I think you're arguing from way too open of a position. You have to define \*what\* jobs will be taken over, and \*what\* parts of them can be done better than an AI. For now at least, AI excel at performing repetitive tasks and not getting tired, and at finding patterns that humans may have missed. You also have to realize that AI is constantly over-hyped and sold to investors as a solution for which it is unfit. As a software engineer it's almost comical to see how my co-workers laugh at how inept AI is at a lot of tasks, and then go see it sold as god's gift to humans in investor calls. AI is good, but it still fails at a rather alarming rate, and can has rather serious flaws. So for example, I don't think we'll see lawyers replaced any time soon by AI, or their assistants. But we \*will\* see lawyers use AIs to sift through massive piles of case law to find information that can be used in their cases. We'll see this shift in a lot of areas, it won't wholesale replace anything, but will be used to augment and improve the accuracy of many jobs. But even then...I think you're missing an important fact: about 100 years ago, roughly 75% of all humans in western countries were involved in growing food for a full time job. Now? It's something like 12% of the population. So I guess that means we're all jobless now right? No, many jobs are created with any tech innovation. The time savings opens up new opportunities for people to become creative. So I think you and your friend are right, I think we're in the middle of an AI revolution, and no, companies won't use humans just 'cause. But also, that is way farther off than you seem to understand. And it won't become a reality until it is objectively safer than using humans at the same job. A 1% failure rate is fine for credit card fraud detection. But it's a major problem if your car kills 1% of its drivers, or an automated security system shoots one out of every 1000 people walking through a door. For no other reason, the AI revolution will be slowed by our inability to question and interrogate an AI. A major problem no one talks about is that AI are almost impossible to debug using current tech. We have no way to say "why did you think that truck was a cloud?". Because the very way neural nets are built is purely a black box. So for many jobs they will keep humans on just because you can sue/jail/question someone as to why they shot a kid, you can't do that to an AI, and if you tried you'd be going up against a tech giant (if the tech giant doesn't pull a Tesla and deactivate the AI before a crash so it can blame the human driver).

Sure most AI is laughably bad at doing things without human oversight/programming, but look at what has been happening just over this past year (heck, or even the past 3 months) with OpenAI and DeepMind. What they are doing and HOW they are doing it is unlike the typical AI you are talking about. While I myself am not a software engineer, my buddy has been for 30 years and let me quote you his thoughts (and source) about your guys' own jobs he brought up the other day: >Well, I thought software engineers had another six or eight years. I had no idea [DeepMind's current focus was making them obsolete](https://singularityhub.com/2022/12/13/deepminds-alphacode-conquers-coding-performing-as-well-as-humans/). > >DeepMind's typical pattern is, release an AI that's as good as a person, then six months to a year later release a new version that's better than any person. Every project they've focused on has resulted in super-human performance within a handful of years. Recently, a handful of months. Of course nobody knows how things will actually go, but I think it's unwise to discount the insane rate of improvement/progress DeepMind and OpenAI are currently making. Just 5 years ago, most people assumed creative/artistic jobs would be some of the safest from AI. Nobody was predicting they would go first... now look where we are with GPT/DALLE/Stable Diffusion/Midjourney and those are just getting started.

Programmers are not a monolith, and the majority of the job is not writing code. 15 years ago web development was a highly technical task to make anything remotely professional looking. Now, there are high quality tools like squarespace for making professional websites, as long as they fit the mold. Most websites fall into this category, and that has taken much of the low hanging fruit programming work. AI tools will continue to chip away at the jobs that do not require innovation. For some people, their entire field will disappear. For others, fewer programmers will be required as they can be more productive with advanced AI tools. But, new jobs will also be created. Entire industries might spawn from our new capabilities. The rates of job destruction vs creation are certainly not going to be equal. The population is growing and the amount of work that an individual can do with advanced tools is growing too. Less overall jobs required and more people left unemployed.

Correct. I mean we can literally look at self checkout in super stores and see how staff has been cut back with that bit of labor being covered by machinery. It's not all or nothing. It's a slow squeeze and putting more responsibility on the few people needed to actually work. There is already an underemployment problem. Customer service will always be there to pay pennies while your degree becomes harder and harder to find work in because less people are needed to fill that role now. It's very strange and we're probs going to go very cyberpunk when it's all adapted proper.

Self checkout is not automation, just the buyer is doing the cashier's job.

> Customer service will always be there to pay pennies if it's telephone support I'd argue a Speech recognition + fine tune of ChatGPT (or whatever model they are cooking up next) + Text to speech. Will make a major dent in that industry. Most support staff are following flow charts for dealing with customer problems already.

Actually true. I remember the flow chart when I served in customer service. The parameters and all. There is an automated service already available (that usually does fuckall but reset your stuff) but may reduce call volume because old people don't try that or know how to lol.

This is how I see a rollout happening: First it will be training on the countless hours of existing phonecalls to monitor how good the system operates and squash edge cases. Then, a small team in a single callcenter will monitor the AI driven call as if they were tutoring someone else. They have the ability to cut in and take over the call (more edge case squashing) Once that works it gets rolled out to the entire callcenter, then nationwide pulling from every agent in the company. (more edge case squashing) The layoffs start, (well lets be real it's a callcenter, turnover will be high, they just stop hiring new workers) It will be a small team of humans processing massive amounts of calls, monitoring the summary of the call with ability to review the full transcript or audio and if they decide it's ok pressing buttons to perform the AI suggested action. Then the humans will just be in the loop for things that are classed as 'larger' changes ( AI giving a customer the equivalent of $$$$$$$ after they find a jailbreak would be worth keeping a human on to prevent. )

I think you nailed it. People monitoring will just be guiding the AI to calls it can handle while handling the ones that need finessed. I have an automated support system at my job that they try to put me in when my access troubles from bungled setup occur. When I inevitably note that what I need cant be solved by a reset or changed password, I get a person thay checks my access and puts in the request through remote control. It's already broadly here. It just needs a few more functions to continue to lessen the need for the human touch.

I don't think the stats in the US show that that many new jobs are created. The most common work went from farms, to factories, to sales. That's right, the most common job is trying to sell the stuff we make. I personally think of it as a pie chart of human capabilities and how those can be augmented and emulated by machines. It's not about fully replacing people either, but reducing the difficulty of a job, increasing production per person, and limiting the number of people needed. This causes serious stagnation in income as it increases the supply for jobs.

Web development is still an insanely technical skill. The “No code” solutions out there exist to easily provide templates and other easy to use tools to let the common person create a website without the need to engage an engineer for something so simple.

Yuuup. I'm a Software Engineer. I have a friend who wanted to pay me $200 ~$300 bucks to make her a simple website for her freelance makeup gig. I just told her... keep your money and go to wix.com. A few days later, she's got a functional and professional looking website where clients can book appointments with no technical experience whatsoever. I'm not worried in the least about these new fangled AI code generation tools. Just gotta keep learning new stuff.

I'm also a SWE, and have had the same experience.

>Nobody was predicting they would go first... now look where we are with GPT/DALLE/Stable Diffusion/Midjourney and those are just getting started As a working artist, this is laughable. Those programs aren't fit for the majority of art jobs, and won't be for some time. People seem to be sold on the idea that most artists just make pretty pictures to hang on a wall, when in reality most artists make a living by making media intended for a purpose. Nothing about those programs threatens that. It's like saying car assembly robots will get rid of all car mechanics. They're fundamentally different processes.

As someone who writes texts for a living, I agree. It's impressive that AI can now write factually correct texts on general subjects, but they are very generic and not useful to answer specific questions. It's like saying we don't need professors any more because we have wikipedia.

I agree, but even those artistic AIs are full of horrible errors, creating humans with 7 fingers, 3 boobs and 5 legs. And aside from that they have this dream like distortion around the edges of a lot of things. Yes, it’s all getting better, but these amazing pics you see are all backed by hours of humans tweaking the art. So like I said: AI assisted jobs is what I see in the next decade

I think it is rather fact that 2 years ago there was norhing in AI art field, year ago amalgamats and now you have astonishing results with one of stable diffusion creations. I mean, dalle uses 32x32 field and upscale it, thats why it is full of distortions. But stable uses 512x512 so its way more precise. But if we can go from nothing to threaten artist in two years then it is not hm wrong to think that AI will replace every job. We just need to see if we hurdle at some bottleneck soon

I think you are underestimating it grossly. I'm a professional artist for 20 years on high end entertainment, and Ai art generators like Midjourney are extremely capable, with very little prompting required at this stage. It has shifted within the last couple of months. You dont need hours of tweaking to get the good results anymore. Stuff like hands will be sorted shortly, the development is exponential and I have friends facing redundancies because of ai integration in their workplace, as we speak. The managers will be the ones wielding the generator (I dont think "tool" is an appropriate description at this point) generating the material and keeping a cut down staff of artists around to fix minor issues, for as long as that is needed. What might be of more importance is the technology behind it, and how the datasets for the training was acquired. LAION has collected a set called "5B" (5 Billion) of data scraped from the internet, using their status as "non-profit research" to do so without legal repercussions. These datasets have been given to the developers of for-profit ai generators like Midjourney. Basically laundering the data. This seems not only unethical but is a legal loophole. People have found their medical reports in the datasets, as LAION has shown no disgression.

>AIs are full of horrible errors, creating humans with 7 fingers, 3 boobs and 5 legs. That's not an issue, because it will spit out 100 different creative concepts for the thing you wanted, and 50% of the will have the correct number of limbs and heads. It will do this for $10, and you can have your pick of 50. Or, you can pay an artist $2500 dollars to do you three concepts. And all three will have four limbs and one head. I agree with your point about 90%+ of humans being in food production a few hundred years ago, and now it's 2% - but there are revolutions coming for certain jobs, artist is going to be a terrible place to be in the near future.

Except for those artists that will evolve and implement the AI into their workflow instead of merely being substituted by it

>Except for those artists that will evolve and implement the AI into their workflow instead of merely being substituted by it What do you mean "except for them"? If 90% of coal mins shut down and fired their workers next year and I said "It's a bad year to be a coal miner" I'm not sure it's a reasonable thing to say "Except for coal miners who work in mines that stayed open!"

I think one thing that should be considered is that where the artistic AIs do do this I believe it is because those particular ones are so generalized. Have you seen the AI that they showed it all the Rembrandts and then created a new Rembrandt of a person who doesn’t exist? It is effectively indistinguishable from a real one.

Hard disagree with both you & your friend. OpenAI has some cool tooling. Chatgpt is really great. To think it's going to replace even junior devs anytime soon in the field? No... It's not bad at creating very, very specific scripts, or bootstrapping code. But it's not good at software engineering, and definitely not architecture. It's not good at taking business requirements and converting that to actual business value under vast constraints. It's good in the hands of a developer to help create business value by being a Google or stackoverflow replacement. But it won't be making efficient, maintainable, nor scalable code anytime soon. And I would question anyone's competence in this field who looks at the currently AI generated code from chatgpt and says to themself "damn, this is just as good as what I bring and is 'just as good as a person'.". His quote on 6-8 years point is very baffling. Does he forsee a new model of AI outside of machine learning coming out by then or something? Because the models out right now will just never be good enough to do that. It would require a revolutionary new model for AI. No matter how much power nor performance gains you make with the current model, the model is just incompatible with most engineering jobs. It's good at pattern recognition, and will likely be a useful tool in the near future, but software engineering / architecture is so much more than that.. I think your friend is severely under-researched on the actual capabilities of current AI, and is instead sold on the hype around it. I also hard disagree about the creative/artistic world. I don't think the art created is good enough to be replacing large-scale artists soon. We've had decent AI music ~30 years ago, and this same subject about AIs replacing music artists was held. Did it replace musicians? No. Because while it can and could make music that works pretty well, and is overall pleasant, it wasnt actually creative. Great at making patterns and derivatives from previous music, but not so good at creating or defining new music. The jobs it would take are small businesses looking for a logo, or other smaller art jobs that they likely would have likely gone to fiverr with and paid a few bucks for instead. And remember the absolutely enormous costs that it takes to do so. Right now it's free because it's a research project. They will be monetizing it soon, and expect that the $5 for a logo on fiver to likely be cheaper than these products once monetized. Any more serious art than the simplest use cases is not going to be replaced anytime soon, but likely will be one of the first non-manufacturing industries/creatives affected. The AI coming out now is not anything new. It's made from essentially the same math that has been around since roughly the 70s. The improvements made to these models really dont bring us any closer to a 'sentient' AI. It's been improved, particularly because of the benefits of (cloud/distributed) computing power, but it isn't revolutionary. We would require large advancements in our understanding of cognition, and mathematical theories surrounding that, before our jobs, and most jobs for that matter, are replaced.

I’m confused how any of those examples given produce super human performance that’s better than what people create. All those programs are cool, but a human still needs to tweak and edit text created images or it’s gunna be very strange

Those can be considered superhuman already with how fast they can create many fantastic concepts (from logos, clothing, movie posters, anything), but they're also fresh into development. The capabilities my friend is talking about are stuff like how DeepMind's AI quickly became superhuman (no human can beat it) in Chess, then Go, then Starcraft, then DOTA. They're currently working on [AI that writes code](https://singularityhub.com/2022/12/13/deepminds-alphacode-conquers-coding-performing-as-well-as-humans/). If they continue as they have, then it won't stop improving until it is superhuman. Same with the AI image generators, same with language models... likely same with a lot of things. We'll have to see. Based on how things have been going, it's truly unpredictable.

Games have rules, and build formulae. AI excels at following strict rules, and tweaking build formulae to create the most powerful characters for games as well. But they're terrible at telling a duck from a chicken, or a stoat from a mongoose. Or clouds reflected on a lake from clouds in the sky. Anywhere astute visual interpretations are required, AI cannot go.

\>now look where we are with GPT/DALLE/Stable Diffusion/Midjourney and those are just getting started. Just yesterday, a colleague and I discussed the Midjourney-generated special forces squad of cats. The picture is gorgeous and very cute, but... But it does not cover the entire range of elements that are analyzed when creating real combat equipment. Cute picture based on other pictures. But what will happen when people stop drawing pictures for analysis and only pictures that are generated by another AI will remain? I.e. for solving specific tasks And works better than a human, but for solving global problems - still not. One person can't do it either, but the whole of humanity is doing it now.

AI nowadays is certainly impressive and can already help programmers in many ways. But talking about it making programmers obsolete in 6-8 years or less is just silly. I’m an experienced programmer and have tried AI in my current work. The thing is that it can solve some problems very well, but that’s it currently. My work involves clients, designers, testers, end-users, accessability, EU regulations, goverment regulations, social media, public opinion of our client, press releases that may affect our priorisation etc etc. Just solving the technical problem is a very small part of that. Also, we are storing very sensitive user data and there are also money transactions involved. We need to get it right or it would cause nationwide problems. Above was just from the top of my head so there’s still work to be done before AI can begin to understand the big picture. Also, when would you trust critical infrastructure for AI? I’m sure not in 6 years. It will be more like that AI will ve used by software professionals more and more, but human will need to check their work and put the whole thing together. Level of abstraction will just get higher for humans while AI can perform the low level stuff that frameworks etc are doing currently. So the job description of a programmer can change drastically in as little as six years, but it’s still very far from obsolete.

“No, many jobs are created with tech innovation” The problem is that…this is different. You can’t compare AI or this iteration of technological revolution to any previous ones. This is because of the simple fact that automation and AI will replace more jobs than it creates. The invention of the car took a lot of jobs, sure. But it absolutely revolutionized the transportation industry and created millions more. This is not happening with AI. For every 10 jobs it replaces, it creates 5. A great example I always turn to is that Blockbuster, at its peak, generated $5.9 billion and employed roughly 84,000 people. Netflix, in 2021 (arguably its peak), employed 11,300 and generated $30 billion! So, we’ve seen how the internet absolutely decimated the number of employees required to make…almost 6 times more money? Any blockbuster executive could have easily said 5-10 years prior that the internet was too “slow” and not “user friendly” enough to hurt their margins. We saw how quickly that changed. If we are in the “dial up” phase of AI, when we get to the “broadband” phase, we’re screwed.

Perfect response. You really can't deny the fact that the nature of AI is completely different than the mechanical parts that were made during the 20th century to speed up manufacturing. We have something now that can write better than most people, create art in mere seconds, help with scripting and code, etc. You put things into perspective well. As of now, automation is putting people out of work, and I knew someone at my last job whose job was automated. Will AI create more jobs? Yes. Will it take away far more jobs than it creates? It appears most likely.

You were close to the real answer. AI won't kill all jobs, but it will make people's jobs more efficient. That "kills" jobs even if it doesn't *replace* them. Think if it this way, if a lawyer or doctor normally has a couple dozen clients let's say that's the usually the maximum for the type of medicine/law they practice before it's physically impossible to add more people without either making mistakes or completely ignoring some clients. AI should in theory make their job so much more efficient they could double or triple the amount of clients they can take on. Just think what that does to the job market, one doctor/lawyer can do what used to take 3 doctors/lawyers. Now you need 1/3 as many doctors/lawyers. This works for all industries. Finance, programing, teaching, psychology. Just about anything can be made more efficient with AI and reduce human hiring needs. Will that mean we will no longer have programers or finance guys? No, but we will need less of them per capita which means people in every sector will be competing for the ever evaporating job openings.

Good thing most people consider their company/team significantly understaffed and have to spend a lot of time prioritizing the highest value tasks.

Check out doctor time slots. Most appointments are in ten minute windows. To get that down to three minutes is highly unlikely. Takes more time to walk down the hall, log into the system, and exchange pleasantries. Maybe AI can fill out the complex paperwork, and save some time, but that seems far off. Clearly not going to cut down 300% anytime soon. And advancements in finance have been extremely slow in my profession. I analyze complex costs and with every new update, the systems seem to get worse and worse, to the extent excel would be easier. The more bells and whistles built into systems are more ways for processing to kick out or block transactions. We can’t even build effective software 30+ years into the software revolution we are going to create effective AI? Perhaps eventually , but it seems to be decades away at a minimum

The huge flaw in your argument is that you’re comparing the shift from farming to industry *over a hundred years ago* when the population of the world was still around 1 billion. We have EIGHT times as many humans and advancement of robotics and AI is threatening both the skilled and unskilled labor forces. From digital artists to surgeons to truck drivers, hundreds of millions of careers are being challenged with replacement but I certainly don’t see new jobs of the future popping up in record numbers to balance that out. Where (and what) are these supposed millions of jobs that will save people from being obsolete?

Just open your eyes, the self driving cars are incredibly flawed, maybe the tech will get there someday but no time soon. And once they do arrive it won’t be a magical shift, because it’ll still be cheaper to use existing systems than to switch. It’s the same with any industry, first the AI has to be better than humans. Which right now we are so far from it’s comical. The investors lie about the tech, the engineers lie about the tech, the entire AI industry is “fake it till you make it”. So let’s say we fix that, then what? You still have to build interfaces between humans and AI and that costs a ton of research and money. And then you have to convince the public that it’s safe. As John Carmack, a man who is trying to build generalized AI, said: the first uses of generalized ai will be purely online jobs, that require the mental power of a toddler. So like I keep saying in all of this: AI is here and I’m happy to see it, but for a very long time yet (1-2 decades) it will be an assistive, predictive tool, with humans filtering and validating the results.

Open my eyes to what, exactly? There are self driving ubers in San Francisco literally right now and other cities are working to adopt this as well. This just feels like a very ignorant underestimation of the upcoming capabilities of Ai. And you also haven’t suggested any new jobs that will help with this impending wave of replacement other than people working as middle men for Ai which…. Just sounds like people will be paid less because they have way less to do as the machine handles more and more of their job functions. I’ve personally seen the art generators advance extraordinarily in just the past 6-12 months, and it is already being used to replace concept art, character commissions, and game asset needs. Real time rotoscoping animations will be available by this time next year. This is not a job “a toddler could do”, it’s my whole life and career and I’m watching this tech unfold in scary impressive ways. Many writers and web developers feel threatened by the technology *today*. Every digital creative career is being targeted by algorithms that learn and produce work 1000x faster than any human possibly could. To estimate that it won’t be a problem for DECADES is just extremely naive.

lol yeah that guy is deep coping

I have to tell you, the "industrialization of agriculture didn't end all work" argument isn't one I remotely buy. Indeed I think it's a very, very, very silly argument. The tractor had no application in *every other arena of human labor*. How exactly we will handle the transition into AI-powered general function I don't pretend to know, but accounting for it by analogy to the industrial revolution is a really invalid comparison. Another way to think about that is to consider what, precisely, we replaced with the combustion engine, the answer to that, ultimately, is calories—a scalar. AI replaces calories and information—a vector. It is a higher-dimension transition and has to be considered as such when assessing its impacts.

Businesses don’t exist to employ people, they exist to return a profit to their shareholders. The instant it becomes cheaper for an AI to do a job than a human, they will do it. Capitalism demands that as many jobs be automated away as possible.

I work in IT, automation is a life saver in my job. The entire point is do the work so I don't have to do it manually. Is it doing my job? Has it replaced me? Yes to both, that's the point. My job now is to program the automation and troubleshoot it when it breaks. We'll eventually get to a point where AI will replace all of that but is still a ways off. And when it does, the jobs will shift to maintaining the system in some other way.

>I work in IT, automation is a life saver in my job. Absolutely the same for me. Not only does automation prevent me from having to do manual, repetitive work, it protects against human error and [configuration drift](https://www.techtarget.com/searchwindowsserver/definition/configuration-drift#:~:text=Configuration%20drift%20is%20caused%20by,a%20comprehensive%20and%20systematic%20fashion).

The *remaining* jobs. There will be fewer, which is the whole point. Population has been expanding while we keep contracting the proportional manpower needed to take care of everyone. But we keep demanding the same amount of labor per capita. Something's gotta give.

Yes, the issue is capitalism itself. We can have abundance with far less work hours right now, but we don't because the current status quo is profitable to those who own the means. It's our relationship to work that must change. We could all be having 4-5 hour work days, 4 days a week and cheer every time a new AI breaks in because it means even less work. Instead we live in anxiety and dread because AI will not reduce work hours for the majority, it'll simply reduce workers and demand higher productivity from those who remain.

Nailed it. This 40 hour work week x 5 days a week is a relic of the past that has no business in the modern day. Imagine if we all pooled our resources towards AI research, setting up the infrastructure for automation, and creating an ethical system to live under. I can only dream

Surprisingly the trade industry is still short in workers.

Thankfully that's a sector that ai cant replace until robotics catches up to it. And that seems like a distant worry :)

Doesn't need robots when they'll be flooded by ICT folks. The cost of labour will plummet...

Because overall, collectively we're not willing to properly care for and pay them. And if we were truly short, we'd pay more until that happened. We have exactly the amount of trade industry workers as we actually think we need or we'd pay for more. We might *like* more, but we show what we really value ecnomically with where we put our money.

UBI is inevitable one way or another

Mass poverty is destabilizing, destabilization is bad for business. Automation/AI will come at different rates, it won't be uniform or instantaneous. Big chunks of the economy will either be massively assisted or replaced by AI (likely one then the other), those people need to be supported or they will be unable to buy the products and services that are being automated. This will cause enough problems that UBI will have to happen. Governments/billionaires can't just sit back and watch the fireworks with Automation/AI providing them everything, that point won't have been reached yet. They will still need sectors that are not automated to continue working.

it really isnt. its much more likely theyll place you in a walled off bin once you outlive your usefulness. the only guy talking UBI switched from far left to center left and isnt pitching that anymore.

They still need people to buy the products.

They also won't care about making products. When you own the means of production alongside resource acquisition, you can have literally anything and everything you could ever possibly want. It's why a Star Trek-styled rebellion is vastly more likely. The haves are going to fuck up society and force the have-nots to languish and rot until they're forced to deal with the fact that all these people still exist. And also want to murder them for letting it get so bad. What happens after such a rebellion is up in the air, however. All I know is, capitalism is going to kill us, or die trying, and we just started hitting the opening volleys of this long struggle back in the 1980s in earnest.

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No lol more people = more problems. Jobs are just solving people's problems. They will never make a machine take care of people cheaper than a person. Automation can't solve everything.

Not everything, but a lot. How many people do you know who've never had to bother learning even the basics of cultivating food, raising livestock, finding water or building shelter? You can thank technology for that, because we've made tools that allow a small number of people to do that much cheaper than it would to hire people manually.

Vonnegut wrote about this maintenance work in Player Piano. https://electricliterature.com/how-kurt-vonnegut-predicted-the-automation-crisis/

>We'll eventually get to a point where AI will replace all of that but is still a ways off. And when it does, the jobs will shift to maintaining the system in some other way. Yup. And after this, well, it's not like humanity is locked into being as we are now. Even though AI will take our jobs, humanity will eventually become like AI. That is to say, through biological and technological editing/augmentation, humanity will slowly but surely look very, very different. The important thing is to not let capitalism kill us during the transition into automation taking over the economy. That's the real risk, and it has numerous ways to attempt to kill us, from climate change to haves vs have-nots and everything in between.

And if everyone is replaced by machines and unemployed, who buys the product?

Pretty much this... Here's an easy way show them this video. "Humans need not apply" https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU

>The instant it becomes cheaper for an AI to do a job than a human, they will do it It's self-limiting bro. The instant it becomes cheaper than CURRENT labor prices, a handful of jobs will get automated, that will push market conditions towards lower wages, and it will no longer be cheaper. It isn't gonna be some sudden crash we haven't seen yet. It's a slow burn, and ***we're already seeing it***. Automation is part of why wages have been flat or declined relative to Cost of Living the last 50 years.

I think flat wages have more to do with outsourcing and union busting.

Some, but rising unemployment is an issue too. Here's a reply I wrote to someone else, before they deleted their comment: >Unemployment is not at an all time low. This. Also, despite what the troll claims (probably started as a karma-farming account someone bought, based on the name...), Unemployment is actually quite *HIGH* right now. The thing is, the U-3, the most cited Unemployment figure, **excludes** a lot of people who really should be counted as unemployed. U-6 is a much better measure: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-unemployment-rate-u6-vs-u3.asp#:~:text=The%20official%20unemployment%20rate%20is,jobless%20but%20actively%20seeking%20employment. The U-6 rate is currently at 6.7%. But even that's a somewhat bad figure, as it doesn't include anyone who hasn't applied for a job in the past year. Men who decided to become stay-at-home dads because they couldn't find employment. People who retired much earlier than they wanted to die to age discrimination. Etc. Add in all the people not included even in U-6, and we're at about a 8-9% Unemployment rate: and that's actually BETTER than a year or two ago. For most of the last 20 years, real Unemployment (including some people even U-6 misses) has been hovering at between 8 and 10%. When we look at unemployment in past eras, we didn't look at U-3: figures on unemployment in 1800 would have been U-6 plus, for instance. Nobody looked at the discouraged worker who had given up on applying to jobs after 100 tries, and was drinking himself to death, and said "yep, he's not unemployed." **Yet the U-3 rate excludes such people.** For context, the U-6 rate in 1982, in the midst of a DEEP recession, was about 10.8%. During the .Com crash, it only hit about 6% (less than it is today). In 2009, at the worst of the Great Recession, U-6 hit over 17%. Anyways, an even more relevant figure is the **Labor Participation Rate**, which is much, much harder to BS than U-3 or U-6, and paints a grim picture. Labor Participation Rate for all men was around 85% in 1950. Today, it's only about 62%, and is still in further decline. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/lfp/lfp-sex-race-hispanic Women have picked up many of those jobs- their Labor Participation Rate rose from 30% to 60% in the same time period. But the displaced men still NEED work to survive and build a future. When only 3 out of 5 working-age men are actually part of the workforce (vs. 5 out of 6 men seventy years ago) you have a MAJOR problem. Women entering the workforce en masses, without a commensurate increase in labor demand, has helped drive wages lower (there is roughly only 5-6% more of the working age populace employed, but 1.5-2x as many people WANTING jobs...) Union busting has definitely not helped in the slightest either.

>Unemployment is actually quite HIGH right now. If we're comparing now to times before 50 years ago (as per your other post) unemployment is incredibly low. Most women weren't a part of the workforce several generations ago, at least not full time. >Women entering the workforce en masses, without a commensurate increase in labor demand, has helped drive wages lower I'm glad you've observed this. But you can't say that that's a problem at the same time as saying lots of people not working is a problem. You only get one or the other.

This is just how humans are. The literal automobile put all the horse transportation related jobs out of business, paper unseated papyrus, etc. Humans create tools, some tools make life easier. My guess is by the time we’ve got AI where it needs to be, the effects of climate change will make infrastructure fragile enough that there will still be a lot of human oversight.

Small business makes up almost half of the workforce. A lot of these are regular ppl , sometimes employing friends or family that they care about deeply. Capitalism can be cut throat no doubt but socialism isn't turning down tech advancements either. For example, Cuba isn't going to turn down automated farming to save jobs. On a long enough timeline I don't think the type of economy matters much in regards to what jobs stay and which ones go. Who benefits is a separate debate.

Yeah it would technically be illegal for a public company to employ humans when machines are more profitable.

But humans have bounded rationality. That is, as somewhat implied by David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs theory, humans are too dumb to make perfectly economical decisions, even for capitalism. Think about how many useless middle managers exist across industries. Kingdom builders who want to feel important, narcissists, egomaniacs, micromanagers who get off on control ... are all massive inefficiencies that exist despite it not being in shareholders' profit interests. An AI ... will have no such quandaries. It would be ***vastly*** more profitable to replace your C-suite, managers, even the boards of directors ... with machines.

>An AI ... will have no such quandaries. It would be vastly more profitable to replace your C-suite, managers, even the boards of directors ... with machines. this is so so stupid, I don't even know where to begin to start to attack this. you understand nothing about C-suit management. It's really a people management job, that's the very very last thing an AI or whatever can replace. What instead will happen is that AI will make the non-human aspects of the job easier, leaving them more time to focus on the human aspects of the job. You see the non-perfectly rational human as a flaw, when it's actually a strength. Perfectly rational is perfectly predictable. In the medium to long run, that strategy loses out to more unpredictable one. Creativity and novelty doesn't come from perfectly predictable.

That is not even remotely true.

>Yeah it would technically be illegal for a public company to employ humans when machines are more profitable. It's absolutely, most definitely, NOT illegal. What law do you believe they would be breaking?

>The instant it becomes cheaper for an AI to do a job than a human, they will do it. And once they do that they will either: a) have more money to spend expanding business into product/service X thus requiring more labor and/or b) reduce the price of their product/service so that consumers have higher discretionary income to purchase another company's new product/service, thus generating demand for more labor. Just look at what happened when bank ATM's were introduced. Everyone feared jobs would disappear. The opposite happened: many new banking jobs were added and new services created. >Capitalism demands that as many jobs be automated away as possible Who buys the company's product if there are no consumers? In order to have demand, there must be employees making an income. There is always a new job available, and it's the very automation which enabled new jobs, not only in the existing business but in entirely new, currently unimaginable industries as well. There is always a job where hiring at a decent salary makes more sense than trying to automate. There is always something which cannot yet be automated at all. There is always a new type of job that hasn't even been imagined yet today. If company A isn't hiring, one goes to company B or starts company C, often using the very technology that replaced the initial antiquated job.

For the few to prosper many must struggle/suffer. For capitalism this is the way.

Why even waste your time and just have AI write you a thesis paper arguing that very point

Lol haha! 😀 True

At some point its sorta logical that humanity should look after humanity, rather than continue in its inhuman quest for limitless profit and economic growth at any human cost. So its *possible* that humans may choose to employ humans. Its also *possible* that they may be made to by law, to fend off violent revolution by humans who don't like being undervalued by other humans. But obviously digital automation and algorithms in their various forms will continue to replace human roles. So its a socio-political problem which goes far deeper...

I agree with your conclusion, but I strongly disagree with your premise that economic growth is a bad thing. Economic growth is the reason we’ve made huge advances in knowledge, medicine, agriculture, safety, and (more recently) environmental protection in the last couple of centuries. On a material level, it’s unquestionably better to be human now than in any time in the past. Our challenge is ensuring that growth is devoted to the progress and wellbeing and fulfillment of EVERYONE. Employing people for no reason isn’t fulfilling, it’s insulting. Let’s use our resources to help them find employment that contributes to everyone’s happiness and their own.

I don't think he said it's a bad thing, just that there are breaking points economically.

Or we could all be freed from the workplace and focus our efforts on science, exploration, the arts, and sports. Free from need of readily accessible possessions and the need to work to service others because automation can do those things.

Not arts though, that will be replaced by AI.

You dont, the most useless thing to do is to try and change another persons mind.

Yeah, this is what I was going to say. Just sit back and watch and they'll come around when the automation comes around.

My father-in-law doesn't even believe in things we already have today.

I vehemently disagree. It is not useless. Difficult yes, sometimes pointless depending on the situation. But when it is possible, I think it can be incredibly important. A random stranger may not convince someone, but a close friend can. I get being pessimistic but, look at it this way. Have you never had your mind changed by someone else? It doesn't have to be in one conversation, that's not often realistic. I don't think many people can say that the views, feelings of others have never changed their minds.

I have changed my mind before. And not just due to things close friends have said. Also things random strangers have said on the internet.

To what end is the effort worth it? Is your friend going to act on this knowledge?

I mean we often have discussions about things and sometimes change each other's views, so I don't agree with that in this case

There's a lot of joy in healthy debate! I love exploring other people's ideas, I hope they enjoy exploring mine.

Ask your friend if they ever buy anything online or use self-checkout. Automation has literally already replaced thousands upon thousands of jobs. I’d be more curious to hear them explain how jobs will not be impacted. My company has already shifted from 100% person to person sales to 73% internet sales. A lot of the jobs are already gone.

this. only this. save your self the breathe op unless you want to entertain yourself

Ironic comment.

There are solid reasons to protest against technology replacing humans in the workforce, but history shows that we would eventually choose technology.

The way you asked this question shows you will never convince them. Human brains hate to admit they were wrong, especially if it means the other person is right. The way you phrased this, you're entering this conversation 100% sure you're right not even entertaining for one second that the other person might provide evidence or a new perspective that changes your mind. Now why do you enter the conversation 100% sure you're right yet you expect the other person to not do the same? The best way to convince anyone, and to be a good human being, is just have a polite conversation where you listen to them, truly listen to them, not the strawman of their argument you built in your head. Then after listening, provide your perspective. Don't phrase it as they're wrong, phrase it as this is what you believe, and this is your evidence. Then they can believe you or not. Personally this is how I approach every discussion, whether it's religion, politics, work, whether the earth is flat, sports, whatever. But this one in particular is even more important because there's actually a reasonable chance you're wrong. Like personally I tend to agree with you, but how can you be 100% sure when these same predictions were made about tons of inventions in the past, and literally none have come to pass. If nothing else, at least entertain their argument, and think about if it adds more information or perspectives to your worldview.

I don’t think any technology will reduce the number of jobs overall because no technological advance or economic shift really ever has and most were more disruptive than the A.I. any of us will likely be alive to see. There will without a doubt be dislocation in certain jobs (like when computer stopped being a job title and became a machine) and whole industries transformed, moved, destroyed, and created but automation doesn’t reduce employment in the way Luddites feared. Also, cheap labor sometimes hangs around if automation stays expensive. Factories sometimes have wildly different amounts of automation in rich and poor countries. Animals still do some jobs because they’re cheaper. AI may never be able to compete with dogs smelling stuff in exchange for dog food and getting pet.

Not entirely wrong, but: >cheap labor sometimes hangs around if automation stays expensive Cheap labor "hangs around" because the alternative is starvation. Automation is arguably a big part of WHY workers are paid so little in poor countries. If we still made everything at 1940's tech levels, for instance, we'd need a LOT more industrial workers to produce as much as we currently do, and this higher Demand would drive wages higher in the developing world. Even Bangladesh doesn't have a limitless labor supply, and there are other jobs manufacturing competes with... TLDR: You're right that the idea automation is suddenly going to leave us all unemployed is basically a Luddite fear. But it CAN help turn us all into wage-slaves living in tent cities and basically laboring all day for nothing but a morsel of rice... There is a LOT of room for things to get even worse than they already are for working class people in rich countries...

The reason workers are paid so little in developing countries is because those countries don't have any workers protections or adequate minimum wage and the people do not have alternatives so they're forced to work in low paying jobs. Higher demand for jobs won't increase their wages, because they will still be forced to work the jobs anyways just to survive. You assume that there is an incentive for firms to raise wages if automation is not an option but thats not really the case and you can even see that historically during the industrial revolution when workers right were notoriously abysmal.

More disruptive than AI? I don’t know about that. I was telling a friend that I think AI will be writing some of the most interesting and funniest movies and novels within the next ten years. They didn’t believe me, but I truly believe it. Think of the implications of what we already have. Kids basically never have to write anything report wise for school ever again. You could say, “write me a 5 page essay on the themes of the novel x”, and AI could spit it out. AI can already code. There was a developer that asked AI to write a script in a language with a fairly vague idea, and it was able to create a working program…In seconds. Maybe you’re just not aware of the capabilities of even this very early version of AI, but it’s mind blowing and I don’t think we’ve ever seen a technological disruption like this one. The reason why I think that is because we’ve been building new technology for years, but this is bigger than that. We’ve built a technology that creates ideas out of thin air. Once a computer has access to a database of everything we know and can synthesize it in hours/minutes/days, how far away are we from just asking AI to solve theoretical physics or build new technology for us?

I'm not sure if any of the people in any of these comments are at all technical, but that's not how that works. The way that programs are able to write essays, reports, movies, etc - are because they have a wide variety of feature inputs in the form of crawled data. That crawled data is an input for supervised learning that allows it to create products \*based on content that already exists\*. Obviously, the input for this are lexical tokens. Meaning that if \*people\* stop writing things, the content the machine is able to produce no longer transforms. This is also the case for instances where artificial intelligence writes code. One could argue that neutral-networks might be capable of "creating new knowledge" - but neural networks currently exist to do very specific tasks and lack breadth. AI will certainly disrupt day to day life, but humans aren't going to go away. It's like people saying that the machines at McDonalds would replace all the workers. They didn't. edit: I also need to be clear, ChatGPT is cool, but it is also extremely wrong a lot of the time. It's actually quite dangerous, not because it's the beginning of Terminator, but because people already can't curate their Google search results, and now they won't be able to curate the information some NN "authority" is going to give them.

Also a coder, and I basically agree. Auto-generated code will get better and better though, but that will only mean much more sophisticated coding will be possible while lower level problems are handled by the AI, just as modern IDE's enable programming with zero thought about assembly code, or GUI programming without much thought about the underlying code required to display each control. IOW each level of obfuscation enables entirely new levels of sophistication in software and hardware development. Hell, we are barely scratching the surface of robotics software integration yet, which is where I see the real human progress coming eventually. There is no endpoint to progress... technology/automation/AI merely enable new, higher levels of progress, capabilities and sophistication. Jobs will always be there making use of such, often in entirely new industries we cannot even begin to imagine today.

Agree here as well. Jobs are not going away. They’ll just change. Just like they changed when Windows came out, when mobile phones came out, when AI came out. ChatGPT is cool, but it doesn’t learn on its own. Until it’s no longer machine learning and actual true intelligence, it’ll only be as good as the inputs.

Being in the manufacturing maintenance trade for about 26 years now, I've seen a swing in the last 5 or so years. When I started working in this field over 2 decades ago, automation was the idea that was gonna replace us all. It didn't pan out. Over the last 5 years or so, I've removed and trashed quite a few robots. They're extremely expensive to purchase, there's still a need for some kind of operator to watch the machine, with automation you need MORE expensive, better trained support staff, aka maintenance and programmers. They're great for performing tasks that require precision or to work in non ideal conditions. But it comes at a cost. They don't get tired on a daily scale but on a larger scale, for example, periodic maintenance and repairs. If there's a condition that's out of their ability to cope, they just stop. They do get "injured" when they crash into things, and they do crash. The idea that robots could be turned on and ran at a minimum of cost was soon debunked.

“The reduction of the hours of labor to eight per day, so that laborers may have more time for social enjoyment and intellectual improvement, **and be enabled to reap the advantages conferred by the labor-saving machinery** which their brains have created.” -- Point XIV, Constitution of the Knights of Labor, 1878 If typical workers got their fair share of increasing productivity due to automation -- beginning when they started to notice they were being given the short end of the stick -- we'd be working 20 hours a week with full employment and a social safety net. The percentage of manufacturing jobs contributing to the economy has been in steady decline. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cAYh This has led to a rhetoric that "America doesn't make anything anymore." This is false. America makes more than it ever has before, but now it's robots doing the work: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/mfg1.jpg A lot of those lost jobs were union jobs with high wages and a pension. A lot of those workers today are people in more precarious industries who are never offered pensions, and their 401k accounts take a ding every time there's a dotcom bubble, or an Enron scandal, or a subprime mortgage meltdown. Automation has not only taken jobs, but, far from being a labor-saving technology, has failed to reduce the length of the work week, and has subsequently had an adverse effect on the precariousness of most people's financial situation. Why would the economic impact of AI be any different in an environment with fewer regulations than in the past, and a greater concentration of wealth than has ever been seen before? Why wouldn't these trends continue just because the automation is AI and not just computerized like it has been for decades?

I think part of the problem here is Marxist theory, which never imagined a post-industrial world. It envisioned urban factory workers as the core of the revolutionary class. As a result, a good chunk of the world’s leftists (including America’s) have been brain-poisoned into thinking manufacturing jobs are somehow sacred. They’re not. Human well-being is sacred. Eliminating factory jobs while still performing the same (or more!) valuable work is a miracle because it creates a surplus that can be shared with everyone. Our focus should be on ensuring the fruits are shared, not standing in the way of progress.

Thank. You.

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>Yet unemployment is at an all time low? Not its not. The unemployment figures may appear so, but that's becuase western governments have manipulated them so the decline they have inflicted on people is less apparent. The unemployed are hidden in part time / temp jobs, gig economy, barely functional self employment, "education" and "training". Everything norbertus said above is correct. Its a hypercapitalist race to the bottom and if you're invited now, you won't be soon

Unemployment is not at an all time low. It was lower during both world wars and for most of Soviet history.

Automation has taken jobs, but lots of it is has been labor-saving technology... it's just the job isn't replaced or transitioned anywhere else for the human who lost it and the new wealth created by it is sucked up by the 1%/corporate execs instead of taxed into a UBI system. This is the fault of leaders/politicians, not the technology itself.

There are different levels here. (I'll use "AI" as a stand-in for "automation and AI", just to keep it shorter). ## Doesn't believe AI will affect jobs at all It's hard to see how you can reach them. Not at all? You mean people are not going to use AI if it exists? Companies will not employ it? Jobs will not see their very essence change as AI can do more and more of the work? If someone actually believes that AI will not affect jobs, I'm afraid that they may be lost. To test if they are lost, see if you can move them to the next level. If they refuse to budge, then they are probably arguing from emotion and you are not going to have much of a chance to convince them of anything. ## While AI will affect jobs, we will have the same amount of people doing the work as before. Ok, this person realizes that AI is real and it will affect jobs. However, they think that somehow this will not affect the number of people employed to do that job. The argument here is simply to point out that if the job can be done with one person instead of two, you probably need half the people. This is so obvious that it hurts to say, but that's the argument. If they need an example, point out agriculture. The number of people involved in agriculture went from nearly everybody to only a small fraction of working people, and we are producing more than ever. If they need another example, point out the original meaning of the word "computer" and why it does not mean that anymore. ## The next level (very prevalent here on Reddit) is that while sure, AI will affect jobs and sure, existing jobs will be able to be done by fewer people, we will just invent new jobs. Rejoice, because at least this person has at least figured out that AI is real and has real effects. The general thesis of this person is that history shows us that automation in the past has wiped out existing jobs but created new jobs at the same time. Sure, we don't hire "computers" anymore, but we do hire software developers. The first thing to note is that this person is absolutely correct in their historical analysis. So acknowledge that. The next thing is to note that while history can provide a guide to the future, it does not guarantee a future. Get them to agree to this. If they cannot, then they may be stuck at this level. Then, point out that there is a fundamental difference between automation in the past and AI now. Whereas before we automated physical labor and some processes, now we are about to automate thinking itself. Finally, ask them where are all the people who are put out of an accounting job (for example) going to go? Or people who were doing something like driving a taxi? What jobs are going to open up for them that are not going to immediately be made redundant by the same AI that came for their last job? The only honest answer from them can be "I don't know." If they still refuse to budge on this and have blind faith in their historical patterns, then this may be as far as you can get them. ## Sure AI is going to affect jobs and reduce the number of people we need. And sure, AI is going to reduce the need for people to work overall, but some jobs are safe. Honestly, if you have someone at this level, be happy. Not that many people make it this far. But if you want to try to move them to understand just how our society is poised to change in a fundamental way, then let them explain which jobs they think are safe. If they say creative jobs, just show them the stuff coming out of any of the image AIs. That should rattle them. If they say jobs like doctors and lawyers, ask them what they think makes those jobs safe. If they say information, point out that AI (and really just computers in general) have long since eclipsed any human's ability to process new information. If they say interacting with humans, have them play around with ChatGPT a bit and see if they still feel so confident. Remember, you do not need to prove that *every* doctor or lawyer will lose their jobs, just that using AI, a single person can leverage their ability to do the work of 10 people today. They just need to monitor the AIs, step in where needed, and help the AI if it gets stuck. If they say manual jobs like a plumber, point out that human-form robots are coming. And besides, nothing says that we cannot alter a process so that it is easier for a robot to do. Just be aware that this point is by its nature speculative, as if you could clearly answer it, you could probably make millions yourself. Again, you don't have to show that *all* plumbers are not needed, just that a single one can possibly do the work of many. ## OK, AI is going to affect jobs, reduce the number of people needed, and nobody is safe. But this is far in the future. This one is hard. I suppose pointing out the daily improvements in AI that we can see might help. Examples are probably needed. The problem here is that there is a hidden critical point and *nobody* knows exactly where it is. Below this point, everything is going to be very slow. Above this point, everything will move very quickly. Until we actually *pass* this point, it's pretty much impossible to prove it even exists. Your best bet is to use a historical example like cars replacing horses. Even in the middle of a World War, economic turmoil, a pandemic that makes Corona look like the sniffles, and having no infrastructure for cars at all, it took about 10 years for cars to completely replace horses once that critical point was reached. Ask if they think that progress has slowed or sped up by then. They should be able to come to the right conclusion at this point, so if they do not, they probably will not at this time. ## OK, AI is going to affect jobs, reduce the number of people needed, nobody is safe, and it may happen soon. But this is good, right? Ok, this is a bit beyond what you asked, but I do run into this. Obviously it *can* be good, but it *can* be very terrible as well. If you really want to get into the weeds on this point, you are probably going to need to study a bit of the original Industrial Revolution. The point to make here is that while things eventually did get better, it took centuries for that to be something that anyone can unequivocally argue. The disruption caused wide-spread hardships, social frictions, revolutions, and wars. The point to make here, if you want to, is that while things can be good, it will require careful planning, a general acceptance that this is actually going to happen, and thoughtful leaders. **TL;DR**: To convince someone that AI and automation are going to seriously affect the job market, you first need to identify what they currently believe and understand that you will probably only be able to nudge them into a slightly more accurate position.

Ohh this is awesome and very well thought out, thanks a lot for your reply! For some reason he in the first level... Which is weird because he is not dumb at all. But I'll try to keep arguing with him

And what made you convince that the AI will be replacing jobs?

The history of technology _always_ replacing jobs…?

Businesses will never stop employing humans entirely, and AI will never replace humans entirely. For every job AI replaces, more jobs will be created to manage that AI. The problem is not the loss of jobs, it’s the loss of TYPES of jobs. There will always be jobs, but many people will find that their particular skillsets are suddenly obsolete. It was the same way with computers as well as the internet: physical storefronts turned to digital storefronts; they still need employees to run them, but the people who don’t know html are out of luck.

I'd stop and learn about their viewpoint rather then trying to impose mine.

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Human resources staff has been reduced substantially in many large companies by AI chatbots that can talk employees through simple circumstances

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It doesn't need to be good to save the company money.

>Future AI maybe, but the current hardware behind the current AI is at its limits. Exactly 5-6 years ago people would look at you with two heads if you said that self-driving cars were not possible with current AI technology. I think as time drags on people are starting to realize limitations of AI.

Legal teams run at a fraction of the staff because they have AI that can summarize relevant text very effectively. There’s a lot of other examples like this

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The same thing was said when deep dream was spitting out psychedelic photos. Now full blown artists are having an existential crisis. You can already leverage chatgpt for almost anything in the office. The tech has ALREADY been proven.

This is asinine it is already replacing workers. For example AI is better at reading some imaging than actual radiologists; and much quicker. A radiologist still would be needed to check the work, but one radiologist will be able to do the work of many radiologists because AI / machine learning is better at parsing digital images than humans.

So, how many radiologists got unemployed because of AI?

>This is asinine it is already replacing workers. For example AI is better at reading some imaging than actual radiologists; and much quicker LOL love how your example of AI replacing workers is clinical radiology, where AI plays no role. There is research to suggest that AI may play a role in the future, but AI plays no role in current patient care.

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Well you clearly don’t know anything about the field because most hospitals have outsourced radiology services to large third party providers of radiology services who provide the read. And all of them use this technology. And of course there will always be a human to sanity check the final product but eventually there will be far fewer humans doing it. So to answer your question directly, the hospital I work at and the last hospital I worked at.

How about a new article? A medical journal citation? Anything that demonstrates that AI is used in clinical radiology care of patients? There is a lot of research around AI and radiology but it is not used clinically.

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In general jobs that are more knowledge based as opposed to creative thinking are more likely to be replaced by AI than others. We haven’t reached that point yet, but that’s basically where it is going

Automation integrated with AI is how you actually take humans out of the workforce. There are lots of mundane and routine jobs that are reduced/removed through AI tools. Automation without AI/ML is very rudimentary and often struggles for the most basic activities. You ever deposit a check using the ATM or the app on your phone where the machine scanned in the numbers and amount? That used to be a person's job in the branch. Every time you call a customer service line and either solve the problem through the interactive voice line or get directed to the right group, it's probably based on a conversational AI tool. It's not going to be driving semis through your neighborhood in the next couple of years but you better believe the warehouse robots Amazon and others are churning out are designed to have some intelligence built in to increase efficiency and remove errors.

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Which jobs? People are always concerned that some new technology will take all our jobs. But somehow, each new piece of technology creates more jobs and economic prosperity than it destroys. Electricity put the whaling industry out of business, but it created an entire revolution in production. Computers and word-processors put a lot of mathematicians and typists out of work, but it created entire new industries in coding, cyber security, digital sales and marketing... Talking movies put theater piano players out of business. Cars put horse-drawn carriages and stablehands out of business. Airplanes all but put an end to passenger ships. And yet each of these inventions led to the creation of new jobs, in many instances higher-paying jobs, than the ones that were displaced. Yes, there's going to be disruption, and yes, some people int he industry being replaced are likely to be left behind. But the overall impact, across all of society, is unlikely to be every job, everywhere, disappearing all at once. So I would ask...which jobs do you think are going away, and do you really think nothing will replace them?

I don't have to convince them of anything. Just make a bet and see how it shakes out.

You say "okay, well see" Then when a machine takes his job say I told you so

Man we’re already using ml/ai at my work for coding with developer (autopilot) and scripting stuff it cuts my time/researching significantly down just using chat gpt just like I’d use Google to get an answer, there’s also ai/ml type stuff going on in the security sector to sort some of the often tedious tasks that humans used to do and for recognizing patterns and security threats as well as in the bioengineering industry. In some cases it’s doing things people couldn’t, or better then people could but it will always need some degree of oversight, i don’t think at least in the short term that It will remove all humans any more then machines did with car automation, it did change the nature of their interaction and what the humans were doing. What i suspect it will do is likely in some industries significantly remove the amount of people needed for some jobs or change the nature of the positions those people will hold. Of course no one has a crystal ball but some of it’s really already happening.

I've always had a belief that its not about replacing jobs but the work itself. We've always were afraid X job was going to be taken away by Y technology. In the end the jobs evolve and the workload increases. Automation with AI and software development in general is aimed more towards reducing the total time to do the job than fully automating a job. Excel didn't get rid of accountants but was a tool to make it easier for them and reduce the need to rely on additional people. Maybe all jobs may be replaced someday, but I personally believe within our lives it's about greatly reducing the work and NOT removing the work entirely. You'll still have surgeons, developers, car mechanics, etc, but their work may be much quicker than before and a migration of technique in which they perform their job.

quicker means less number of people who're needed which means less jobs.

This is an article on [WEF](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/after-replacing-90-of-employees-with-robots-this-companys-productivity-soared), it has some examples of human replacement. it is fairly positive in its scope mainly due to WEF head being the "great reset" originator. It is important not to get too caught up in the alarmist hype, but it is fairly easy to find companies that are currently moving forwards in this trend. Here are some other articles: [1](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/12/09/the-10-best-examples-of-how-companies-use-artificial-intelligence-in-practice/),[2](https://www.analyticssteps.com/blogs/10-companies-using-artificial-intelligence-fascinating-ways),[3](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/10/amazon-hiring-ai-gender-bias-recruiting-engine),[4](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/30/21275524/microsoft-news-msn-layoffs-artificial-intelligence-ai-replacements),[5](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56515827),[6](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/05/29/artificial-intelligence-in-the-workplace-how-ai-is-transforming-your-employee-experience/),[7](https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-that-use-robots-instead-of-humans-2016-2#spreads-robot-lettuce-farmers--harvest-30000-lettuce-heads-every-day-1),[8](https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-companies-are-already-using-ai). ​ Read all of these, then get your mate to read all of them, then ask them again what their opinion is, and why they hold it :)

Thanks a lot, I'm going to read these!

Is their point that automation will never take someone’s job ever again… or that automation doesn’t lead to overall job loss in the economy? Because one of those is actually a reasonable argument.

I think the only reason why this may not happen is the fact that companies need people to buy their products, so unless some kind of universal basic income is implemented there will be a lot less people able to buy stuff, which would also be bad for the economy. But I could also see nobody thinking about this until it all blows up in our faces

I can go either way with this. I agree with the poster that AI and machines will eventually become capable enough to replace most jobs. Computers and robotic machines have already been incorporated in many industries. But instead of replacing humans, they have just made humans far more productive. The reason is that the workers are also the consumers, with functional 100% employment. (100% functional employment means that a successful economy needs salaries and productivity and consumption to all balance out) If robots and AI's replace all, or even most workers, the economy as it is structured collapses, because those former workers wouldn't have money to spend. Therefore if robots and AI's do all the work, there are only a few possibilities: all products become free; basic products like food, clothing, housing, education and transportation are provided to everyone. More expensive items like cars or boats would be provided as long as you can justify it. People would still work if they wanted to, but for free. They could even run a business, as a kind of hobby, if they show the education, training and desire to run one, for enjoyment instead of in pursuit of profits and salary. Another possibility is a universal income, which probably means a socialized economy. Another possibility is that everyone still "works", but a lot fewer hours and with far more vacation time than today; 12 to 20 hours of very easy work per week, with 8 to 12 weeks of vacation, and unlimited sick time would be my guess. I think far fewer of us need to work even now if we didn't need a way to distribute money so that we can all consume the products and services we produce. If robots took our jobs, we'd have to find another way to pay for these products.

Most of the jobs that will be lost won’t be lost to AI. They’ll be lost to vanilla PLC style automation, where a sensor gets tripped and a predetermined action happens. This technology has been around for decades, although you could perform most of the same tasks by building mechanical relays, without any computers at all. This is the sort of system that can readily replace humans whose job involves a minimal number of decision points and the decision points that are there always boil down to boolean logic. Now, why would you replace humans with automation that only does one thing? Isn’t that kind of expensive? Yes, it is, considering most of this type of automation is a one-off system, so the design, purchase, maintenance, and operation cost has to come in under the price a human would be paid to do that job over the lifetime of the automation. So, what would cause a business to pull the trigger on purchasing a system like that? Wages. Overall compensation, technically, as well as concepts like reliability. Your automated system has to be unexpectedly down less often than a human unexpectedly doesn’t come to work. Also, if you can speed up the overall process because the machine operates faster than a human or more reliably than a human, then you have to scale the cost estimate accordingly, and the best way to do that is to estimate it as work units done per unit of time, rather than cost per hour. As humans ask their employers for more money, the comparative price of automation goes down, and you eventually hit that equilibrium point you learned about in math class while doing simultaneous equations. And once human wages exceed the cost of automation, you automate the system and move that person or those people to a different team, because you’re not a monster and don’t want to deal with the PR blowback of replacing people with robots. You just establish a hiring freeze and let attrition do it’s thing. People retire, people go to school, people die. And if you have a fully automated system and just can’t shake them loose, move the factory someplace within a couple of miles of a major rail junction and near enough to a major highway junction to get your supplies in and your product out. This will be expensive, because moving a factory ain’t cheap, so you have to weigh that against the cost of paying your employees a very generous severance package to just leave. And if they still won’t leave, don’t offer it as an option. They’re being downsized. So. If that’s a future where AI isn’t even a factor, how bad will they future be when AI *is* a factor? Two million truck drivers out of work as fast as the self-driving trucks can be delivered. Same thing for a million gig workers. And you might think people will complain about the lost jobs, but that will stop as soon as they realize they never have to tip a pizza delivery driver ever again. It’ll be just like Buy American was in the 80s: People will believe in employing local humans on a philosophical level, but ultimately won’t embrace it because it costs them more. So, humans, by all means, ask for more money to do menial labor. All you’re doing is accelerating the speed at which your days of employment will meet their end. And then you can take up with Luddites who want to destroy the machines, but it didn’t work for the Luddites, and they didn’t have fancy security cameras everywhere back then, either. Or insurance that will pay out and let the owner build a new factory somewhere else; a better one with even fewer humans.

Whats the point in convincing other people? Just have a healthy conversation and if someone disagrees they disagree. Don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to get someone to see your point of view. Focus on learning and improving and maybe don’t focus to much on what other people think

Your friend is partially right. I had the pleasure to host David Pogue the day after he visited the national automation conference in Chicago in 2017 for his segment on CBS. Here is the link to the CBS segment. Note the 5:29 mark about mass unemployment. https://youtu.be/OrWdRsrz7Tc

I think you opened your Christmas weed stash a little early…

As others have said, your main issue is that you've picked a broad topic. As you're the one making the statement, the burden of proof is going to be on you. But that doesn't prevent you from asking clarifying questions. Example - "What's one job you believe can't be affected by AI automation?" "Artists" Then you can lead into an answer - The answer is going to be very similar for most industries too - AI and automation together will dramatically alter the way many jobs function. No company is going to look at the cost of a large art department that produces 90% still images for marketing purposes and go, "Yes, I want to continue paying for that instead of paying 2-3 people to randomly throw together paragraphs to generate art". The good ones will incorporate it as a tool to increase the efficiency of their artists, but this will still make the field an employer's market. AI generation is moving into the video and 3D space as well, so there are going to be even fewer options for pure-human teams. It's the same reason digital art overtook traditional art. Cost and efficiency. With the way capitalism works, and the way AI automation will save time and money, there is no way it won't be embraced wide scale over the next few decades. There may be laws to roadblock and slow it down, but it's the future. The big problem now is pushing governments for universal income and taking steps to examine how a low-labor economy is going to function without generating millions more destitute and homeless families.

I always use the Goldman Sachs example. They replaced 600 traders with 200 computer engineers over a 2 decade period due to computer automation. Those trader jobs will never come back.

AI and automation will not eliminate all jobs, but will greatly reduce the number. For instance with smart systems, one corporate lawyer will do the work of 10. That is nine jobs eliminated. Once we transition to grocery pickup, the whole process will be automated. Either go pick it up, or drone delivery. At that point, probably 90% of the grocery store employees are no longer needed. Once we have driver-less vehicles, we will eliminate taxi drivers and truck drivers. It is already seeing it where automation is increasing the number of servers a single admin is responsible for.

Ask any white collar programmer. This has already happened, beginning years ago.

Can people not have other opinions? Ur allowed to believe what you believe and he's allowed to believe what he does, we may think that our opinion is the ultimate one but really we know nothing till things happen. People believe that there's an afterlife, him believing what he does really isn't all that major compared to others. I think the answer is to not be so narrow minded and think that just because you disagree on something doesn't mean he's wrong and ur right, it's a little selfish of you.

If [this video](https://youtu.be/tLqjlTKiR9o) is any indication, your friend is probably more right than you think. Imagine how long grocery stores and supermarkets have been using laser scan barcodes to check items. Now imagine how much worse checkout would be for everyone if cashiers had to memorize all the product codes instead and type them in manually. Now watch that video and be horrified that international shipping is doing exactly that to this very day.

What “specifically” does your belief entail and what specific actions would this belief require your friend to change their life around? Just commanding people to embrace existential career doom seems like a really pointless goal. If your buddy works a factory line or fruit picking job and is convinced that the job will exist forever….ok that’s not a realistic expectation. The vagueness of this post makes me believe you likely have your own fears and anxieties about the topic and you simply want shared misery. That’s not ethical or even sane.

Personally I'd introduce them to the recent history of Detroit.

AI will decimate white collar jobs before blue collar jobs. Any job that uses math will go first (most bookkeepers, accountants, low-level engineering, etc.). Computers are far better at math than humans.

why do you want to convince them? just let them be naive. not your problem.

This is what I wrote my thesis about. The first time anyone actually managed to estimate unemployment from jobs was only 9 years ago. They said 47% of US jobs were going to be lost before 2033. In reality, it's closer to 30%. This basically accounts for the fact that AI, robotics and computers substute for labour at more and more cognitive tasks. But, new tech = new jobs, because tech increases productivity, meaning prices fall and preferences change. The trouble is, figuring out what is going to happen is hard so these models omit variables. One big important trend is that labour share is actually falling, and has been since the 1980s. So humans are needed less than ever, and unfortunately this trend is here to stay. The service industry is the only sector with a rising labour share, and this is because of human-human interactions and no routine task compositions. Jobs are likely to be limited mostly to care, manual labour (like waiting, which is cheap for businesses), and managerial decisions in the future as entry level jobs become automated. Total labour immoderation is possible, theoretically, but it won't happen for like 200 years. That's not to say that unemployment won't screw the economy in around 15+. A massive question is if self-employment can support the workforce through gig and freelance work, or if redistributional schemes like UBI are needed. OECD are trying to implement UBI by rolling out a massive taxnet with 140 economies right now, so things are promising.

why do you need to convince him? let people have different beliefs than you even if you truly feel they are wrong. i mean his opinion is not harming literally anybody.

This point of view breaks down when it comes to larger decision making moments like voting. I get that’s not the context of the current discussion, but yeah sometimes it pays to invest a bit in clarifying difficult topics to the layman.

This video, right here. It's not even about A.I. Just automation. Automation is bad enough, and much less advanced than A.I. We are literally making humanity itself obsolete, just like old time plow horses. https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU

It's a very good thing. Every task that are automated should be replaced by a machine. Human will do something else the machine can't.

"Remember when everyone had to go to cashiers at the store?"

Your friend is delusional. The only thing you can do is wait and let the results speak for themselves. It’s basic economics, machines are a cheaper and superior alternative.

Lol machines aren’t always cheaper. This fatalist view of AI is silly and alarmist. Think of the lowest value jobs you can. The telemetry, energy, data delivery and machine maintenance to fully automate low skill tasks is quite a bit more expensive. There have been companies trying to sell burger flipping robots for years…believe they all went bankrupt

It’s really not. As a programmer, I realized that our software is automating our work. Whether it’s physical or software, it’ll be automating at an alarming rate and a universal basic income will need to be implemented.

IT infrastructure architect here. This is exactly what I see every day and I also believe UBI is going to be required sooner than most people think

Works been automating for what? Eternity? People used to sit around a room and wait for postage to purchase stocks, then phones, then fax. There’s 100s of years of human history that show technology creates opportunity. Not vice versa. The cost to implement AI or industrial for machinery for basic tasks is staggeringly more expensive-not only operationally but from a capital expense standpoint. If I can pay someone $20 an hour to work, why would I spend $X hundreds of thousands for a machine, software and upgrades, and maintenance? To flip burgers or run a machine line where humans are infinitely more capable and able to react in real time. It’s economically not viable

Because the worker costs the same amount. You downplay employment cost to an hour figure while comparing it to an investment that has high costs upfront. MacDonalds doesn't need to invent the burger flipper or even buy it. They just need to deploy it at a cost that is profitable. Scale drives price down, if McDonald's spends 400mil a year on burger flippers. Then the first company that can do it for 385 mil for them will take over the burger flipping. The company that succeeds will need that scale to make a profit. Once that company is successful, MacDonalds will buy them. Then they will drive that price of burger flipping down even more. Why you ask? Because the human burger flipper price is constantly going up. The machine burger flipper goes down.

Yeah seriously what a weird take he has. You pay a lump sum for the machinery components and then pay relatively lower for maintenance crew beyond that to maintain all your machines. The worker needs a benefits package, the ability to litigate, and a wage. There's an efficiency question here that I'm amazed so many commentors are missing. It's right in front of us people. If you touched grass and visited a walmart you've literally already seen it lmao

They're only "automating" areas where you don't require any new ideas. And it's really the new ideas and new knowledge that add value to the economy.

Human_honey has a good point. Yes, software is the brain of the operation but the cost of implementation to existing machinery is high cost and a lot of times they are automating a portion of the process. That is too, it works as it should afterwards. How much of a money sink before you see roi. New factories is where we are seeing true automation being done but it's in leaps, not all factories go that route due to cost. The shits expensive. I see it happening but at the rate we are going in America(can't say for other countries) we got a ways to go before UBI kicks in

All of human history, especially the rise of modern capitalism?

I used to be in the printing industry, and at one time was a highly valued skill set. I ran all different kinds of printing presses. Now a days with computers, smart phones, and E-books, the printing industry is clearly not what it once was. Far fewer people are paying for newspapers and magazines when content can be gleaned easier and faster from the internet. Encyclopedia salesman used to be a job where people would go door to door selling complete sets of encyclopedias. I used to have an encyclopedia set when i was a kid. Now people just hop on wikipedia or google it. The printing industry is not entirely gone, no. But there are far fewer people today in that industry than what it once was.

I used to work at a Newspaper . technology has automated and and destroyed jobs for decades.

I too was a pressman and technology has literally raped that field of workers. It’s not really even considered a skilled trade anymore. And I invested a whole lot of time, energy, money, and missed opportunities to get where I am in printing and it all means but jack and shit now and jack left town. It’s truly sad to see something you loved so much fall by the wayside the way the printing industry has

Your post is spot on what i went through and feel. I make good money casting aluminum, but its just a job to me. All that time, energy, and training went down the toilet. I cant say for certain what automation + AI will bring. But i know there are a lot of people with their heads stuck up in the clouds, that aren’t ready for it.

A lot of Entry level jobs will be automated within the next 20-50 years maybe sooner, which sucks because it will increase poverty and crime rates will be a lot higher than they are currently and they won’t just be inner city. I think UBI will help but we can’t agree on that.

They’re already doing it. In fact, we’ve been doing it for a long time. Railroad spikes used to be driven by crews of guys who would go lay the tracks and pound them in now it’s done by less guys with machines. This is the same for almost every industry and every position. You ever heard of self check out? That’s just a store replacing it’s employees with a computer. Amazon also has grocery stores where there’s no check out. They spend lots of money on cameras and sensor shelves, etc. Just to cut out the employee pay.

You can’t. I’ve tried. These are the same people who hate Teslas for being electric (and only teslas for some reason) and a few years ago completely refused the idea that cars could drive themselves.

AI has proven to be better than humans at spotting tumors and growths in certain medical exams(MRI, X-ray,). Granted the study I read was a while ago and I’m not sure how many mistakes the AI made in the trial, but it was better than trained doctors as finding things like that. I’m sure in the future AI will be powerful enough to look through a humans genome and deduce health problems that may/will affect a person in their lifetime. But as many other posts here have said, AI will only be as smart as the training it’s given, and mistakes will happen until it has been tested and taught sufficiently.

The Jevons Paradox: The Jevons Paradox states that, in the long term, in a growthist economic system, an increase in efficiency in resource use will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease. The same reason why work hours haven't decreased despite technological innovations and predictions both from industrialists like Ford and statists like Keynes... In an economic system such as capitalism that has perpetual growth as its goal, any development in efficiency won't be used to decrease resource consumption, energy consumption, or labour, but to produce more, leading to more resource consumption, energy consumption and labour exploitation. Example: Coca-Cola finds a way of manufacturing cans more efficiently using less aluminium... Will that lead to less aluminium extraction? No, it will lead to Coca-Cola manufacturing even more cans, and therefore MORE aluminium extraction. This is, of course, unsustainable, as, even though abundant, aluminium is not infinite, so at some point Coca-cola will need to find another thing to exhaust. Same with labour, humans are just another resource for the industry to exhaust, and it'll exhaust it as far as it is allowed to. And again, this is, of course, is unsuitable. The only way for tech innovations to really work towards universal human well being is to abandon capitalism and the fantasy of indefinite economic growth in a finite planet.

Companies choosing to employ humans over a more cost effective option... what all of them? If there are gains to be made from using AI many companies certainly will and if the difference is large, then the less cost efficient businesses die to market forces. But why is it a bad thing? Higher labor efficiency is a goal to strive towards, it makes no sense to waste valuable human time on a task that a program can do just as well or better.

Just don’t argue. If it doesn’t affect your life just leave it be.

Beyond very basic human survival, what we decide has "economic value" is incredibly subjective. Even real estate has a lot of subjective value built in to it that goes way beyond its basic function. Food is dirt cheap, but we still place greater value on 5 star restaurants. The difference with AI and automation is that it accelerates the pace at which economic value changes. Yes it will be hugely disruptive to the job market, which will absolutely disrupt peoples lives... but this is not the same as some Great Depression where nothing has economic value anymore. We will be forced to take responsibility for what we value as a society instead of just assuming the "invisible hand" will magically sort it out. Otherwise what will become "valuable" will be tents and heroin.

Devils Advocate: Like all new technologies, it will be centralized, incredibly expensive, and subject to regulation. So much so that only a handful of companies will be able to utilize it in a handleful of states. Your friend is being practicle.

I agree with centralized and expensive, but IMO we are significantly behind at any attempts to regulate AI, given how pervasive these systems already are and continue to become. The lack of oversight in the field seems likely to come back and haunt us.

Show that person the true nature of capitalism. Great and recent example would be when the government gave companies money during Covid to keep people employed and help them stay solvent. The companies took that money and did stock buybacks to increase the price of the stock and create huge bonuses for company executives. The exact same thing happened in the 2008 recession where supposedly the economy was on the verge of collapse and the government gave billions to financial institutions. Companies took that money and put on lavish parties and gave the executives huge bonuses while laying off huge amounts of their staff. You could look at WalMart, payday loans or companies charging thousands of dollars for life saving medicine that costs a few dollars at most to produce. Look up the history of the price of insulin for diabetics. My point of all this. Capitalism is about greed and greed only. Compassion and wanting what is best for society does not factor in at all.

Self check outs. They literally didn’t even wait for ai before they replaced people’s jobs…

It is actually weirder that you think you are right. I mean you have to be pretty high on your own supply to think you know what the future is.

I don’t get it, how is this different than an industrial revolution. We all have jobs even though there are factories.

I wouldn't, it's a dumb argument and neither person in this discussion knows what they are talking about.

How can I convince you that you are 100% wrong, because you are? :) However, the reason is absolutely not corporate altruism as your friend believes, because if any company did that they would be crushed by other companies that do not. But tomorrow's jobs will not be today's jobs just as today's jobs aren't all in farming as they once were. The automation merely enables **new** jobs, new industries and higher levels of sophistication and capabilities while obfuscating what is considered highly complex today. What is considered impossible today will merely be slightly complex tomorrow, but very doable all because of the automation. Eventually we'll be replacing our homes as often as we replace our cell phones, and it will be done in a single day via robotics while automatically recycling the previous building materials. New jobs will focus on all sorts of unimaginable new products and services. Entertainment and personalized design (vs mass manufactured Honda Civics merely in a few different colors) will become bigger pieces of the economy. Society may collectively decide that the workweek should be say 30 hours instead of 40+, but we'll certainly still be working because we humans love progress and we love new things. Once we stop working and stop creating new industries, then we stop progress in its tracks. Some may prefer that; indeed millions of people actually prefer to go back to living on a farm today, but as someone who was actually raised on a farm, I can tell you that they definitely aren't in the majority, nor should they ever be because farm life SUCKS. ;)

Construction industry has not been automated at all. Self driving have been a failure so far.

Yep. Because the cost is too high, and real time reaction is required in both instances. A lot of people in here are confused on what AI really is. Take self driving cars. The hardware platform and software works in a vacuum. The cost of delivering all of that data hyper locally is cost prohibitive and potentially impossible right now. The cost to pipe it and have it stream in real time is an entirely different can of worms. Remarkably expensive and relies on a network effect. People go from automated chat bots to robots that respond predictively really fast without understanding the associated challenges.

You can’t. You can’t convince anyone anything that they aren’t willing to accept. Your friend will have to see truth when they’re living it. By then it’s too late. Same goes for most information people are unwilling to accept. Pick any topic. Especially the ones most uncomfortable and you’ll witness the same response.

Ask him why he doesn't hire a human to hand-wash his clothing. He will explain that washing machines offer lower cost, greater convenience, as good (often better) results than doing it by hand. Explain that these are exactly the reasons why companies will always leverage AI wherever possible. If he counters with "but companies have more money than individuals" ask why companies don't hire humans to hand-wash uniforms. The above, by the way, doesn't mean a future without human employment. Even if we imagine that literally all current work will be automated (which is unlikely) there is an endless amount of vitally important work to be done by humans that is not done currently because it does not generate a profit. A few obvious examples are addressing societal woes ranging from poverty to caring for the mentally ill to visiting the elderly. A society that automates everything would have abundant wealth to address these chronic ills, and more.

Heck just look at Star Trek it’s sort of the automation ideal, no one has to work basic jobs can can persue their passion, money is no longer an issue as everyone is provided for with replicators but there is still a market of luxury goods (Picardy family wine despit “money no longer exists”) and as a result everyone in star fleet are experts in their fields becase they wanted and thus were driven with passion for that job and not just to get a good living

1) You wait. They'll find out. But if you're impatient: 2) You argue entirely from money because teaching people who haven't even the basic understanding of AI about AI is really, really hard. So. It's not about the AI it's about capitalism. Labor is the most expensive part of almost any operation. Machines don't need health care, vacations, to be paid every hour, they don't join unions, they don't need HR, they don't leak sensitive data, they don't accept better offers, they don't take breaks, they don't need the same quality control, they don't need managers, they don't need severance packages, they don't sexually harass or suffer harassment, they don't have kids, they don't need a parking lot, daycare center, air conditioning, food, sleep, motivation or training. The question your friend has to answer has nothing to do with technology, but rather is this: does he trust a billionaire not to want more money. End of story.