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Comment by alansaber | Hacker News Reader

I don't find the argument that advanced AI will leave 20% of society permanently unemployed particularly compelling

There are places where 20% of society (or more) are unemployed. They're not nice places. They're run by gangs or warlords. They're the kind of place where teenagers sit on steps and just wait for the wrong person to walk past them.

Like where?

Lots of places in the ME and Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemploym...

Do those places have gangs and warlords because they have 20%+ unemployment, or do they have 20%+ unemployment because they have gangs and warlords?

I cannot imagine the answer is strictly just one of those two. Young men in particular who have no prospects can and nothing to domesticate them (parents, jobs, relationship prospects) can especially be a lot of trouble.

That said, I'm not particularly convinced that gangs and warlords would suppress employment (if anything, the more organized criminals tend to run protection rackets which sort of require people to have some income they can steal) however they are most certainly reducing the quality of life for people.

Unemployment causing gangs at least feels more plausible, however you seem to have plenty of areas with gang activity that have plenty of employment opportunities as well as social programs. Selling drugs almost certainly makes more money, but comes with much, much higher risks. I might guess that this is more about social mobility than it is about survival, but I don't want to try to over-simplify a complex issue.

Fortunately it's extremely unlikely.

There was a change in the world, which went largely unnoticed - sometime in 2013-2017 the global number of infants peaked, never to recover.

Those 20% would just figure that there's no need to have children when you can just focus on yourself and go largely extinct within a generation, replaced with some people from the higher tiers, but not nearly enough to make up for those who weren't born.

This actually has been happening without AI for a while now, but I imagine technology would accelerate the process.

> Those 20% would just figure that there's no need to have children when you can just focus on yourself and go largely extinct within a generation, replaced with some people from the higher tiers, but not nearly enough to make up for those who weren't born.

A person being _unemployed_ is not a hereditary trait. Also, while it's already pretty wild to effectively claim that about 20% of humanity carries some kind _doomed to be made unemployable by AI_ gene, it's another giant leap beyond that to declaring this cohort will uniformly choose not to reproduce and therefore become extinct.

It doesn't need to be hereditary. Just needs to be in the range where on one hand a person doesn't want the next generation to go through the same and on the other, where making the most out of their current situation means not starting a family.

It's what's happening right now, just with poverty being the largest factor. Gig/minimum wage workers start families considerably less often and no wonder - how they are supposed to?

In the US, ~80% of the prime working age population is employed:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

For every one person who is classified as unemployed, there are one or more others who are classified unable to work for some reason.

Wait until you're in that 20%.

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