[jyl]

Without parsing the details of the article, it seems to me that when AI, machine vision, and natural language recognition reaches a certain level, many administrative, clerical, transportation, and customer service jobs will become redundant. Robotics has already made many industrial jobs redundant, and before that mechanization made many manual labor jobs redundant.

Then many professional jobs will become redundant. Take, for example, pathology, a highly skilled medical specialty. It won't be long before software can interpret biopsies as accurately as the average human pathologist, requiring only a few experienced humans to handle the most difficult cases. Not fiction: there are already devices that image and analyze skin moles and lesions to look for skin cancer, and they are as accurate as human dermatologists.

The "trades" won't be a refuge. Plumbing, for instance, is not intrinsically very difficult. Many people could become competent plumbers, if they chose to undergo the training and were willing to endure the hard work and apprenticeship. Maybe today they prefer to become insurance agents. But when AI systems are perfectly capable of asking questions and pricing insurance coverage, those people might be willing to become plumbers. When there are 10X as many people competing for plumbing work, the earnings of plumbers will collapse.

I can see, in a few decades, a clamor for laws prohibiting further advances in certain types of automation. It will become a populist issue, pitting tens of millions of workers against a small number of corporate and wealthy interests.

The argument of the latter will be, as it is today, that whatever lowers prices and improves service for "consumers" is good. This argument has been used successfully for decades. Maybe it will eventually lose its power. I wonder, for example, if a congressman proposed a law requiring all customer service calls, chats, emails, support requests originating in the USA to be handled by persons physically located in the USA . . . would it pass? I think it just might, today.

it used to take 300 man hours to build a car, now it takes 30. That's 90% of production line jobs gone - in theory, anyway. Are we, overall, better off? Maybe, maybe not.