I can only see brutality personally. I’m not prepared. Once I lose my way of making a living I think it’s done basically. Time will tell, but it’s never been kind before, why now?
Many here seem to think anyone "smart enough" or "hardworking enough" could simply pivot into something else after their entire category of employment was decimated. I assume that:
a: These people are very young and don't understand what it takes to invest 3, 4, or 5 decades in a career and/or despite their assumptions about their life experiences, have never actually experienced significant hardship.
b: They're neurologically or emotionally incapable of empathy or lack a usable theory of mind.
or
c: They've read too much inspirational linkedin hustle porn about people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps (which is actually supposed to be a joke-- it's obviously impossible to pull youself up by your own bootstraps, but for some reason people repeat it without considering its true meaning) and think if they are tough and ruthless enough that they'll be one of the ones on top. Which is kind of sad.
Or a variant of a: they're forgetting how little their first jobs paid.
Even in most lucky case, pivoting your career into an entirely different category means reverting to entry-level pay, while your age, health and obligations remain the same. Imagine just the paycut alone happening to you, out of a sudden. And that's the best case for what people displaced by AI will experience.
As someone who spent quite some time as a young person with the fringe end of society, I can assure you that saying you'll pivot into crime and drugs is like saying you'll pivot into being a plumber. It takes time to build a career that pays more then entry level money consistently, and good luck developing a network of connections to make it happen. It's not like walking down the street to pick up an application at Chipotle. And AI is probably going to take individual computer criminals' jobs even before most other people's.
Yeah, but a lot depends on where they live. From what I heard about the US penal system, someone living there would be better off being homeless than jailed.
