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Alex Potts's avatar

The thing I find fascinating about the AI-induced unemployment is that it flips the usual class analysis totally on its head. It's the middle-class white-collar workers (perhaps even the extremely privileged few who work in creative industries who long believed their work was more "human" than anyone else's) whose jobs are under most immediate threat. I've heard multiple times that the job safest from automation is being a plumber.

This is really likely to change politics in the near future. It is true that UBI is already somewhat popular in liberal elite circles, but currently that feels more like a luxury belief than a deeply held conviction - the sort of thing people say in order to sound sophisticated. Well, soon it's going to be deadly serious, as these people unexpectedly find everything they've worked for washed away as the skilled manual labourers inherit the earth.

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Bill Allen's avatar

Isn't this analysis based on a fallacy of sorts? If AI results in everybody losing their jobs, what does that mean? It sounds to me like it means the costs of production have declined to near zero and thus the cost of goods will have declined to near zero - maybe too cheap to measure. Since goods are zero cost, the cost of charity is zero cost. Sounds like utopia come true - with all the good and bad that implies.

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