The language is all wrong here. You don't own your job. You are not entitled to perpetual payment for whatever it is you are doing. A job is not a possession. You are not being robbed of your job. You simply do labor in exchange for money based on the value of that labor. And sometimes you do that under some long term arrangement with an employer and sometimes based on more short term arrangements. Either way, the arrangement is entirely premised on what you do having value and being worth paying for. So, if the value of what you do changes, you need to adapt. It's not being stolen from you because you never owned it to begin with.
The threat with AI for a lot of people is that what they do right now becomes less valuable. And people don't like change and feel threatened by it. Generally there are two solutions to that problem:
1) do something else that is more valuable or more worthy of your time.
2) figure out a way to scale what you do. For example by leveraging AI.
For many people it might be a combination of the two. And for some people it will indeed mean that they need to figure out something else to do.
But we'll still need to have an economy that is based on people earning some kind of income and then spending that income. The whole system grinds to a halt without that. If AI eliminates all the jobs, nobody would earn anything and be unable to spend. So, that's unlikely to happen. Economies are self regulating in the sense that people optimize for value.
In the end AIs are just tools that people use to create value for each other. If an AI can do everything by itself at a very low cost that just means that what it does has low value and is not something that people will spend a lot of money on. Meaning that other things will emerge that they will spend their money on that are more valuable. Those things are probably going to involve human activity that is scarce in some way.
Many people are wage slaves: if they're job is gone, they have a big trouble. That's why they're scared of AI, that's why so many news count the potential jobs cuts: more fear means more clicks.
There's also a lot of inequality, and AIs will push for a bigger gap, not smaller. If everyone is 20% more productive, does everyone get a 20% raise? Historically, no: the company gets the extra profit.
So there's more to discuss than free market 101s, which don't capture the whole complexity of the world.
3. People who may want to try out AI to see if they're 1 or 2 but don't want to give ChatGPT their email and phone number to do so. Also, are people uploading their company's private code to ChatGPT to get its help? Wasn't there a big issue with ChatGPT leaking info recently?
1. People afraid AI will take their jobs
2. People using AI to take people's jobs
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