One minor data point. I've got a friend who worked as a translator. That's slacked off a bit and she's retrained as a tour guide. I think there will be a trend towards humans doing more human facing work.
Yes, for sure there are transition opportunities for some. But there are limited number of spots. "tour guide" is not a _new_ job that didn't exist before. And that's really the problem. There either has to be a completely new profession -- or set of professions - to absorb all those who lose their jobs, or existing professions have to increase in demand such as they can absorb large quantities of new hires. Human facing professions will do better than machine-facing ones, but they're not going to 10x the number of hires. People will eventually pay a premium to be served by a human, but a limited number of people will be able to afford that.
> except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge
I think it's worse than that. The frontier labs are purporting that there won't be any "new work" required in the future—starting with knowledge workers and then eventually snaking down into more manual labor jobs via robotics.
The irony is that these same labs are still hiring engineers to build the machinery they're so convinced will make engineers obsolete. It's so paradoxical it's not true.
The only true things are that AI is a bubble, the current technology is unsustainable given the amount of compute required, and LLMs are overhyped in what they can do well versus what they need to be closely supervised with.
Perhaps - there is a massive gulf between the LLMs and the sort of models required by robotics though so I'm not convinced progress will be quick there.
I have a young son and I intend to teach him robotics as a hobby partly because it is where I believe the high-paying jobs will be in 20 years.
except that no one has been able to articulate what "new work" might emerge
and while yes, this happened before, it happened over decades, and more importantly, the new jobs were created as the old ones were being destroyed
neither of these conditions are happening this time around
so we have not "been there before"