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> Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true.

It also isn't true. The story of the last 50 years has been that technology, especially computer and communications technology, has facilitated the concentration of wealth. The skilled work got computerized, or outsourced to India or China. That left U.S. workers with service jobs where they have much lower impact on P&L and thus much less leverage.

In my field, we used to have legal secretaries and law librarians and highly experienced paralegals. They got paid pretty well and had pretty good job security because the people who brought in the revenue interacted with them daily and relied on them. Now, big firms have computerized a lot of that work and consolidated much of the rest into centralized off-site back-office locations. Those folks who got downsized never found comparable work. They didn't, and couldn't, go work for WestLaw to maintain the new electronic tools. The law firms also held on to many of them until retirement or offered them early retirement packages, and then simply never filled the positions. It used to be a pretty solid job for someone with an associates degree, and it simply doesn't exist anymore.

The only thing keeping the job market together is the explosion in healthcare workers. My Gen-Z brother and sister in law are both going into those fields. In a typical tertiary American city, the largest employers are the local hospital and perhaps a university or community college. Both of those get most of their revenue directly or indirectly from the government. It's not clear to me how that's sustainable.

>It's not clear to me how that's sustainable

If it makes you feel better, I'm pretty sure it isn't sustainable. (But I'm not an economist so take that with a block of salt.)

I don't think anyone has the answers. It's just some of us are honest enough to concede we have no answers, while others promote an answer that aligns best with their belief system.

"It'll all work out."

"It's the immigrants/blacks/jews/whatever dragging us down."

"Nothing's going to happen and we can all continue doing the work we always have."

"Burn the rich."

Etc etc.

Not a lot of serious attempts out there at even getting a hand on the issues, let alone fixing the issues.

Socialism has been the answer since I was born in the 90s and the V shaped economy took hold.

We have enough resources for everyone to have food, shelter, education, and healthcare without the need to extract value from their labor.

All of these problems are self inflicted wounds. The solution is for humanity to stop stabbing itself and care for itself instead.

The solution is to let go of greed and embrace our humanity.

Healthcare really seems like the only safe direction anymore. They're needed and a human is still required to physically do it.

My wife is a nurse and keeps in touch with her school professors. They said that the number of people flooding into healthcare careers is more than most colleges can handle, and is starting to cause supply glut in some roles.

If I was younger it’s what I would do tbh. Engineering, CS, and anything else white collar has such a foggy future right now. No chance would I risk going into something that might have wages suppressed or mass lay offs within a decade. And honestly 3 twelve hour shifts doesn’t sound that bad compared to 5 days a week of corporate bullshit.

I'm also pretty sure in the past industrial transitions, many of the people who lost their jobs at the start of the change never found better ones. It took a generation or so for new opportunities to really be found and fine tuned and you're competing for those new roles with younger people anyway.

If ai does take a lot of white collar work, is it a lot of comfort that maybe jobs in a very different sector will be better in 20 years?

Did the younger people find better jobs? You used to have all these jobs for people who were maybe a bit smarter than average with good judgment. In the 1990s, the local community college used to advertise associates degrees for paralegals. That's a job that doesn't exist in the same way anymore thanks to computers. Now it's become an internship for kids with top credentials before they go to law school. Which is fine for them, but what about everyone else?

It seems to me like all of these people are flocking now to healthcare fields. That seems totally unsustainable.

>It seems to me like all of these people are flocking now to healthcare fields. That seems totally unsustainable.

Why? There will never be a shortage of sick/dying people. So medical staff, and also undertakers, aren't going anywhere.

Because most healthcare spending comes from tax dollars.

Is this a different route to the universal basic income scenario?

My understanding is that healthcare keeps growing because the large Boomer generation is aging. When they have passed though, then we should see a corresponding slide in healthcare growth

Not in all past industrial transitions.

But yes, the argument has been wrong often enough that the people still repeating it as a rule should be mocked and ashamed.

It’s also not that true, and highly dependent on a lot of factors.

Anecdotally I see a lot of schadenfreude online about tech jobs after a decade or two of lecturing everybody from Appalachians in coal country, to Midwestern autoworkers, that they should just “learn to code.”

Totally agree, and would add another way “that’s what always happened in the past” is a terribly weak argument. Things might have always worked out at the societal level so far, but very often do not at the individual level. Countless successful craftsmen have had their livelihoods ruined by technological changes and spent their remaining years impoverished. How many people funding AI would be willing to throw their own life away for the good of some future strangers that may or may not be born? I'm pretty sure the answer is <=0.

> The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.

Malthusian observation can still be true...It only has to be true once, and the only reason people say it isn't right now is due to industrial fertilizers and short memories.

> "the only reason .. industrial fertilizers"

canned food, tractors, combine harvesters, mechanical refrigeration, freezers, chilled trucks, ocean liners, aircraft, antibiotics for farm animals, milking machines, genetically modified crops, satellite/computer weather prediction, modern pesticides, Pasteurization, vitamin and mineral fortification...

Yes, I appreciate the expanded list.

I should have clarified that industrial fertilizers (and other modern Ag) come from non-renewable fossil fuel exploitation, just as the 90% of the things you listed.

Antibiotics and GMO crops are nice too, but if you don't have the energy inputs to grow and distribute the food, it all goes tits up.

Malthus wrote in 1798 when world population was 1 billion. It's now 8 billion and famine is rarer, food is more abundant and more food is wasted every day than ever before. Industrial fertilizers do come from fossil fuels, but they aren't fossil fuels. Nitrogen fertilizer uses natural gas for its Methane content, and we can make Methane using electricity, seawater and make Nitrogen fertilizer from that, and we can make electricity from solar, wind and nuclear.

> just as the 90% of the things you listed.

90% of the things I listed only use fossil fuels because they are the cheapest energy, not because they are dependent on fossil fuels specifically. Freeze-dried food doesn't need coal power. The idea that 8 billion humans are just gonna shrug and go "oh well, guess there's no food now, we'll just all give up and die" and not try to invent any way to carry on, is silly.

>But if something approximating AGI does work out, human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation so it’s not clear why the past “automation has created more human jobs” logic should continue.

Human labor still seems to be cheaper. And then theres opex/capex to be considered. Like if they achieve AGI, and AGI isnt affordable its not going to displace much.

>“we have always found other jobs”

It really depends what humans value and what they have to spend. No one could predict that Banks would need more staff to deal with ATMs. It sucks being unable to predict past a coming automation revolution, but that doesnt mean there isnt something there.

>human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation

Humans are currently needed to manage automation. Theres no clear reason why, even with AGI, that we wouldn't want humans in most loops. Thats before cost and quality.

>The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.

Malthus is a pretty great example. We did sort out food production. There are risks with the scale at which we have done it. Malthus wasnt able to predict technologies to aid food production, but he did forecast the need.

When I see people complaining the jobs dont exist I find its the same. We dont know what the jobs are, but that doesnt mean the prediction of all of humanity being out of work are correct.

Actually the worst part of this whole thing will be that any incoming job losses being catastrophised as if the whole world is ending due to AI.

At some point there really won't be enough jobs and massive social change will happen. It has to surely? Don't call me Shirley. In star trek WW3 had to happen before the better society emerged. I think a large scale wipe out and cleaning of the slate is inevitable. What happens in a world where people who have spent so much time and effort and money to get educated and establish a career are suddenly worthless and penniless? Nothing good I suspect!