I'm not worried about AI job loss

At no point have worker rights and conditions advanced without being demanded, sometimes violently. The history of maritime safety is written in blood. The robber baron era was peppered with deadly clashes such as the Homestead Strike. As a reminder, we had a private paramilitary force for the wealthy called the Pinkerton Detective Agency (despite the name, they were hired thugs) that at it's peak outnumbered the US Army.

Heck, you can go back to the Black Death when there was a labor shortage to work farms and the English Crown tried to pass laws to cap wages to avoid "gouging" by peasants for their labor.

Automation could be very good for society. It could take away menial jobs so we all benefit. But this won't happen naturally because that's essentially a wealth transfer to the poor and the wealthy just won't stand for that.

No, what's going to happen is that AI specifically and automation in general will be used to suppress labor wages and furhter transfer wealth to the already wealthy. We don't need to replace everyone for this to happen. Displacing just 5% of the workforce has a massive effect on wages. The remaining 95% aren't asking for raises and they're doing more work for the same wages as they pick up whatever the 5% was doing.

We see this exact pattern in the permanent layoff culture in tech right now. At the top you have a handful of AI researchers who command $100M+ pay packages. The vast majority are either happy to still have a job or have been laid off, possibly multiple times, and spend a ton of time going through endless interview rounds for jobs that may not even exist.

This two-tiered society is very much in our near future (IMHO).

In the Depression you had wandering hoboes who were constantly moving, seeking temporary low-paid work and a meal. This situation was so bad we got real socialist change with the New Deal.

2008 killed the entry-level job market and it has yet to recover. That's why you see so many millenails with Masters degrees and a ton of student debt working as baristas. Covid popped the tech labor bubble, something tech companies had been wanting for a long time. Did you not notice that they all started doing layoffs at about the exact same time? Even when they're massively profitable?

So the author isn't worried about job loss? Delusional. We're teetering on the edge of complete societal collapse.

Not necessarily. Automation may also just result in higher quality output because it eliminates mistakes (less the case with "AI" automation though) and frees up time for the humans to actually quality control. This might require the people on average to be more skilled though.

Even if it only results in higher output volume you often have the effect that demand grows also because the price goes down.

I’m still waiting for the evidence. I still haven’t seen externally verifiable evidence that AI is a net productivity boost for the ability to ship software.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t. It does mean that it isn’t big enough to be obvious.

I’m very closet watching every external metric I can find. Nothing yet. Just saw the steam metrics for January. Fewer titles than January last year.

We've presumably all seen the progress of humanoid robotics; they're currently far from emulating human manual dexterity, but in the last few years they've gotten pretty skilled at rapid locomotion. And robots will likely end up with a different skill profile at manual tasks than humans, simply due to being made of different materials via a more modular process. It could be a similar story to the rise of the practical skills of chatbots.

In theory we could produce a utopia for humans, automating all the bad labor. But I have little optimism left in my bones.