| More immediately (2023-2024): Housing bubble in major U.S./Canada cities will 'collapse'. Not catastrophically so, but prices will begin to ease as the city centers become less relevant. Hardest hit will be owners of office real estate, as it becomes apparent white-collar industries are being gutted from both sides: remote work/offshoring results in less need for office real estate, and automation/AI reduce staffing needs overall. Cities built around blue-collar industry, as well as those which are more desirable to people working from home (cities with good weather, hiking/climbing/skiing access) will continue to see residential real estate prices rise. Slightly more long-term (2023-2027): More jobs will be automated, or heavily assisted by automation. Most of these will be jobs which are done at a computer, not manual labor. As more jobs are automated, but while we're still in a capitalist society, lots of people will be forced to survive by suing the AI makers. E.g. AI does most of the coding, but laid-off programmers can sue the company with a claim that some code it was trained on was recognizable in the output, in a way that violates license. Artists who no longer have work can similarly sue the AI art programs. Courts will be increasingly sympathetic as we enter an economic and labor crisis where more is being produced, but people have less work. Humans having published work prior to 2022 (which was then used in AI training sets) will be crucial to keeping the masses of laid off people from starving as competition for blue-collar jobs becomes more intense. Only so many people can be Uber drivers and taskrabbiters. Eventually, once the AI has written software and schematics for robots which can also automate the blue-collar jobs, the situation will be so out of hand that lawmakers will introduce UBI which affords people at least the bare minimum living wage, and take the money from the AI makers who are now the producers. Surprisingly to everyone, driving will be one of the last things to get automated, due to the regulatory hurdles, liability, and lack of consensus on how the trolley problem should be solved. |