[thewebguyd]

Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.

Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.

Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.

[zozbot234]

The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.

[oldsecondhand]

Helped or overworked?

[taneq]

Automation is a boon when it automates away tedium, but also a curse for the people that subsist by enduring that tedium.

[pizzly]

Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.

[pembrook]

> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.

Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.

You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.

How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.

In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.

[oldsecondhand]

"Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay"

I wouldn't take his word too seriously. According to him, corporate lawyers, administrative assistants and compliance officers shouldn't exist.

[pembrook]

Uhhh...what jobs do you think AI is going to be tasked with automating?

The most valuable non-foundation-model AI companies are...legal apps. This means he was right, not wrong.

[_DeadFred_]

Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.

[pembrook]

Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.

In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.

You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.

It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.

[jackcviers3]

You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.

So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.

[pembrook]

What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?

You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.

Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.

Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.

Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.

I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.

[_DeadFred_]

Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.

If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.

Again, it's magic and hopium.