Will AI Replace Jobs?
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I don't necessarily agree with this video. The channel is a mostly libertarian leaning channel, and I think libertarians are naive in a lot of ways and this video illustrates one of them.
The topic of AI itself is only part of the real issue. As I see it, the real issue is that 'dumb people' jobs are dwindling, and 'smart people' jobs are "growing". Which is to say they are dwindling too, but not as much and transforming into even higher barrier to entry "smart people" jobs.
This is a trend that has been happening for a long time, and it's one I don't see libertarians or pure economic conservative types really ever choose to address. In the distant past, there weren't many jobs that required someone to be smart. A village of 100 people might have a priest, a notary, a mayor, a merchant, and one or two others that truly required an legitimate education to perform. Below that was a tier of skilled trades; blacksmiths, silversmiths, fletchers, tanners, masons, etc. And below that was the biggest group; unskilled labor. Farmers, miners, and jobs that basically required being able to lift heavy things on command.
The libertarian argument has always been that as advancement eliminates one kind of job, a new kind of job takes its place, so that nothing is every really displaced. Telegraph operators can train to become telephone operators, and so on. But one thing they don't like to mention is that each time this happens, the amount of education and even basic natural intelligence to do these new jobs tends to increase. Libertarians would pass this off as irrelevant and just say the obvious answer is to train the people on the new higher intelligence job.
But the uncomfortable truth is that there is a ceiling to that. If you're willing to see the truth, you'll notice not every race has the same capacity for intelligence, and even among those that might, not every person has the same capacity either. The bell curve of intelligence is what it is. There are a lot of average people, and very few hyper intelligent people. What do you do when every time technology advances, the requirements of the new job require more and more people from the right of the bell curve, but we don't see the curve itself shifting to the right?
I personally believe that when it comes down to raw numbers, we are going to eventually end up in a world where the remaining jobs require the employee to have a certain base level of intelligence to do them, and there will be a hell of a lot more remaining humans who just don't have that. In the past, those people would go lay bricks or till soil, or screw a widget on an assembly line all day. But we have machines to do that now.
What does a society do when there are a small number of available jobs for one to earn a living, with automation and machines doing all the rest, and a massive population of people who will never be able to get smart enough to do them? Even if there were somehow enough smart people jobs to give one to everyone if they can do it, which there aren't and won't be, what happens to the people who are basically naturally too stupid to learn to code or work with advanced robots or the other smart people tasks require to keep the machines running?
From one moral perspective, some one would that answer is to tell them to fuck off and die. No one is entitled to the fruits of labor of others. If they can't earn a living by contribution, then they don't deserve a living. While that is true in a sense, it's not really practical in the real world. What happens when a tiny group of people tells a massive group of people they should just go somewhere else and die? The bigger group says 'no' and kills the smaller group.
If we automate and mechanize and AI our way into a world where there's only legitimate contributing employment to say, 30% of the population, and the remaining 70% literally cannot do anything that is worth paying for, ie earning a living, and they are just too genetically stupid to ever be able to even train to be more, what happens then? Do we think the 70% are going to shuffle off and say "yeah sorry, you're right. I guess I'll just go die in a corner now"? Because they aren't going to do that. They're going to cave the heads on the 30% in with rocks rather than starve to death. So what do we do before it gets to that point?
Don’t worry the elites have plenty of ways to kill off most of the population before that happens. This has been one of the keystones behind thr destruction of the middle class and White people in general.
Even unrelated to AI, the trend of jobs becoming more and more specialized to the point where switching tracks becomes impractical is something that isn't talked about enough.
Sure that 70% will be angry but what if the smaller group engages in a campaign of propaganda to convince the masses to fight amongst themselves and die while the tiny group reaps all the wealth? Hypothetically of course.
There's physical labor and thinking-work. As physical labor began being automated, most people could shift to new thinking-work that opened up.
Now we are going to automate thinking-work, and there is no remaining category to shift to, other than niches where people genuinely prefer for something to be done by a human, such as art and prostitution.
It's a testament to stupidity and malice, that we're about to enter a situation where perhaps 1% of people are needed to work to keep the world running and provide luxury for everyone while the remaining 99% are freed up - and our reaction is that we can't possibly figure out how to organize this bonanza, so we're all going to die or murder each other.
Caving in the heads of the competent isn't going to suddenly make the rest competent themselves, it just ensures that everyone dies. But if this is the prevailing idea, I can see why the competent class might become opposed to carrying those who hate and resent them. One would think there's a better way.