I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a result of this because of our complete lack of planning for it.
Afraid you won't have a useful job due to the rapid rise of AI replacing vast amounts of knowledge workers? Get to work building guillotines. You won't be able to sell them for very much but you can make up for it in volume.
To the wealth class: Massive amounts of people don't just quietly disappear when they suddenly can't feed or house their families because they've been automated out of a job.
Of course there can be some painful periods of adjustment, but that’s often caused by misguided policy trying to hold back the tide and delay the inevitable.
Ultimately yes, full no holds barred human level AI may well render human labour obsolete, but we’re a very long way away from that.
I know some people think LLMs are close to that already, but no, not even remotely close. I do believe strong AI is possible and maybe even inevitable. They’re a huge step forward, and are easily the biggest advance towards strong AI in my lifetime, but these things are just tools.
Nevermind that these people aren't crybabies - and that it is incredible condescending to paint them as such.
More fundamentally - what you're asserting as a self-evident fact is massively contradicted by what is probably the single largest sea change in many Western countries in the last 50 years - the systemic disappearance of solid middle-class jobs (and at least some form of community in many places), due exactly to these nifty "paradigm shifts" you are referring to.
Then again, I'm also reminded of a story of a homebuilder, hiring two workers. Together they held up the material and one of them measured the hypotenuse. Well, after someone showed him the Pythagorean theorem, the boss no longer needed the two workers to hold the materials up, and so sent one of them home. That day's labor market didn't expand to hire the guy who's job was replaced by a calculator. Does that extrapolate to the whole labor market, over a longer period of time, given a calculator for words?
So too for complex accounting/insurance structures.
Under the BLS classification scheme, these jobs are sprinkled around under various industrial categories such as medical, logistics, business services, etc. they add up to a large number of jobs in the aggregate (probably another 10%)
I took so many people to the ER for work injuries that were preventable but the bosses skimp on everything.
Environmental risks can be mitigated, if the job location inherently has risks, you will be better off with a regulated industry where the regulations have teeth, and probably in a union. Stresses on the body are largely mitigated by having a job that takes more brain than back, but watch out for repetitive motion stuff and mitigate that yourself.
Mostly in the trades you get paid more for some mix of a) having in-demand skills and experience that aren't easy to acquire fast, b) putting up with unpleasant environments, or c) accepting risks. You can probably trade off c against a mix of a) and b).
So for example being a tool and die maker in general is way safer than being a faller. Watch for industry specific stuff too. Kicking carpet is more pleasant and less dangerous than electrical, but it won't pay well and your knees are likely screwed by your mid 40s.
I think this "learn a trade" plan has maybe 5 years max. By then the trades will also be automated.
I remember a college professor who cashed out his retirement in the mid-1990's to start his own online college. He went broke in less than a decade, and we still have not removed professors from the colleges.
As a teacher, I do think that ChatGPT will replace most textbooks and teachers, but I don't know how long that will take.
