When it comes to AI taking jobs, optimists like Jensen Huang point to the history of technology and note that humans have always found something to do. Others say that history is not a reliable guide, since technology that can do certain jobs better than humans is different from an all-purpose technology that is superior to us in every way.
I believe that even the optimists on job loss do not go far enough. Regardless of how AI progresses, there will always be work. This is true even in the extreme case where machines can do literally everything humans can, cheaper and better. This is the world that Bill Gates fears:
So there’s no doubt that to date, A.I. has created more jobs than it’s destroyed. The demand for the skill sets, even just to build the data centers, is very, very high. We have a reasonably low unemployment rate.
The superiority of these systems is subject to a threshold where you have to believe that it’s incredibly reliable. If you’re going to have your telesales or telesupport capability be A.I.-driven, you want to make sure that its accuracy is better than humans…
We will, in the next few years, cross over those thresholds for accounting, legal work, telesales, telesupport — where there’s service 24 hours a day, in every language, with infinite trivia capability and no urgency.
I imagine people starting with a mental checklist of jobs, and then crossing them off as computers can do them more affordably than humans. Attorney, accountant, nurse. Check, check, check. Before, we checked off things like farming. Now, technology comes for the brain work, mops up the last remnants of physical work, and at that point there will be nothing left. Sure, the pessimists acknowledge, in the past there was always something else for humans to do, but now we are reaching beyond the limit of this principle, at which point the members of our species will be completely superfluous.
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The reason that many pessimists fear that the gains from AI will not be widely shared rests on the assumption (a correct one in my opinion) that AI enables BOTH job automation and systematic political repression through an advanced surveillance state. Past technology advances lead to a rise in social welfare spending because of a credible societal threat of armed revolution in its absence (like the infamous 1932 veterans march on Washington DC). It was cheaper to "pay off" retirees and the dusplaced than to quash them. This revolution threat was credible because of military drafts that resulted in a high percentage of the civilian population gaining military tactical skills.
In an AI-tech world a few oligarchs can counter any potential revolt with automated drones and robots that only they control. With the outside bargaining option of revolution off the table the AI oligarchs then lack any economic incentive to tolerate a tax-and-spend welfare stare.