I hang out with a lot of people in the AI world, and if there’s one thing they’re certain of, it’s that the technology they’re making is going to put a lot of people out of a job. Maybe not all people — they argue back and forth about that — but certainly a lot of people.
It’s understandable that they think this way; after all, this is pretty much how they go about inventing stuff. They think “OK, what sort of things would people pay to have done for them?”, and then they try to figure out how to get AI to do that. And since those tasks are almost always things that humans currently do, it means that AI engineers, founders, and VCs are pretty much always working on automating human labor. So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that if we keep doing that, over and over, eventually a lot of humans just won’t have anything to do.
It’s also natural to think that this kind of activity would push down wages. Intuitively, if there’s a set of things that humans get paid to do, and some of those things keep getting automated away, human labor will get squeezed into a shrinking set of tasks. Basically, the idea is that it looks like this: