> Sure, if you're content to stack shelves.

Why this example? One of the things automation has done is reduce and replace stevedores, the shipping equivalent of stacking shelves.

Amazon warehouses are heavily automated, almost self-stacking-shelves. At least, according to the various videos I see, I've not actually worked there myself. Yet. There's time.

> AI isn't automation. It's thinking. It automates the brain out of human jobs. You can still get a job that requires a body. My job doesn't require a body, so I'm screwed. If you're say, a surgeon or a plumber, you're in a better place.

Right up until the AI is good enough to control the robot that can do that job. Which may or may not be humanoid. (Plus side: look how long it's taking for self-driving cars, how often people think a personal anecdote of "works for me" is a valid response to "doesn't work for me").

Even before the AI gets that good, a nice boring remote-control android doing whatever manual labour could outsource the "controller" position to a human anywhere on the planet. Mental image: all the unemployed Americans protesting outside Tesla's factories when they realise the Optimus robots within are controlled remotely from people in 3rd world countries getting paid $5/day.

Yes, AI is automation. It automates the implementation. It doesn't (yet?) automate the hard parts around figuring out what work needs to be done and how to do it.

The sad thing is that for many software devs, the implementation is the fun bit.

Except it isn't thinking. It is applying a model of statistical likelihood. The real issue is that it's been sold as thinking, and laypeople believe that it's thinking, so it is very likely that jobs will be eliminated before it's feasible to replace them.

People that actually care about the quality of their output are a dying breed, and that death is being accelerated by this machine that produces somewhat plausible-looking output, because we're optimizing around "plausible-looking" and not "correct"