I haven't formed a comprehensive thought about the whole AI thing, but I can see where the author came from. I have a remotely similar experience a few years a

I haven't formed a comprehensive thought about the whole AI thing, but I can see where the author came from. I have a remotely similar experience a few years ago, which always got me thinking. As lots of people know, In the US at least, when you go to the gas stations to refill, you do it yourself. It's very easy, has almost no learning curve, everyone is used to it. When I went back to my home country (China), I was surprised that self-service refill is still not the norm. It exists, but in most of time, there are workers refilling for you. It's not even more convenient because you have to walk to the cashier inside to pay instead of staying at your vehicle. I said to my parent that how "wasteful" it is to have all these people around. They replied that, it still provide jobs despite how low skill or how low the pay is. Without these "stupid" jobs, lots of people would be unemployed. I started to think what the ultimate purpose of work is. Sure, we can (and will, regardless how me or the author want) continue optimizing how efficient everything is, but the benefit should, at least in part, be reducing people's workload without reducing their income. Unfortunately, we all know what actually happens: reduced workload isn't evenly distributed to workers without changing their income; instead, we just hire fewer workers with similar workload and the rest are now jobless. I don't think it's going to change any time soon, so anyone wants to survive always has to adapt. And it's fine. But I do now have more tolerance and empathy to "worthless" jobs.