[karaterobot]

What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead? Go back to their old jobs as cloud infrastructure architects, or hedge fund managers? I agree that most people don't want to work as pickers, and I think that's the point: in general, if you've got a shitty job, it's because it's the best available to you. They don't want to work that job, true, but they sort of have to, and if it goes away they'll have to get an even worse one—if they can.

> That’s cheap enough that middle class people will have live in super servants.

Take into consideration that, if AI and robot super servants exist, the idea of a middle class will almost certainly have to be redefined downward. Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money. That would change the economic accessibility of live-in super servants.

[crote]

There are plenty of other low-skill or medium-skill jobs available. People have been making this argument since the start of the Industrial Revolution and there are still jobs for them. Sure, the labor market will shift, but it's not like we are suddenly replacing all humans with robots.

[snapplebobapple]

What did everyone else do when their job was made obsolete over the last 150 years? They seem to have mostlyade out ok from wealth effects causing more demand for labor in other fields, often at better wages.

Your argument has no historical precedent for and lots against so the likelihood of it coming true can only be estimated as very small and you honestly shouldnt be worrying about it too much. Its equivalent to arguing that you are going to win the lottery. Somebody will win eventually but the proba ility makes anything but assuming it wont be you irresponsibke

[science4sail]

> Your job will be less valuable, as you get get undercut both by automation, and by the highly motivated people who lost their jobs due to automation and who would do yours for less money.

Couldn't that be solved via political means? You can either institute a de-facto/de-jure caste system (like medieval nobles) or engage in career gatekeeping (like doctors).

[quickthrowman]

> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead?

What did all of the laid off agricultural workers do when farming was mechanized and industrialized? This isn’t the first time we’re facing technology taking jobs away from people.

[hkpack]

I see this thinking all the time, that if something worked ok in the past, then it is absolutely guaranteed to work next time.

And it is absolutely not. People live as they are protected by some divine power over the consequences of their collective actions.

[pc86]

Nobody is saying that it's a 100% certainty, but when this is exactly what has happened many many times throughout human history, the burden of proof that this time is different kind of falls on you, doesn't it?

You could absolutely be right but I see zero evidence that this technological advancement will be any different than the countless before over the last thousand years.

[hkpack]

We literally had world wars with millions dead because of the technological breakthroughs.

You should be blind not to see how technological advancements driving the increasing gap between classes and put pressure on governments in developed countries all over the world.

No one says that people will go extinct, but throughout the thousands of years you mentioned we had periods of very very bad times. It is very naive to think that high paying tech job will protect from the outcomes of other people losing their jobs en masses.

[pc86]

Were those wars caused by the technological breakthroughs, or did the breakthroughs just make them more devastating? Is it possible they would have been longer, and more deadly, without those breakthroughs to bring them to quicker ends?

You seem to be implying that these recent advances are somehow going to drive massive irrevocable unemployment and that that's somehow going to lead to some sort of - world war? Or at least "very very bad times?" Presumably at least one of those events is that none of these warehouse workers who stand to lose their jobs will be able to get work doing anything else, which seems extremely unlikely.

[hotpotamus]

> People live as they are protected by some divine power over the consequences of their collective actions.

I mean, most people in the world are religious, aren't they? I sometimes forget that fact working in tech where everyone seems to be an atheist (myself among them), but it seems like a very helpful psychological adaptation to living an uncertain and finite existence.

I do think it will eventually doom us however as we create problems beyond our ability to manage. I was thinking it would be climate change that will doom human civilization if not the species itself, but AI (even just the economics effects rather than some rogue intelligence) also seems like a contender.

[maxwell]

They got manufacturing, shipping, or warehouse jobs.

[Tade0]

> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead?

Whatever they eventually go on doing anyway, considering Amazon reportedly has a crazy turnover rate of 150% per year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwardsegal/2022/10/24/amazon-r...

What value is a job you can't really hold on to for even a year because it's so gruelling?

[jrumbut]

A sudden rush of so many similarly situated workers is going to be a very difficult situation.

The robots may be good but the cost of the social upheaval should be factored in to the cost of their operation. Otherwise the rest of us are paying for the externalities of these devices and incentivizing the displacement of workers.

[prepend]

Will it be sudden? I expect it will happen over many years with the robot:human ratio starting at 5% and taking a while to get to 95% or whatever the optimal ratio is.

I’m not sure why you think all humans would be fired immediately and replaced.

Most likely is that humans will stay and robots will be mixed in to increase capacity.

[oldpersonintx]

> What do these laid off warehouse pickers do instead?

this line of reasoning was also peddled by slave owners before the Civil War...these people can only do one thing and will starve unless we provide this opportunity to them...

[pc86]

They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete.

Nobody's making textiles on looms anymore but the mechanization of that work eliminated a lot of jobs, but it created jobs both higher in numbers and more economically valuable.

Eliminating the need to humans to pick a box off of a shelf and put it into a slightly larger box to get put on a truck is an objectively good goal for the economy (which is probably obvious) and for people, including those doing that job now (definitely less obvious).

[tivert]

> They do something else, as has happened hundreds - thousands - of times throughout human history when some innovation has made entire classes of occupations obsolete.

Exactly! They'll stop being warehouse workers and do intellectual and creative work, for instance by becoming commercial artists!

Oh wait.

At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.

[prepend]

> At some point, you really need to take "past performance is not a guarantee of future results" to heart.

While this is true, I think it’s a better assumption than “this time, we’re just too stupid to change and sit here and starve to death.”

Evidence shows humans as creative problem solvers and I think the trend of people doing more productive things to survive will continue.

There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?

[tivert]

> While this is true, I think it’s a better assumption than “this time, we’re just too stupid to change and sit here and starve to death.”

I don't think so, for a few good reasons:

1. Making the "everything will be fine" assumption discourages taking proactive steps (e.g. if buggy-whip making is going away, It'd be better to retrain the buggy-whip makers 5-10 years beforehand they become redundant, rather than letting their businesses fail and letting them die penniless and forgotten).

2. This time may be different. There's a lot of hype going on about AI, but if even a little of that is true, it's going to put insoluble squeeze on a lot of workers (e.g. their job gets automated away along with most of the other ones they were supposed to pivot into).

3. You talk about "humans" in the abstract, but what about the seven billion people who are actually out there? You abstraction is a rug that can hide a lot of actual damage. To give an extreme example: what if "humans figuring it out" means two million tech billionaires living in an automated paradise on top of seven billion skeletons of workers they no longer need? "Humans" made it through a lot of things, while lots of individual humans were immiserated an/or died.

> There’s a million examples of this. And just look at fast food restaurants and cashiers being replaced by kiosks. Did all the cashiers get fired or starve to death?

Yeah, happy endings like "the rust belt."