alt Hacker News> I think one form of cognitive labor will remain: What do we actually want to do/build.
Sure, but you don't need very many people to do that relative to the billions of workers that currently exist.
If you wipe out 90% of all jobs instead of 100% the practical implications for society as a whole are roughly exactly the same.
The Great Depression was "only" 25% unemployment.
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And this is why we must ensure that the AIs get aligned towards humanity and crucially that they don't get aligned towards capital, which seems to be the current trajectory.
There's a better chance that a humanity-aligned AI would make sure that humans have something to do and keep us alive versus a capital-aligned one. At the same time, if AI would be the deathblow to capitalism, that'd be very, _very_ ironic.
A good precedent is mechanized agriculture. When machines effectively replaced most humans in agriculture, unemployment did not rise to 90%.