alt Hacker News> It's uniquely American to believe that your life will end when AI takes your job.
It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking.
AI is not going to immediately replace food service work, manual labor, farming, hospitality, etc.
But it might replace quite high-paid software jobs, finance jobs, legal jobs, etc. One, if AI is good at anything it's things at least tangential to this. Two, these have costs high enough that off-setting is at least worth trying.
My suspicion is that ultimately it will lead to more of these types of jobs, though it could easily come with a huge reduction - and the jobs aren't guaranteed to be in the same countries.
You could create 3x as many of these jobs, and still end up with -25% of them in the US. Who knows.
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> It's probably because it's uniquely American for a sizable chunk of the workforce to have cushy jobs that appear ripe for the picking.
What an arrogant statement.
Lots of people outside America have cushy jobs.
What's much more likely to be uniquely American is that if you lose your job there's nothing there to help you.
The tech jobs were cushy because the tech companies bribed ambitious people to keep them from starting their own companies. Like it wasn't about hiring them because you needed them it was to keep them from competing against you. Like this was always a deal with the devil, but the idea that Microsoft has more of a right to the monopoly it has over OS operating systems than their employees have access to their healthcare is wrong. Like I think a lot of people are waking up to the idea that the promises their companies made to them were like the promises the devil made in that theirs fine print and they sold the company more than they realized.
Additionally all the startups offering to automate whitecollar work are going to run into a problem when they realize the jobs never needed to be done.