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by Taywee 1149 days ago
The scale is different by a grand margin. If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?

I'm not saying to ban it. I think the productivity gain could be a gift. Everybody being freed from the need to work would be amazing.

But without actually dealing with it, what's the proposal for dealing with the majority of the population of your country being completely without employment? What do we do for money when there's no work left to be done? The whole country can't trade stocks for a living.

1 comments

> If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?

Which 50% are you seeing replaced? We can, and have, always imagined mass income eradication.

I'm not arguing we do nothing. But zero problems surfaced so far are even remotely actionable, as they're all well within the realm of hypothesis versus evidence.

Potentially? Most artists, programmers, musicians, most teachers, huge amounts of finance, marketing, legal and especially paralegal, most journalism and technical writing positions, stock trading (most traders don't do anything that AI can't fully replace), and even more of customer service.

The majority of those will probably be staffed at 10% what they are now at best. Some, like stock trading, will probably be almost completely erased as a human job.

I'm not so worried about legal. Lawyers seem to be in a good position to gatekeep AI out (e.g. suing DoNotPay). Paralegals could go extinct though.