The historical precedent is those people get other jobs, and/or everyone else in the economy gets richer faster than they get poorer.

If this does or doesn't happen with AI kinda depends how fast it makes multiple different sections of the population unemployed, rather than just one group like "software developer" or "vehicle driver".

That's very much not what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Hand weavers were relatively well-paid, and the new factories were more likely to employ the urban poor - including kids - than to give jobs to people who used to be hand weavers.

It took maybe a century and a half for the modern consumer economy to appear. And it didn't happen until money started being shared into the wider economy for political reasons, not technological ones.

Meanwhile the enclosure of common land was catastrophic for rural populations. Sources of food and pasture disappeared as the Big Houses took them over and turned them into huge single family estates.

> The historical precedent is those people get other jobs

Heh, got fired from my old company for reasons not connected to AI. Then couldn't find job. AI suggested one that is perfect for me, helped me put up webpage (I can do everything from electronics/firmware/backend/iot/cad, but nice webpage is not something I can do easily), then helps me every day to learn new things and make useful products I always wanted to make. And I found something safe for now from AI and big companies - making old equipment work with new systems. No one will touch it, because you have only small projects here and can't extract a lot of value at once, but a single person who can do anything with some help from AI can carve out a whole niche.

I think such solution - thousands of small niches by small entrepreneurs (1 person companies) who can use AI for some small skill they are lacking - are our future and they will absolutely extract a lot of money from people, who hope to make some more money with small optimisations of already working businesses. One example of such small optimisation - making a slightly better wood drying controller for small woodmill owner. He already put up small cabinet with cheap tuya controllers and needs to control them though atrocious app. Now I can make a small module that will add several more sensors, give him some simple dedicated control panel on webpage. Not even medium company would make such small product, because planning phase alone would cost more than what I can charge for whole system and do it in a week.

And it all started with one prompt - "Given my CV, what single person job would you recommend?"