| > The issue that I see addressed less often is that the new jobs require by definition, a higher skill set. I don't think that's necessarily true. A taxi driver of 20 years ago had to memorize roads and routes, and become familiar with traffic patterns at different times of the day. (Many taxi drivers sucked for various reasons, but that's neither here nor there.) Today, anyone can be an adequate taxi driver, without really any knowledge of the areas they work in. Slap a smartphone on your dashboard and you're good to go. That's a lower skill job. > You wouldn't displace 100 manual labor workers with a machine that requires 105 workers to maintain Sure, and that's part of the problem. You lay off those 100 manual workers and hire 5 workers to maintain the machinery. It's not at all clear that those 100 manual workers are going to then find higher-skill jobs, especially if they need training to get them. > What's the proper social response to [hypothetical AGI displacing more and more jobs], I don't know. Easy: universal basic income, plus free higher education and vocational training programs for people who do want to work in a field that still needs humans in the loop. We need to drop this inhumane view that people who can't (or even simply don't want to) work somehow don't at least deserve a basic standard of living. And I think we'll find that if we remove financial, housing, and food insecurity, more people will actually want to find meaningful ways to participate in society. Some people won't, and maybe that's a shame, but for the sake of all of us, they should still be housed and fed, comfortably enough. |