> help someone is going to automate my job and other jobs might be harder

More like “help, someone is going to automate my job and there won’t be jobs for everyone”

In a hypothetical scenario where 30% of the current workforce is decimated by AI (white collar jobs), what makes you think the demand for plumbers, aircon unit installers or fruit pickers is goong to go up and absorb all those lost jobs?

I think, in some way or another, the economy will settle into an equilibrium where everyone is doing some kind of paid work, but if we automate away the enjoyable work and the difficult-to-automate work happens to be the type of work that's less enjoyable, then all our lives will be less enjoyable.

We've seen this play out in history with the various productivity-increasing technologies in manufacturing. I imagine that being a member of a crafts guild producing their wares in Renaissance Florence was a more fulfilling existence than being a modern assembly line worker who basically just fills in the difficult-to-automate gaps between the machines on an assembly line.

There are essentially two ways of using technology: One is where technology becomes an extension of your body (and, with AI, your brain) and puts more powerful means at your disposal to do what you want to do and have an effect on the world. The other is where your role in life is reduced to being a mere part in a machine -- someone else's machine.

And it's not in each individual's power to freely pick and choose how they will end up relating to technology. This is rather the result of societal-level forces, and there will be many people who will see their quality of life diminished by recent advances in technology.

> imagine that being a member of a crafts guild producing their wares in Renaissance Florence was a more fulfilling existence than being a modern assembly line worker who basically just fills in the difficult-to-automate gaps between the machines on an assembly line

I was in Murano last summer. They probably have more global demand for their handmade wares than they’ve ever had in history.

> ...more global demand

Maybe in absolute terms, given the expansion of the total size of the economy through history, but I can't imagine that the proportion of Italy's population that was able to sustain a middle class existence through artisanship was lower in the Renaissance than it is today.

In the Renaissance, artisanship was an economic necessity and a political system. Nowadays it's a weird meeing of supply-and-demand between the elites among the buyers and the elites among the sellers. Only the elites among the buyers can afford to buy goods that have been produced in a less economical way than functionally/aesthetically equivalent alternatives, just for the bragging rights connected with filling one's home with handmade stuff. Only the elites among the sellers can withstand the competition among those wanting to be such sellers.

Obviously those elites' point of view shouldn't be the only one informing the decisions about how we, as a society, want to relate to technology.

> can't imagine that the proportion of Italy's population that was able to sustain a middle class existence through artisanship was lower in the Renaissance than it is today

I would love to see figures, actually. My gut feeling is it would be lower. The world was overall poorer, and still struggling to even feed itself.

> still struggling to even feed itself.

I don't think so, especially considering the plague. The economy was already set up to feed a lot more mouths than survived the plague, and places like Florence were the destination for many of those newly wealthy. The guilds also exercised political power, behaving as organized monopolies. You would think that monopolies are bad for the economy, but they were markedly different from today's monopolies in that their internal organization foreshadowed today's systems of democracy and a strong civil society.

So, to think of this as a golden age of artisanship, and to think that the phenomenon reached even into commoners' lives, is certainly more than mere romanticizing about the past ...though I don't claim to have a good quantitative grasp of it either.

Adding substance and example to the peer Murano comment

Lino Tagliapietra is a g'damn wizard.

I've had the pleasure of working with him in both Australia and New Zealand and I can't see his skill set being AI replicated anytime soon.

I dare say when it is we're all doomed. :-)

https://www.linotagliapietra.com/artist/biography

But what if instead of laying people off - you can expand the project's scope instead? In my country's gamedev community "GTA in our country" is a meme, because we don't have enough funding and manpower to make a GTA-sized game. But with AI assistance it could be feasible. And big companies like Rockstar, instead of laying people off, could make something truly massive.

The same with movies. We can't make anything like James Cameron's movies. But with AI we could.

YES this is absolutely the answer. We can now do very cool and worthwhile things that simply were out of reach before.

Counterpoint, companies do what they’ve always done and do more with less because big companies are run by MBAs, not idealists, and startups are difficult to bootstrap and manage.

Big companies have to compete with other big companies. What if you lay off your employees in order to make a product with a similar scope as before, but your competitor hires more people and expands the scope of their project significantly?

Considering all the big companies laying people off recently, even those with enough capital to retain them, they don’t seem very concerned about that possibility. For what it’s worth I hope you’re right.

Even after all those layoffs - they still have more employees than before the pandemic.

I view it differently. Some people are not cut out for manual labor, lots of white collar work is intellectually stimulating in a way blue collar work isn’t, and a deluge of white collar workers competing for blue collar jobs will drive down wages.

End goal should be trying to give the next generation a better “cushy” life than the last. If harder work for less pay is what lies in the future then the future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.