[empath75]

Yeah I was going to say they seem to be equating anybody doing "office work" as being "high skill" and there are tons of mediocre hacks in office jobs doing menial, brain-dead work. I think those people will continue to do menial, brain-dead work, except now it will leverage AI.

95% of people or some ridiculously high number like that used to be involved directly in agriculture in some way. Now a small percentage of americans do farm labor. If you told someone in 1845 that in 2024, only 10% of americans were working on farms, they would probably naively assume that the vast majority of us would be living lives of idle leisure, when what actually happened is that automation just made different, more advanced work economical to engage in.

There is not a limited amount of work that can be done, and if we relieve people from having to do some kinds of labor, they'll figure out how to spend their time doing stuff that would have been unimaginable before.

The scenario that I bring up a lot is that there is not a limited amount of movies and books that could be produced a year. We only produce the amount we do because that's how much we can produce _economically_. But if you had a super powerful AI that could actually cheaply produce movies on demand near the quality of professional movie makers (something that I don't imagine will happen any time soon, but it's the "worst-case-scenario" for creative workers), people will be spending their time making their own personal streaming service -- movies just for them, on demand. TV shows that never end, tailored for the individual's taste. There could literally be 10s of billions of hours of media produced a year, all of it at the quality of a modern block buster -- all of it that might be viewed by only a single person. And there will still be plenty of jobs available at the companies that are producing that media.