The exception is when the regulatory environment prevents certain jobs from being automated or otherwise competitive, resulting in artificial scarcity of necessities. But then your problem isn't AI, it's market consolidation and regulatory capture.
AI is manifestly not automating away the shittiest jobs like hand-digging for rare earth minerals, subsistence agriculture, sorting through garbage to collect recyclables and so on. It is being very disruptive to cottage industries like graphic design, tech consulting and the like. In some cases it will certainly free up providers to skip the boring stuff and move up market or serve a larger number of customers, but in other cases it's just going to make people redundant. For example, it's entirely practical right now to launch and run a greeting card company without ever hiring an artist.
And then the products they used to make become less expensive because they require less labor to produce, which reduces amount of pay or hours anyone needs to make a living. Meanwhile all of the people who didn't lose their jobs now have that much more disposable income, which they use to buy something else, which creates new jobs doing whatever it is they're buying with the money they saved.
> AI is manifestly not automating away the shittiest jobs like hand-digging for rare earth minerals, subsistence agriculture, sorting through garbage to collect recyclables and so on.
You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.
> It is being very disruptive to cottage industries like graphic design, tech consulting and the like.
Obviously the people who used to do the thing being automated will have to do something else, but then they do something else. If there is a something else then that's fine (and this has been the historical norm), if there ever comes to be no something else then substantially everything has been automated and the cost of living should be negligible absent some kind of government regulatory dysfunction.
That's textbook deflationary, and mistakenly assumes that consumer products make up the bulk of discretionary spending. A more likely outcome is that whole fields of endeavor will become areas where hardly anyone can make a living, because the marginal cost of the product has fallen to zero. Your argument would have more force if UBI were an established norm, but it isn't. People whose income shrinks drastically or dries up due to AI are not going to have their rent or food costs reduced, they're just going to have to find some other form of work to pay their bills.
You're describing work that has been under heavy and increasing automation for decades. Farmers use combines and sophisticated irrigation systems. Miners use heavy machinery, not their hands.
First, that's not AI - the subject we're discussing. Second, it's not true. The existence of automation and industry does not mean that manual labor under terrible conditions ceases to exist. A huge portion of the food industry is done through manual labor, often illegally hired. Here's a current example of how mining continues to be done by hand, at scale:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893...
While I'm very much a tech person and excited about the possibilities for AI, I'm also keenly aware of the downsides and economic dislocation it's likely to inflict, and how these could be worse as well as better. You seem to have a very idealistic view of the world, but not a great deal of experience.
Meanwhile, the quality of life for the unemployed keeps improving due to those same technologies. If unemployment is a problem because of lack of access to things you want (other than status symbols), then it's hardly a problem anymore in developed countries. If the problem is a feeling of shame or uselessness, then maybe we should be building or growing other institutions to make unemployed people feel good about themselves.
Another such job that is disappearing in Estonia is food (https://www.starship.xyz/) and package delivery (https://www.dpd.com/cn/en/2022/08/09/self-driving-delivery-r...), which we are also replacing with robots, meaning all those people will soon be unemployed, if not already in some amount.
I have a hard time seeing how automation helps these people. And these people are growing a disdain towards people like me, tech people, who put them out of work. Low-skilled jobs are becoming increasingly scarce to find, and with people not having resources or time to level up their education, they are stuck. I know many people like this myself. Struggling to pay bills, no light at the end of the tunnel.
If the government would give some support to these people misplaced by automation, maybe it would help lift these people out of poverty indeed, but that's not happening. There is no support. These people are on their own.
It's quite possible, for example, that the value of "skilled jobs" and "knowledge work" will go down because it's easier to automate if you don't need to build hardware to manipulate things in the world.
