It definitely took out a lot of jobs from the lowest rungs of the market, but on the more specialized / upper end of the ladder wages got actually higher and a lot of companies got burned, and now they have to readjust. It's rolling over slowly still, as there a lot of companies selling AI products and in turn new companies adopting those products. But it tells you a lot that
A) a company selling an AI assistant last year is now totally tied to automating busy work tasks around marketing and sales
B) AI writing companies are some of the busiest in employing human talent for... writing and editorial roles!
It's all very peculiar. I haven't seen anything like this in the past 15 years... maybe the financial crisis and big data was similar, but much much smaller at scale.
Effectively all mechanization, computerization, and I guess now AI-ization has done this. In the past you could have a rudimentary education and contribute to society. Then we started requiring more and more grade school, then higher education for years. Now we're talking about the student debt crisis!
At least if AI doesn't go ASI in the near term the question is how are we going to train the next generation of workers to go from unskilled to more skilled and useful than the AI is. Companies aren't going to want to do this. The individuals are going to think it's risky getting an education that could be replaced by a software update. If left to go out of control this is how a new generation of luddites will burn data centers in protest they are starving on the streets.
