When will they come for the truckers?

[RandBlade]

I see your conservativism reflex reacted to my characterization in "sucks to be you...". But if you read my post carefully, you'll understand it isn't about today, or the conditions workers are facing today. Find new work has always been a solution, but what happens when virtually all work is automated? Sounds impossibly ridiculous, I know, so I'll understand if you don't want to talk about that. But that's the topic.

I understand what you're saying and I'm saying it won't ever be the case. When old work goes human ingenuity finds new work. New ideas. Ideas that would once have been either viewed as either impossible or unnecessary.

At one stage the vast majority of population had to work on basics like agrarian society in order to survive. Then that became largely unnecessary and now a much smaller proportion do that.
Then we had increasing proportions working on manufacturing to produce things we'd like rather than need. Then that became largely unnecessary and now a much smaller proportion do that.
Now we have increasing proportions working on services to provide services we want rather than goods we want or basics we need. As that becomes unnecessary we move on to something else.

For every one person working in agriculture now in America there are more than six working in leisure and hospitality. A service industry that is essentially largely a luxury that would have once been unimaginable to be so large compared to agriculture.

EDIT: More than a third of a million people across the EU now work in professional sport and directly-related activities, that's not even counting ancillary hospitality areas like bars where people go to watch televised sport. Do you think we're going to replace footballers with robots?

[Unheard Of]

EDIT: More than a third of a million people across the EU now work in professional sport and directly-related activities, that's not even counting ancillary hospitality areas like bars where people go to watch televised sport. Do you think we're going to replace footballers with robots?

Given the net gain in wits and charisma, this is appealing.

[EyeKhan]

EDIT: More than a third of a million people across the EU now work in professional sport and directly-related activities, that's not even counting ancillary hospitality areas like bars where people go to watch televised sport. Do you think we're going to replace footballers with robots?

Humanity reduced to playing games as "work." I know that's not what you're saying, but it was funny -- a scifi short story premise. I do think the bars can easily be automated, btw, though people may not like it, and it might be cheaper to use people.

I think virtually any work can be replaced by AI. But, it won't make sense to replace some work because it's cheaper for people to do it vs the complex robotics/ facility redesign required for AI to do it. I'm thinking of stuff like hotel/ home housekeeping, facility maintenance work - plumbing, electrical, etc. And other work won't be replaced because people like it better when humans do it - or it's literally defined by humans doing it. Now thinking of athletes, performing arts, and the like. I think engineering and design could be done by AI well enough, but I wonder about laboratory research - real out of the box idea work. Any work with curiosity at its heart should be safe for a long time because an AI with curiosity would be an actual entity - strong AI - which isn't, IMO, coming soon. But none of this other stuff requires strong AI.