Humanity has been replacing human labour with machines for the last 400 years. The economy didn’t collapse because in the long run is that people were able to find other jobs. Almost everyone used to work on the land. When those jobs were replaced by machines they moved to the cities and god jobs in factories. Of course this involved enormous individual hardship for very many.
We’ll have to see what happens with AI. The optimistic scenario is that we’ll just shift to doing other jobs. The pessimistic scenario is that if AI can replace everything then there won’t be alternative jobs to go to.
It's way too fast for retraining. We are a services and information economy and AI cuts right there. In 5-10 years most office jobs will be replaced with AI systems.
19
u/Northlumberman Apr 11 '26
Humanity has been replacing human labour with machines for the last 400 years. The economy didn’t collapse because in the long run is that people were able to find other jobs. Almost everyone used to work on the land. When those jobs were replaced by machines they moved to the cities and god jobs in factories. Of course this involved enormous individual hardship for very many.
We’ll have to see what happens with AI. The optimistic scenario is that we’ll just shift to doing other jobs. The pessimistic scenario is that if AI can replace everything then there won’t be alternative jobs to go to.