Claims about the near term impact of AI are always vague. Exactly which jobs are going away, and how many of them are there? Is there empirical research support

Claims about the near term impact of AI are always vague. Exactly which jobs are going away, and how many of them are there? Is there empirical research supporting these conclusions? From my point of view, the impact of AI in the past couple of decades has primarily been better translation, computer vision, speech recognition/synthesis, scientific computing, recommender systems, and the latest wave of generative AI. These are excellent tools, but they aren't capable by themselves of doing a job that a human does. Autonomous vehicles are an exception to this, and they do have the potential to disrupt the transportation industry. But it seems like there are still significant problems to be solved before we can deploy them on a large scale. We don't seem to be making much progress on creating truly generally intelligent agents, either. I think any claim that these technologies are going to have a large impact on the overall number of jobs in the next 5-10 years is highly speculative at this point. The underlying issue is that the current hype and fears around AI are being used to push a specific political agenda. Even if I grant for the sake of argument that millions of jobs will be automated away in the next decade, that doesn't automatically imply that UBI is the solution. Why is UBI a better solution than expanding existing social programs? What impact will UBI have on inflation and other economic indicators? Will UBI have a positive or negative impact on societal problems like structural inequality? Of course, it could turn out that the predictions about AI are true. And maybe UBI is in fact the best solution. All I want to see is a nuanced conversation on this issue, grounded in empirical data, that weighs the pros and cons of the alternatives. That's not what I'm seeing in the media narratives around AI right now.