I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created.
Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already
Not many pay “a lot more”—your plumber is not taking home what she charges you—and that often comes with unpleasant working conditions, overtime, or extended time away from home. That’s like talking about tech salaries as if most people are L7 staff engineers at big tech companies.
Most people are not making that much in blue collar work, but even if they were, it’s also not like freshly-laid off people can just switch overnight. Lots of that work isn’t great for middle aged people, etc. and anyone retraining is going to need support for training, certifications, etc. but that’s happening when they have the financial obligations of a successful mid-career person.
For example, say Google actually developed AGI and canned everyone. What happens to the market in Mountain View when everyone is trying to enter construction work or become auto mechanics at the same time that those industries are hammered by a lack of customers, and the real-estate market suddenly has entire blocks for sale?
That last part might seem extreme but I saw it in San Diego in the 90s: the defense contractors laid tons of people off after the Cold War collapse, and that meant that entire neighborhoods went from having streets of engineers who worked at the same places all scrambling at the same time. Fortunately, that wasn’t permanent or every sector of the economy (and some of them were able to repurpose things like carbon fiber aerospace techniques into golf clubs and bicycle frames) but there were literally people with engineering Ph.Ds competing for $15/hour QA jobs just to have health insurance.
Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.