> I should probably read something about past instances of this; you mentioned coal miners and maybe hearing their stories will help us.

IMO it probably won't make you feel any better, for the following reasons:

1) The AI disruption is going to be far wider than any previous disruption, people will have much less chance to pivot to something else while continuing to do economically productive work, because not just one field is in danger, every field based on cognitive work is in danger (and all the manual labor isn't too far behind with robotics advances).

2) Even despite the more limited blast radius of prior work disruptions, they were still generally awful for the people who got disrupted. People love to cheerily talk about how the industrial revolution lead to a world of more, different, better, safer jobs and while that did happen, the newer world wasn't really for the people who were displaced, but rather people of the next generations. The people who were actively displaced were mostly hard fucked... economically destitute and emotionally damaged from loss of purpose.

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ChickeNES an hour ago | parent [-]

Nah, my wife is from an old coal mining family; her and her family are VASTLY better off than their immediate ancestors. I’d also suspect if said ancestors were alive now, they’d be happy to know that their descendants live in vastly better and safer world

	▲	georgemcbay an hour ago \| parent [-]
		IMO none of this is at odds with what I said. The test would be the ability to interview the ancestors in the past, near the end of their life, after they had lost their jobs. How happy were they then? And in any case, should we move into a world with real ASI the outcome is going to be very different than the displacement of a single industry. If an ASI replaces you at one cognitive job, it replaces you at all of them certainly faster than you can reasonably retrain.