Will AIs take all our jobs and end human history, or not? (2023)

It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking.

AI is not going to immediately replace food service work, manual labor, farming, hospitality, etc.

But it might replace quite high-paid software jobs, finance jobs, legal jobs, etc. One, if AI is good at anything it's things at least tangential to this. Two, these have costs high enough that off-setting is at least worth trying.

My suspicion is that ultimately it will lead to more of these types of jobs, though it could easily come with a huge reduction - and the jobs aren't guaranteed to be in the same countries.

You could create 3x as many of these jobs, and still end up with -25% of them in the US. Who knows.

The AI hype is definitely much bigger in the USA - on that part we concur.

Lmao. America has worse social welfare than most developed countries, but it's still a heaven compared to most of the world. What you can find in food bank is a feast for billions of people on this planet.

American people are stressed about AI because American people are expensive. Like hella expensive. So the incentive to replace American workers is very strong.

I guarantee you that these people exist in other countries too. Not everybody is a tech bro strawman.

If you look at 1940, women were ~24% of the workforce. Now in 2025 they are ~48%. The numbers are probably similar with immigrant workers having increased greatly in the last 80 years.

If you view AI workers as just more labor flooding the workforce it might have a similar affect. If we flooded the 1940s economy with 10s of millions of qualified women and immigrant laborers people would have viewed it as devastating to the economy, but introduced gradually over time we arrive at a point now where we fear what would happen if they went away.

AI uses 10litres of water and 10kwh of power per day to digg a hole? You'd better do it for less human!

I'm not sure on the human needs costs vs the AI costs and what lifestyle it would allow me. I'm sure as shit not having kids in such a world. I suspect it's ghetto like meager living while competing against machines optimised to do a job.

What do you think money is...?

Money is a way to indirectly trade labour and goods. If a job is automated, that labour doesn't disappear into the aether, it's still in the tradable pot of total goods and services. You cannot empty a pot by filling it. A world where a company though automation has made there nobody else to productively sell to is a world where _by definition_ they own all the output that they could otherwise have traded for.

Think of it as if in a few generations, everyone had the motivations of a rich junior, for better or worse.

IMO, this is a natural consequence of the industrial revolution, and the information revolution. We started to automate physical labor, then we started to automate mental labor. We're still very far form it, but we're going to automate whole humans (or better) eventually.

Edit: I think I replied to the wrong comment, feel free to ignore this.

Therefore the scenario where 'all jobs being replaced in a short time span' is simply impossible.

As for the civil unrest, I see Minneapolis as a bit of a dry run of what it would take to remove large numbers of presumably poor minorities along with anyone else who objects. The job is clearly more than the leadership expected but it still seems within the realm of possibility given the fact the minority party leaders are barely saying no to those in power.

I think The companies would go out of business if the government did not subsidize them as a matter of public or national security interest. Do you think that would not be the case? It doesn't take much for a company with money to lobby for this and for the power of marketing and mainstream media to make the public perceive this as the right decision - in fact a study of our history would reveal this as the more likely scenario so as a company racing to render the labor market obsolete its in their interest to disrupt it to capture any amount of it.

Those will suffer the Baumol effect and their prices will rise to extraordinary levels.

A massive improvement?

For AGI? Do you care about uniquely ant experience? Bacteria?

Why would AGI care? Which now runs the planet?

I call this the Quark principle. On DS9, there are matter replicators that can perfectly recreate any possible drink imaginable instantly. And yet, the people of the station still gather at Quark's and pay him money to pour and mix their drinks from physical bottles. As long as we are human, some things will never go away no matter how advanced the technology becomes.

Could be it shakes out in a generation or two, of course.