>The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't

>The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office. I certainly see AI changing things, but these hysterical futurist articles tend to lean more pie-in-the-sky techies than managerial types. Managers and executives know that employment, today, is a mostly a fiction. A lot of what drives employment could be automated right now, but isn't for political reasons. Not the least of which is internal company politics on having as many direct reports under you as the threat of becoming a 'small' department means becoming eliminated by outsourcing or in-sourced/absorbed by another department or simply a loss of prestige. The idea that employment numbers are purely meritoriousness is fairly questionable. Its bureaucratic and political primarily. The larger issue is, how much will this change things from the norm from a reasonable perspective. We can't automate most things and that probably means a certain class of jobs will be threatened but most will be fine. So even if that doubles or triples unemployment, that means we have unemployment rates closer to European economies or perhaps higher, but still doable without a radical restructuring of our economy. The futurist dream of 100% unemployment in ten years and everyone on UBI simply isn't happening. My worry is that we'd probably need a very liberal government to handle this as it will put it quite the load on welfare, but currently the US has a radical conservative administration as well as a conservative congress, which means the political fight to raise taxes and expand welfare for displaced workers is going to be tough or impossible. The problem is that angry voters put in isolationists and those who they perceive have and can build wealth, but those types of people are often very anti-social services and very anti-welfare. So the voters took a big gamble. They think the Trump admin will 'fix' jobs. Jobs that are destined to go away. But if he fails, and he probably will, then they will lack the social safety net to fall back on. Those in vulnerable industries, often in rural and less urbanized communities, simply voted the wrong way and most likely will be punished economically for it.