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Definitely agree with this! Given the pace of technological development, we should basically expect entire groups of people to constantly drop out of the compet
by woopah 2mo ago
Definitely agree with this! Given the pace of technological development, we should basically expect entire groups of people to constantly drop out of the competitive labor market. Don't get me wrong, new jobs will be created as well, but it's also very possible many people will also not be able to reskill into those new roles without some sort of structural support. People have faith that technology will create new markets and roles, and while that's historically been true, I think people also tend to forget that this happens in aggregate, and that someone's personal career trajectory can be largely luck dependent. You may happen to find the role of the future or you might get stuck with depreciating skills, hard to say which unless you can predict the future!
I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.
- Theodores 2mo agoI can remember the Thatcher years when redundancies for hundreds of thousands was routine, with the unemployment figures going stratospheric. The miners, auto-workers, ship workers, BT (phone) workers and other swathes ended up leaving the workplace as a general rule. To massage the figures, the government were able to expand the education sector and take the 'long term sick' off the books. For the education sector there are mature person degrees, however, education mostly takes the young off the books, the people that did apprenticeships. Long term sick can be an easy skive, if you have taken up the bottle, can claim to be depressed and have the doctor in the job centre believe you. The incentive is more money than dole and no need to check in with the job centre on a fortnightly basis. IMHO AI is the fig leaf for what is going on, with further financialisation of Western economies (rent seeking) and absurd energy costs, due to the Anglo-American 'war for oil against humanity', making most Western economies doomed to never be competitive ever again. Soon the only jobs will be 'multi-drop delivery drivers' and 'care workers for seniors'. Immigrants and young people will fill these roles, not whomever is being laid off 'due to AI'.