradually destructed itself by just living longer and not having so many children. The other part of humanity that avoided robots flourished (not without suffering). But that all required new planets for settlement (I am looking at you Elon).

Trying not to spoil a 40+ year old story, but Asimov eventually retconned that the flourishing of humanity was driven by a benevolent AI behind the curtain.

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