> Which is true, but it’s true as long as it’s not true.

It also isn't true. The story of the last 50 years has been that technology, especially computer and communications technology, has facilitated the concentration of wealth. The skilled work got computerized, or outsourced to India or China. That left U.S. workers with service jobs where they have much lower impact on P&L and thus much less leverage.

In my field, we used to have legal secretaries and law librarians and highly experienced paralegals. They got paid pretty well and had pretty good job security because the people who brought in the revenue interacted with them daily and relied on them. Now, big firms have computerized a lot of that work and consolidated much of the rest into centralized off-site back-office locations. Those folks who got downsized never found comparable work. They didn't, and couldn't, go work for WestLaw to maintain the new electronic tools. The law firms also held on to many of them until retirement or offered them early retirement packages, and then simply never filled the positions. It used to be a pretty solid job for someone with an associates degree, and it simply doesn't exist anymore.

The only thing keeping the job market together is the explosion in healthcare workers. My Gen-Z brother and sister in law are both going into those fields. In a typical tertiary American city, the largest employers are the local hospital and perhaps a university or community college. Both of those get most of their revenue directly or indirectly from the government. It's not clear to me how that's sustainable.

I'm also pretty sure in the past industrial transitions, many of the people who lost their jobs at the start of the change never found better ones. It took a generation or so for new opportunities to really be found and fine tuned and you're competing for those new roles with younger people anyway.

If ai does take a lot of white collar work, is it a lot of comfort that maybe jobs in a very different sector will be better in 20 years?

It’s also not that true, and highly dependent on a lot of factors.

Anecdotally I see a lot of schadenfreude online about tech jobs after a decade or two of lecturing everybody from Appalachians in coal country, to Midwestern autoworkers, that they should just “learn to code.”

>But if something approximating AGI does work out, human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation so it’s not clear why the past “automation has created more human jobs” logic should continue.

Human labor still seems to be cheaper. And then theres opex/capex to be considered. Like if they achieve AGI, and AGI isnt affordable its not going to displace much.

>“we have always found other jobs”

It really depends what humans value and what they have to spend. No one could predict that Banks would need more staff to deal with ATMs. It sucks being unable to predict past a coming automation revolution, but that doesnt mean there isnt something there.

>human labor has absolutely no advantage over automation

Humans are currently needed to manage automation. Theres no clear reason why, even with AGI, that we wouldn't want humans in most loops. Thats before cost and quality.

>The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.

Malthus is a pretty great example. We did sort out food production. There are risks with the scale at which we have done it. Malthus wasnt able to predict technologies to aid food production, but he did forecast the need.

When I see people complaining the jobs dont exist I find its the same. We dont know what the jobs are, but that doesnt mean the prediction of all of humanity being out of work are correct.

Actually the worst part of this whole thing will be that any incoming job losses being catastrophised as if the whole world is ending due to AI.

Totally agree, and would add another way “that’s what always happened in the past” is a terribly weak argument. Things might have always worked out at the societal level so far, but very often do not at the individual level. Countless successful craftsmen have had their livelihoods ruined by technological changes and spent their remaining years impoverished. How many people funding AI would be willing to throw their own life away for the good of some future strangers that may or may not be born? I'm pretty sure the answer is <=0.

> The classic example of how drastically this kind of thinking can fail is Malthusian theory, that populations would collapse because food growth was linear while population growth was exponential. This was true for all of history until Malthus actually made this observation.

Malthusian observation can still be true...It only has to be true once, and the only reason people say it isn't right now is due to industrial fertilizers and short memories.

At some point there really won't be enough jobs and massive social change will happen. It has to surely? Don't call me Shirley. In star trek WW3 had to happen before the better society emerged. I think a large scale wipe out and cleaning of the slate is inevitable. What happens in a world where people who have spent so much time and effort and money to get educated and establish a career are suddenly worthless and penniless? Nothing good I suspect!