Well, we have many examples where in the past technology (and to a lesser extent trade) have let to some sectors of the economy using fewer people than before.
The situation you describe isn't all that special.
Yes, losing your job (or your career) is not fun, and can be painful. Massive salary reduction can happen.
No, that hasn't lead to widespread unemployment in the past. At least not widespread enough to be visible in aggregate statistics, especially over the noise of the 'normal' business cycle. However, individuals can obviously have pretty long spells in unemployment, but that can also happen without a shift in technology.
> Yes, losing your job (or your career) is not fun, and can be painful. Massive salary reduction can happen.
I'm just trying to get the point across that unemployment might rise so gdp may fall, in fact I think it should be the baseline scenario and not thinking some new jobs we can't imagine yet will be created.
It's so hard to imagine these new jobs because if the machines will out perform us cognitively it follows we will be able to get intelligent robots into the real world quite soon after. Then seriously what the heck is left? Fewer jobs, not more.
There is one "cure" I can think of for this and that's something closer to socialism, the market will have to step aside and the government will create massive amounts of new jobs. For example classes can be 5 pupils per teacher instead of 30 pupils per teacher. Nurses can attend to 3 patient beds instead of 8.
But letting the market sort this out ? I don't think so.
> It's so hard to imagine these new jobs because if the machines will out perform us cognitively it follows we will be able to get intelligent robots into the real world quite soon after. Then seriously what the heck is left? Fewer jobs, not more.
So I admit that this is a serious possibility that we need to consider.
But for the argument to make sense, we can't just talk about the general 'Oh, new technology will make a bunch of jobs obsolete.' We have to specifically talk about what (might) make AI special in that it might be even more general than electricity.
You didn't mention these special factors in your original comments.
I am not sure whether AI will be different or not, or rather I don't know how different it will be.
So far I see it as a good sign that we have many relatively equally competitive models from different providers, and some of them have open weights and some of them even have completely open sources (including training algorithms). So at least it's unlikely for the technology to be monopolised by any one entity.
> There is one "cure" I can think of for this and that's something closer to socialism, the market will have to step aside and the government will create massive amounts of new jobs. For example classes can be 5 pupils per teacher instead of 30 pupils per teacher. Nurses can attend to 3 patient beds instead of 8. But letting the market sort this out ? I don't think so.
If you want to involve the government, I'd rather give everyone a basic income, than to give our pupils inferior teachers and our sick people inferior nurses. (After all, we are assuming that humans will be worse at these jobs than the AI.) Also, I'd rather have people enjoy whatever it is they want to do, instead of being forced into some government provided make-work programme.
The situation you describe isn't all that special.
Yes, losing your job (or your career) is not fun, and can be painful. Massive salary reduction can happen.
No, that hasn't lead to widespread unemployment in the past. At least not widespread enough to be visible in aggregate statistics, especially over the noise of the 'normal' business cycle. However, individuals can obviously have pretty long spells in unemployment, but that can also happen without a shift in technology.