Technology

We seem to always come up with more stuff to do than we get with productivity improvements

That's because in the past, obsolete jobs have tended to be replaced. From wagon makers and coachmen to auto workers and cab drivers. From ice block deliverymen to refrigerator repairmen. From literal shit shovelers to plumbers. You get the idea.

This time is different though, for a few key reasons:

1. The key selling point of the new way, other than convenience, is not having to pay people or indeed involve any of them unless absolutely necessary. NOT replacing lost jobs is part of the POINT.

2. While the world has been on a trajectory of fewer and fewer people owning more and more of the world's resources AND DECISION POWER for centuries, the last few decades of technological advances (which are of course a good thing when used well) coupled with regulatory capture have seen this trend explode like never before.

The robber barons and feudal nobility of old that we tend to look at as the personification of uneven and unjust societies would be absolutely aghast at the excesses and callousness if today's business leaders and the politicians that enable them.

In other words, the people with the power to replace the lost income are incentivised not to like never before and many of them got where they are because they didn't need any incentives to act callous and selfishly while forever striving for more more more and not giving a fuck about anyone who might get in the way of that.

3. As others have pointed out, the only potential replacement jobs are basically just correcting errors the AI made, for which nobody's paying anyone anywhere near as much as for actually creating things.

4. Thanks to the previously mentioned regulatory capture as well as international treaties on which workers rarely have a say, it's increasingly becoming illegal, even for sovereign countries, to hinder the profiteering of corporations for any reason, even the preservation of human lives.

So good luck securing dignity for the people economically displaced by the hot new thing that few of the elite understand, but almost all of them prefer over paying workers.

The time where everybody needs to work in order to survive but almost nobody is able to GET any work is approaching, and replacing writers and visual artists with lines of code will be a huge leap towards that dystopia if we don't somehow band together and stop it.