Also, it's not necessarily true that there will be other great careers available. This seems to just be an assumption people are making.

Of course, there are jobs that will still require human labour for some time yet, but in reality a lot jobs that require physical human labour are now done in other parts of the world where labour is cheaper.

Those which cannot be exported like plumbing or waitressing only have limited demand. You can't take 50% of the current white-collar workforce and dump them in these careers and expect them to easily find work or receive a decent wage. The demand simply does not exist.

Additionally, at the same time as white-collar jobs are being lost an increasing number of "low-skill" manual labour jobs are also being automated. Self-checkout machines mean it's harder to get work in retail, robotaxis and drone delivery will make it harder harder to find work in delivery and logistics, robots in warehouses will make it harder to find warehouse jobs.

It seems to me there is an implicate assumption that AI will either create a bunch of new well-paid jobs that employers need humans for (which means AI cannot do them) and jobs which cannot be exported abroad for cheaper. What well-paid jobs would even fit the category of being immune to AI and immune to outsourcing? Are we all going to be really well paid cleaners or something? It makes no sense.

A lot of the advice we're seeing today about retraining in construction worker or plumber seems to assume that there's an unlimited demand for this labour which there simply is not. And even if hypothetically there was about to be a huge increase in demand for construction workers, it would take years to even have the machinery, supply chain and infrastructure in place to support the millions of people entering construction.

The most likely scenario is that people will lose their jobs and will be stuck in an endless race to the bottom fighting for the limited number of jobs that are left in the domestic economy while everything else is either outsourced or done by robots and AI.

The better advice is to start preparing for this reality. Do not assume the government will or can protect you. When wealth concentrates corruption because almost inevitable and politicians have families to look after too.

Please take this seriously. Even if I'm wrong it's better to prepare for the worse rather than to assume everything will be find and you'll be able to retrain into a new well-paid career.

+1

50% of the workforce was in farming near the end of the 1800's. Today, 2% 40% of the workforce was in manufacturing early to mid 1900's. Today 8% 60+% of the current workforce is white collar. What will it be in 20 years ?

LLM's are only a couple of years old, we have no idea where this will go. Maybe it will be a big hallucination, maybe we are looking at the very early version of farm and manufacturing machines.

The ENIAC was larger than a person, we now have watches that are significantly more powerful. Maybe in the future, your Apple watch will have more compute than several racks of H100's.

When they came for the farmers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful food. When they came for the manufacturers, no one else cared - everyone got cheap and bountiful products. Now they are coming for the white collar workers, and their highly paid laptop lifestyles.

Who is left to care ? The billionaires ?