Personally I look at the anti-AI upswell as a modern day version of the luddites. People are always scared of progress particularly when it means the end of certain jobs.
There's a very large degree to which I agree with you. As well as agreeing with
@utee94 that no matter what dire prediction is made, that even if it comes true it'll happen more slowly than the prediction.
But the post shared by
@Honestbuckeye is worth a read: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
The march of technology has been very good for society as a whole. At the time of the American Revolution, according to the interwebz over 90% of the population was in agriculture. Now that's 1%. That's a GREAT thing. The population is larger but a smaller proportion of it is working to feed us--that's productivity.
We see this across many industries. As technology has improved, it may have had taken some jobs in agriculture, and in some manual labor tasks, in some labor-intensive manufacturing replaced by automation, etc. That has freed up people to get educations, to get professional white-collar jobs, and ultimately to generate a lot more wealth than we had in this country before the technology existed.
And while that some of those people in agriculture / manual labor / manufacturing weren't cut out for those white-collar jobs due to lack of mental horsepower to complete a formal education, it also meant that there was a LOT more wealth in the economy to support service-sector jobs. Do you think a farmer in 1776 went to go get his hair cut by a professional barber every 3-4 weeks? No... His wife did it once every 6 months. But I do. And a lot of other people do to--making barber a common job. And in a place like where I live, where there's a LOT of wealth, it means that barber makes a HELL of a lot more money per haircut than one where Fearless lives. Incomes are higher here so disposable incomes are often higher as well, so paying a little more for a a haircut here is the market-clearing rate.
Or not even that... In 1776 how many people went "out to dinner"? Pretty much none. You cooked at home--and probably with whatever ingredients you could afford (or grow), not what you WANTED for dinner. Yet we have on this board an entire thread devoted to restaurants, and that we devote an inordinate amount of time thinking about what to eat and where to buy it. That's something that comes from that white-collar professional wealth and incomes. Which means that wait staff here getting 20% of an expensive restaurant bill, are actually making a far more decent living than you'd think.
The article highlights that it's the white-collar employment (and incomes) that fuel a HUGE part of the economy. What the "fear" is from that article is that AI and intelligent robots will hollow out the white-collar job market, meaning that the people who have the wealth and incomes to support the service economy no longer will. And for some of those jobs in the service economy, the robots can do them so we don't need the people.
The article is that the one moat humans had, the one place we could always retreat beyond automation, was intelligence. We could move up the stack, and then the wealth generated by those who moved up the stack opened up more jobs in the service economy for those who couldn't/wouldn't. If computers effectively replace that (or expand it well enough that FAR fewer humans are needed for those tasks), that engine of the economy disappears. Meaning everything below it evaporates too. We'll have a lot of people but nobody will have anything to do.
What will humanity have to retreat to? The arts? Think of the average American. Do you want to read any novel, or buy any artwork, or consume any content, that the "average" American is capable of producing? Of course not. It'll be shit. The best case scenario is something like a UBI where we all have subsistence income guaranteed, with nothing else to do, and nothing else to give life meaning. It's optimistic to think we'll find new meaning and achieve higher heights as a society, but I'm not sure humanity knows how to do that. So you'll have a bunch of shiftless people who have enough money to provide for basic necessities, who are depressed or drug-addicted or video-game addicted, but have no aspirations or meaningful paths to achieve them.
Now, I'm not 100% sure I buy this thesis. But I understand it.
