Things aren't really that bad for most Americans, but even if they were, it doesn't follow that adding more intelligence to the world would be a bad thing for them.
A lot of people in the lower income brackets do the kind of work that an AI can't do. The people who should be worried most are actually college graduates doing clerical work, whose main work output is writing or evaluating texts. Even those people will likely use AI as a tool to enhance their productivity, because the AIs still are not good enough to replace people for tricky edge cases. The first companies that try to replace their customer support workers with an AI are going to have a bad time (and so are their customers!).
When almost everything can be automated, the problems that remain are the really hard ones that can only be solved by human experts.
A construction worker with a circular saw can cut boards way faster than someone with a handsaw -- but the introduction of circular saws didn't result in a bunch of carpenters getting laid off. Instead it made them more productive, and for people who get paid by the task rather than by the hour that is a huge benefit. They could build more and make more money, and a bunch of other people benefitted from their increased output, like homebuyers and property developers.
Similarly, as a software engineer I benefit from code generation tooling already. If that gets smarter and faster, I will be more productive, my team will be able to build software faster, and instead of laying people off I will expect to be given more work. Maybe our 4-year roadmap will be achievable in 1 or 2 years with the same size team.
Productivity gains by and large do not translate into real wage gains and an improved quality of life for laborers. We have more than a century's worth of data suggesting they usually do the opposite. Yet somehow this fairytale that productivity gains are a boon for laborers persists.
> Similarly, as a software engineer I benefit from code generation tooling already. If that gets smarter and faster, I will be more productive, my team will be able to build software faster, and instead of laying people off I will expect to be given more work. Maybe our 4-year roadmap will be achievable in 1 or 2 years with the same size team.
Why so sure the end users aren't going to be feeding their own requirements directly to a Jenkins/Copilot/ChatGPT mashup running as a service in the cloud?
A lot of people in the lower income brackets do the kind of work that an AI can't do. The people who should be worried most are actually college graduates doing clerical work, whose main work output is writing or evaluating texts. Even those people will likely use AI as a tool to enhance their productivity, because the AIs still are not good enough to replace people for tricky edge cases. The first companies that try to replace their customer support workers with an AI are going to have a bad time (and so are their customers!).
When almost everything can be automated, the problems that remain are the really hard ones that can only be solved by human experts.
A construction worker with a circular saw can cut boards way faster than someone with a handsaw -- but the introduction of circular saws didn't result in a bunch of carpenters getting laid off. Instead it made them more productive, and for people who get paid by the task rather than by the hour that is a huge benefit. They could build more and make more money, and a bunch of other people benefitted from their increased output, like homebuyers and property developers.
Similarly, as a software engineer I benefit from code generation tooling already. If that gets smarter and faster, I will be more productive, my team will be able to build software faster, and instead of laying people off I will expect to be given more work. Maybe our 4-year roadmap will be achievable in 1 or 2 years with the same size team.