[yujzgzc]

"Laid off" may be more appropriate than "fired", but in essence, removing the need for costly labor is often the main "value" of any technology. Society as a whole comes out ahead from it, I mean for all the ice transporters and merchants put out of a job by electric refrigeration, and all the sailors put out of a job by modern cargo ships I think we're better off for it. But at the individual level it does make one uneasy about the prospects of individuals affected by it. My personal conclusion is that people have a personal duty to anticipate and adapt to change, society might give them some help along the way but it doesn't owe them that their way of life will be maintained forever.

[samiv]

This is putting the apple cart before the horse.

Economy should be a tool for the society and to benefit everyone. Instead it's becoming more and more a playground for the rich to extract wealth and the proletariats have only purpose to serve the bourgeois lest they be discarded to the outskirts of the economy and often to the literal slums of the society while their peers shout "you're just not working hard enough".

[Spooky23]

Very true. We waste alot of valuable labor on “software engineering” that is grossly inefficient. Capital gets allocated to these so called startups that are incredibly inefficient.

[taftster]

This says a lot as relating to the rise of AI and the fear of job loss. There's going to be displacement in areas we can't predict, but overall it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.

[Nevermark]

> it might very well just lead to leveling up the entire workforce.

How could that possibly work?

At some point I could see white collar work trending down fast, in a way that radically increased the value of blue color work. Software gets cheaper much faster than hardware.

But then the innovation and investments go into smart hardware, and robotics effectiveness/cost goes up.

If you can see a path where AI isn't a one-generational transition to most human (economic) obsolescence, I would certainly be interested in the principle or mechanism you see.

[gnatolf]

Craftsmen will have a resurgence, that's probably a 'leveling up' in terms of resilience against AI takeover. There's just no way of automating quite a few of the physically effective crafts.

[pbhjpbhj]

So the rich who can afford craftsmen will get richer, spend more on their multiple houses, perhaps. But that's literal crumbs, one or two jobs out of tens of thousands. There's no significant "leveling up" there at the societal levels of job destruction we're talking about.