The other 99% would like automation to make their lives easier. Who wouldn't want the promised tech utopia? Unfortunately, that's not happening so it's understandable that people are more concerned than joyous about AI.
How can one run a business by replacing humans, if no humans are left with enough income to buy your products?
I suspect that the desire to "replace humans" runs far deeper than just shortsighted business wants.
If you control all of the wealth and resources and you have fully automated all of the production of everything you could ever want, then why would you need other humans to buy anything?
One, a lot of human jobs have been replaced by machines before. Refrigerators eliminated the jobs of all those guys who used to deliver ice for your icebox every day. And so on. Those were real human beings and I'm sure many of them had families. There was real pain but it was ultimately probably a huge net positive. On a much larger scale, the microcomputer revolution of ~1975-present certainly does not seem to have reduced the number of human jobs.
Two, I am not the biggest fan of capitalism, but this is an area where it works pretty well as a self-balancing system because companies still need to compete with each other. If competing companies A and B each eliminate a bunch of human jobs thanks to AI, they're still locked in an existential struggle. They need to outcompete and outperform each other. They will shift that money to other expenditures: on AI tech, humans doing other jobs, capital expenditures, whatever. Jobs will be created or sustained in other companies providing those goods and services.
It's not foolproof, and it can certainly devastate particular regions, because the money may now flow out of those regions instead of being spent on local salaries.
There is a lot of change, and a lot of very very real pain to come, but if it is anything at all like past technology revolutions the net gains will also be real.
The fallacy here is in supposing that the mechanisms that kept those people from starving in the 1920s still exists and remains effective, that the "people replaced" have some other industry to move into. But we live in a post-industry nation... all that god offshored. There is nothing more to make, or build, or repair, not to any scale that would employ everyone meaningfully. And while I suppose some like you imagine that we'll all sit around day trading and speculating on bitcoin for a living, this means that places like China would have to manufacture everything and grow everything and that they'd be willing to do that so that they could have the bitcoin tablescraps you toss to them from time to time.
I've heard your argument all my life, starting all the way back in the late 1980s when the government was first talking about making China the "most favored nation" status that would permit it. Maybe back then people could still believe it but now it rings hollow as hell.
>Two, I am not the biggest fan of capitalism,
I am. I am a big fan, when it's used well everyone benefits. But you still have to police it a little to deter fraud, and we've all been the victims of the biggest fraud ever. And we can't even talk about it here, hurts too many feelings.
>hey will shift that money to other expenditures: on AI tech, humans doing other jobs
Or, maybe instead of shifting to "humans doing other jobs", someone runs the numbers and discovers there are still 30 years worth of profit (or even just 10 years) selling the product to Europe or whereever even if they don't hire anymore humans, and since this exceeds their projected career duration, there's no need to look past that very distant horizon. And it doesn't matter that here or there you're even correct (that some companies might shift to "humans doing other jobs", because I only have to be partially correct and you have to be entirely correct... if some companies do it as I hint, then those companies outcompete your companies which go under, and it still results in massive unemployment.
The fixes for all of these things are simple, clear, and effective, but are politically untenable. Even if people could have been eventually persuaded that they were necessary, those people are now outvoted by many more people who have been brought in who have no loyalty to this country (and it really applies to many countries, not just the one I'm in) and would cockblock the fixes.
