[insane_dreamer]

> Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia

The difference this time is that no one can articulate what are these "new" jobs that people will find. When agricultural jobs were being decimated, factories were opening up (whether they were better jobs or not is a different discussion, but the point being that the technology opened up new opportunities while destroying the old ones. We do not see this with AI and I have yet to read even any reasonable speculation of what these "new opportunities" might be. Sure you could argue that the future is unknown, but we should be able to at least glimpse it. And yet, we can't. Because almost any "new job" that you can come up with that doesn't exist today (which is already hard to imagine), could ostensibly also be replaced with AI.

So all we have is comments like yours, vague "it worked before so it'll work again" (lets ignore the fact that the circumstances are completely different), or even worse, "people will have time to focus on things that matter" but no explanation of how they'll pay the rent and buy food to survive.

> all the benefits ... raw economic terms ... quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life

In what way is AI improving any of these? So far, it's making all of these worse. Productivity increases don't matter if they don't benefit more than just a few wealthy shareholders.