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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

A lot probably depends on who can do the new jobs.

In many past cases where new technology eliminated jobs it was accompanied by new jobs related to the new technology that the people whose jobs were eliminated could do, or could reasonably learn to do, and with good enough pay to maintain their standard of living.

Lose your job working in a horse drawn wagon factory because companies are switching to motorized trucks for deliveries? Those trucks are way more complicated to build than wagons so there should be plenty of new jobs in the truck factories.

With AI it seems much less likely for that to generate new jobs for people replaced by AI in as direct a way as trucks did for wagon makers.

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It's completely untrustworthy, so eventually we'll hit an inflection point where we discover that we either cannot use AI anywhere we need trust, or we'll put a human middleman in there. The latter sounds much more realistic. There will be plenty of jobs.

We've spent over 300 years doing the Luddite song and dance. To be clear, I have no problem with Luddites and do not view them negatively, but to imply that this productivity enhancer is magically special in a way no other one was needs some kind of incredibly solid explanation.

edit: as an aside, I do wonder how, if ever, we'll make the transition over to a world where people don't need to work. It seems like every time we think we might be getting closer, the first response is fear.

> We've spent over 300 years doing the Luddite song and dance. To be clear, I have no problem with Luddites and do not view them negatively, but to imply that this productivity enhancer is magically special in a way no other one was needs some kind of incredibly solid explanation.

There's nothing magic about it. My point is that in the past it was often the case that building the machines that replaced jobs often created enough new jobs to greatly reduce the net job loss. The number of machines needed was proportional to the number of jobs the machines replaced so it scales.

When it is not new physical machines replacing jobs but rather software, often running on machines the employer already had, you won't get that kind of balancing job creation.

Im not sure we want to live in a world where no one works.

Maybe I’m wrong, and I certainly have no studies backing up my feelings, but not having to work seems like it would be a massive psychological disaster.

Having external reasons to get up in the morning (providing for your family, being apart of some organization, etc) feel really important.

I don't disagree with this. I just think it's more likely people will continue finding ways to make life easier, rather than us collectively agreeing to like... stop at some point.

work =/= having a job

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