AI is being driven by the more enthusiastic older generation (in my view) and it's not just about taking a fraction of brick and mortar sales away, it's about systematically replacing the full breadth of white collar jobs, especially the entry level jobs. You know, the jobs that college grads are vying for.
When Amazon was launched, I immediately started to use it to get books that were impossible to find at bookstores near me. Similarly for various computer components that are less frequently used by typical users or even certain kinds of clothes or accessories needed for special activities, for which there were no nearby shops.
I have never been a typical consumer, so it had always been very difficult for me to find what I wanted at local shops, thus the appearance of online shopping was really great for me.
I flew around the US basically automating stuff with a network automation and operations orchestration team. This is before amazon really was a thing. So we were going into big old school data centers where the largest leap in tech since the 80s was VMWare ESX ( the new hotness ).
every site we went into we were by and large putting a lot of people out of work. these old telecom giants and industrial giants basically had a lot of folks who were like... the guy who reboots switches. Or the guy who maintains a specific bash script to take backups.
the stuff we did made most of these folks instantly obsolete. especially the CCNAs.
Now for those that don't know... 2000 or so... high schools started getting kids CCNA certifications to be top of rack switch kids so they could get a 'good job'. And it was a GOOD JOB. It paid VERY well. Better than most kids with a liberal arts degree.
Fast forward an almost a decade and we were wiping that entire career path out FAST. Datacenters went from having an army of CCNAs to a couple CCIEs and a couple CCNAs to do the physical labor. A lot of people who had only ever done one thing in their career for ten years were losing their cushy upper medium income salary and finding out their career path ended. They were as you might imagine... angry, afraid, prepared to sabotage... etc.
I didn't like that side of the work at all. But it really was inevitable.
Fast forward 15 years. The highest paid people in tech are CCIEs that can code. I know guys making 700k a year cause they know python and BGP inside and out.
We ripped the middle out of networking and EVERYONE paid the price. It's amazing to me that we never learn from our past.
One of the notable figures in that, Carly Fiorina, made a point to “forget the engineers”.
The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147793)
That will make a hell of a difference between being all for it and booing the proponents of the new order.
Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.
We will need fewer humans, basically. But we already have the humans and there are many of them, and they’ll be more jobless than before. There’s fear with that. And that’s not irrational. But I think it’s misdirected. You aren’t going to stop AI. People should instead focus on breaking up monopolies, taxing the largest corporations (soon: Anthropic) more than smaller ones, and maybe UBI for citizens or something like that.
And the conservatives are always going off about it not being profitable for the USPS... but like... that subsidized shipping service is like nitrous for the US economy. We made a fortune off that. And achieved huge sweeping strategic objectives.
Example.
The ENTIRE US commercial airline industry was originally subsidized by Air Mail. We built planes and radar systems using USPS subsidies. We quite literally had Pan Am build midway island years before ww2 kicked off to prepare for that war... using Air Mail subsidies.
Logistics is not for the naive or the feint of heart.
Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.)
[0] In its new soulless incarnation.