I agree. Mass unemployment is not a concern we can start to address because we do not know the nature of the coming unemployment. We're talking about 20 or 40 years away.
Meanwhile, we have real fucking problems right now:
1. Sky high housing prices.
2. Extreme wealth disparity.
3. Environmental degradation.
4. Cybersecurity failures everywhere, just as everything goes autonomous or otherwise cyberphysical.
5. Information operations threaten both democracy and the openness of the internet.
You can still make $100k a year editing English. The demand for talent is sky high, it's investments in education and society that will help us, not fretting over how AI will take away jobs long before we can do anything about it.
> You can still make $100k a year editing English.
The only employers paying that much are old-school publishers that are a bit of a hold-out but will eventually give way. As a translator often doing full-length books, I have witnessed some big publishing names severely slashing the amount they pay for editing (by doing things like outsourcing the job to India), and they don’t worry about any drop in quality because it is felt that in a web-heavy world, the public no longer cares too much.
It is depressing as fuck for me as a translator, because I put a lot of effort into my translations and I wish they would get the same level of love at the next stage of the publishing process, but this is the trend of the future.
Also, I feel lucky to still have work as a translator because many clients today are running the text through Google Translate and then just paying a native speaker to clean up the text for less money than they would have to pay a translator. Obviously that is not common in the mainstream publishing world, but it is increasingly happening with the marketing materials and technical manuals that are a translator’s daily bread and butter. “AI” is already hitting businesses based on human language hard.
Perhaps mass unemployment and extreme wealth disparity are the same problem. It's known that the productivity gains we've had from computers has mostly accumulated at the top. Workers are more productive, but their pay does not reflect that.
Wealth is moving around less because we don't need to spend (i.e. distribute) as much as we have in the past to generate more wealth. So, I think wealth disparity is a strong predictor for unemployment. I also think unemployment is the wrong word because it paints a false dichotomy. There's a not a huge lifestyle difference between making $20,000 a year and $0 a year (since the government steps in), compared to making $20,000 and $80,000 a year; and then $80,000 and $200,000.
One reason housing prices are so high right now is because people (mistakenly IMO) view houses as an investment. NO one wants to lose money on a sale. Another reason (for some areas) is probably because of the productivity gains. Since we need to distribute less to make more wealth, we've further centralized our economy into smaller pockets of land (i.e. cities).
I agreed with everything in your comment until you mentioned the investment in education. To handle education well, we do need to do everything we can to understand the changing demand in the upcoming decades.
Most government attempts to provide targeted education based on expected future demand haven't worked. Educators and bureaucrats are terrible at predicting the future (and HN users aren't any better).
Meanwhile, we have real fucking problems right now:
1. Sky high housing prices. 2. Extreme wealth disparity. 3. Environmental degradation. 4. Cybersecurity failures everywhere, just as everything goes autonomous or otherwise cyberphysical. 5. Information operations threaten both democracy and the openness of the internet.
You can still make $100k a year editing English. The demand for talent is sky high, it's investments in education and society that will help us, not fretting over how AI will take away jobs long before we can do anything about it.