> Imagine having a secretary who could read 1 million records and give you back your answer in 100 microseconds, for just 10 cents an hour. That's Postgres.

Well, that secretary can only answer very specific questions in a rather peculiar format.

> [...] but we'd all lose our jobs, as secretaries did to postgres.

I doubt many secretaries were replaced by postgres.

However, you might like reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment

> So I'd imagine that if R&D can be automated, everything becomes better and cheaper but we'd all lose our jobs, as secretaries did to postgres. UBI season

Perhaps, but there's a thing in economics, the "resource curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

I don't have any formal training in economics, so I can't argue the for and against arguments listed in the Wikipedia page, but it is at least possible that having full automation means that the underclass gets left behind and ignored, cut out of all progress forever and without any help from UBI as we cease to be important to those who control the AI.

(Even owning shares in successful AI companies may not help: Tesla doesn't pay dividends, NVIDIA's dividends are tiny).

That would be a failure of imagination when it comes to everything secretaries actually do. Which is a problem with the idea that AI is coming for all our jobs anytime soon. It totally undersells everything humans do on the job.