All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc?
It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same.
It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets.
It's also easy to imagine a world in which you're able to cut more workers than everyone else, and on aggregate, barely anyone is impacted, but your margins go up.
There's tons of other scenarios, including the most cited one - that technology thus far has always led to more jobs, not less.
They're probably believing any combination of these concepts.
It's not guaranteed that if there's 5% less white-collar workers per year for a few decades that we're all going to starve to death.
In the future, if trends continue, there's going to be way less workers - since there's going to be a huge portion of the population that's old and retired.
You can lose x% of the work force every year and keep unemployment stable...
A large portion of the population wants a lot more people to be able to not work and get entitlements...
It's pretty easy to see how a lot of people can think this could lead to something good, even if you think all those things are bad.
Two people can see the same painting in a museum, one finds it beautiful, and the other finds it completely uninteresting.
It's almost like asking - how can someone want the Red team to win when I want the Blue team to win?
If people don’t have jobs, government doesn’t have taxes to employ other people. If CEOs are salivating at the thought of replacing white collar workers, there is no reason to think next step of AI augmented with robotics won’t replace blue collar workers as well.
Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing. Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.
Over the last few years, I've seen a few in use here in Berlin: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/robot-waiter-for-sale.html
> or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores
For physical retail, or home delivery?
People are working on this for traditional stores, but I can't tell which news stories are real and which are hype — after around a decade of Musk promising FSD within a year or so, I know not to simply trust press releases even when they have a video of the thing apparently working.
For home delivery, this is mostly kinda solved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
> Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.
Sure… if they have the money.
But can we make an economy where all the stuff is free, and we're "working" n-hours a day smiling at bad jokes and manners of people we don't like, so we can earn money to spend to convince someone else who doesn't like us to spend m-hours a day smiling at our bad jokes and manners?
Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs can now do 5 years ago?
These are three totally different jobs requiring different kinds of skills, but they will all be replaced with automation.
1. Plumber is a skilled trade, but the "skilled" parts will eventually be replaced with 'smart' tools. You'll still need to hire a minimum wage person to actually go into each unique home and find the plumbing, but the tools will do all the work and will not require an expensive tradesman's skills to work.
2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.
3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
They've already replaced part of that job at one of the grocery stores that I go to, there's a robot that checks the level of stock on the shelves, https://www.simberobotics.com/store-intelligence/tally.
I have already eaten at three restaurants that have replaced the vast majority of their service staff with robots, and they're fine at that. Do I think they're better than a human? No, personally, but they're "good enough".
I've seen this already at a pizza place. Order from a QR code menu and a robot shows up 20-25 minutes later at your table with your pizza. Wait staff still watched the thing go around.
Hey, is there a good board game in there somewhere? Serfs and Nobles™
Surely the modern history of decision making has been to move as much of it as possible away from humans and to algorithms, even "dumb" ones?
I can tell you for many of those professions their customers are the same white collar workers. The blue collar economy isn't plumbers simply fixing the toilets of the HVAC guy, while the HVAC guy cools the home of the electrician, while...
That is exactly what blue collar economy used to be though: people making and fixing stuff for each other. White collar jobs is a new thing.
History seems to show this doesn't happen. The trend is not linear, but the trend is that we live better lives each century than the previous century, as our technology increases.
Maybe it will be different this time though.
But it is myth. It has always been in the interest of the rulers and the old to try to imprint on the serfs and on the young how much better they have it.
Many of us, maybe even most of us, would be able to have fulfilling lives in a different age. Of course, it depends on what you value in life. But the proof is in the pudding, humanity is rapidly being extinguished in industrial society right now all over the world.
Yes, the lives of "people selling stuff" will likely get better and better in the future, through technology, but the wellbeing of normal people seems to have peaked at around the year 2000 or so.
If you, a CEO, eliminate a bunch of white-collar workers, presumably you drive your former employees into all these jobs they weren't willing to do before, and hey, you make more profits, your kids and aging parents are better-taken-care-of.
Seems like winning in the fundamental game of society - maneuvering everyone else into being your domestic servants.
So, flooding those industries with more warm bodies probably won't help anything. I imagine it would make the already fucked labor relations even more fucked.
You forgot the born-wealthy.
I feel increasingly like a rube for having not made my little entrepreneurial side-gigs focused strictly on the ultra-wealthy. I used to sell tube amplifier kits, for example, so you and I could have a really high-end audio experience with a very modest outlay of cash (maybe $300). Instead I should have sold the same amps but completed for $10K. (There is no upper bounds for audio equipment though — I guess we all know.)
I briefly did a startup that was kind of a side-project of a guy whose main business was building yachts. Why was he OK with a market that just consisted of rich people? "Because rich people have the money!"
The rich were able to insulate themselves in space which is much harder to get to than some place on Earth. If the rich want to turtle up on some island because that's the only place they're safe, that's probably a better outcome for us all. They lose a lot of ability to influence because they simply can't be somewhere in person.
It also relies heavily on a security force (or military) being complicit, but they have to give those people a better life than average to make it worth it. Even those dumb MAGA idiots won't settle for moldy bread and leaky roofs. That requires more and more resources, capital, and land to sustain and grow it, which then takes more security to secure it. "Some rich dude controlling everything" has an exponential curve of security requirements and resources. This even comes down to how much land they need to be able to farm and feed their security guys.
All this assuming your personal detail and larger security force actually likes you enough, because if society has broken down to this point, they can just kill the boss and take over.
My prediction is that the poor will reinvent the guillotine
