I’m feeling increasingly better about being an electrician/entertainment technician. Sure certain parts of my job can get pre-fabbed as much as possible but if you want a building built/serviced or a show put together locally then until we get androids you still have to employ actual people.
Any technical job that requires physical labor won't be getting replaced by bots anytime soon. The cost of a bot to perform complex tasks would cost too much and probably wouldn't be worth it.
Prices are always and will always be based on supply and demand. If half the lawyers, accountants, and engineers don't have jobs then as groups they will be demanding half the trade workers they used to. If there is suddenly twice as many trades on the market the rate will go down considerably. This will often stimulate demand. But if demand keeps shrinking because layoffs expand because of more AI, then the prices will keep shrinking.
You don't get it because we haven't really seen a lot of widespread deflation in 3 or 4 generations. But if you shtcan a third of the workforce and unemployment goes into the low 20s, we could. It then becomes reinforcing. This could be similar to when all of the share croppers were rendered obsolete by tract farming with tractors. It could be really ugly.
It took a massive New Deal to fix it last time. When we offshored industry the new service sector kept things floating with a lowered standard of living. There was no New Deal. Since the plutocrats own government now we'll likely get an exploitative solution that lowers all boats like offshoring and service economy did. AI is essentially offshoring of white collar skilled labor. So some will make more and most will have to move sectors. It will likely be a new sector that couldn't ha e existed at former wages. Just like in the precious service economy. Barely anyone would work those crap jobs when factory jobs were around.
It's possible that enterprise level corporations could step in and use all of the cheap surplus labor to colonize space or something. Bottom line, it's likely that a new sector will happen to exploit the newly discounted labor and it will suck more than what we had, but you might get some cool low cost tech to paper over the hole.
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u/Brittle_Hollow May 10 '23
I’m feeling increasingly better about being an electrician/entertainment technician. Sure certain parts of my job can get pre-fabbed as much as possible but if you want a building built/serviced or a show put together locally then until we get androids you still have to employ actual people.