[bluefirebrand]

Companies are salivating over the idea of cutting staff and replacing them with AI tools, so it's not exactly farfetched to think AI might lead to a lot of unemployment, at least for a while

Every type of automation ever invented has led to massive job cuts and yes, some sectors actually did not ever recover

[Barrin92]

>Every type of automation ever invented has led to massive job cuts

It, never has, in fact the opposite is true. Every type of automation has expanded the economic output so much that it created massive amounts of labor demand, which is why cities early absorbed masses of underemployed workers during the industrial revolution. One famous example, there are now more bank tellers than before the invention of the ATM.

In fact you can go to any poor country with no automation and you'll find entire classes of un- and underemployed people. This is a condition of premodern, not technological societies.

The entire AI debate rests on the speculative claim that it is not merely an automation tool, but a sort of sci-fi wholesale replacement of human beings, contrary to what happened during earlier waves of automation.

[bluefirebrand]

> One famous example, there are now more bank tellers than before the invention of the ATM.

Bank tellers do way more varied work than ATMs do. You cannot open an account at a bank from an ATM. This is a stupid example because ATMs were not and never did try to automate the entirety of a bank teller's job, only a couple of the services they do

> In fact you can go to any poor country with no automation and you'll find entire classes of un- and underemployed people. This is a condition of premodern, not technological societies

You can find this in Rural America, forget "poor countries with no automation"

[PantaloonFlames]

> It, never has, in fact the opposite is true. Every type of automation has expanded the economic output so much that it created massive amounts of labor demand, …

This seems to be true, but there’s a second issue at work here, which that automation and progress in general can _disrupt_ the labor market. Sure there’s a net gain in labor demand, but there are people involved who are more than just “resources” who can easily be redeployed.

Progress is what built and then killed (injured?) cities and towns like, in the US, Detroit, or Gary, or Pittsburgh.

We want to promote progress and automation while at the same time protecting people who are inadvertently over-exposed to the downside. (Generally less educated people or people with less agency).