> We convinced ourselves that it was only physical working class jobs that would be automated through self-driving cars and robots. That may well turn out to be

> We convinced ourselves that it was only physical working class jobs that would be automated through self-driving cars and robots. That may well turn out to be true but a more immediate fact is that their jobs are rock-solid and safe. This was the main delusion. The reason robots don't do the jobs of "essential workers" is because they are far more expensive at the same quality. A machine getting sick or dying costs a business tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, a person getting sick or dying is discarded into the gutter and a replacement is brought in. A lot of people are getting paid for their opinions, though, or more specifically as the article puts it, their "text production." They are paid an amount far outstripping their usefulness for superstitious reasons: it's hard to predict the quality of the opinions of a future hire, so we just pretend that more expensive is better. To balance this out, society already made that class the most heavily taxed, and kept their existence precarious through surrealistically expensive health care, mandatory education, and homeownership (and in the US, I'd add dental care specifically.) I don't see how they aren't all trivially replaced. Capitalists act like ownership is a job that deserves compensation, rather than a wager on what is usually a sure thing. It's not. Owners buy people to make decisions for them, in fact they overbuy and overstaff (creating bullshit jobs) and pit those people against each other to guarantee the best outcomes. The losers get sick, lose their homes, and their kids can't get into college; the winners get another day in suburban paradise with 60-hour weeks and two-hour daily commutes. I can't imagine that 90% of high-status middle class jobs would survive properly-applied generative AI even at current quality, and techniques are getting better literally hour-by-hour. At least we'll still need doctors, although at greatly reduced responsibility. Will they also cut hair?