If technological innovation is to liberate us from poverty then it should be a celebration that everytime that a job is automated. Since that is not happening, it implies something deeply wrong about how we structure our society.
It depends. Sometimes automating a job just means wiping out the institutional knowledge that came with the job - which I take to be the OP's broader point. It's not clear that AI agents will be able to replace that role to any useful extent, even though it's nice that we can read their accumulated knowledge as a set of .md files written in plain English.
So my grandma shouldn't have been be deliriously happy with the new washing machine that saved her hands from bleeding weekly because the evil capitalist laundromat owners charged a few quarters per load?!
Those jobs aren't creative knowledge work.
The advent of digital audio workstations didn't reduce the number of musicians - it increased the amount of music.
Now that we can write code with AI, we (as a civilization) will simply write more code than we used to.
Long hours? Sure, but that's not new (or universal), and AI definitely didn't cause it.
That’s where your idea breaks. There’s a big swathe of people who prefer the feel and simplicity of newspapers over digital hellscape. There’s also a reason why people prefer quality books like Folio Society over books printer on a toilet paper.
> “IF” your job can be automated away or made more efficient it will. That might not be a benefit for your but it’s a benefit to society at large
You can automate away 80% of CEOs by Markov chains, and it would be a benefit to society at large. Yet it doesn’t happen, why?
Because, at some level, people understand that a CEO’s job is largely about the human interaction part, so the real value of a human CEO is that last 20%.
The real value of a software engineer is also their own “last 20%”, but non-technical people (and many frustrated technical people) don’t really appreciate how much non-technical work is involved in being a good SWE.
That remains to be determined. Most of the examples you'll likely come up with are made at the expense of the environment. We've never consumed as much oil and other limited natural resources as now, in spite of massive gains in productivity.
So far it also looks like digital media is fast tracking us back into fascism, helped by the large concentration of capital that occurred during the transition.
Change and automation are not always societal progress, sadly.
"No greed required" doesn't seem accurate. One would not use an AI to do the job instead of a human, except for the motivation that they would have more at the end of the day.
Now of course there's also jevon's "paradox" here, and the automation does allow us to support a larger population so in that sense not all the increased productivity is just "skimmed off the top" as profit. But on the flipside the crux of the other recent [1] HN post is that the wealth disparity is increasing. And if all the increased productivity directly translated to more "physical resources" in the world, that wouldn't be the case.
So something must be getting skimmed of the top, and intuitively you can feel the "rent seeking" layers in society have increased. Gains in efficiency are no longer resulting in surplus of physical products and decrease in prices.
Or, IOW, "productivity" is a per-capita measure, so the total number of people doesn't factor in. (Or perhaps rather, gets factored out?) Anyway: People becoming "more productive" means each one producing more per hour — or per 40 hours — than before, so it's weird that they still need to work just as much as before, only to maintain the standard of living they had before.
(Running faster and faster, just to stay where they are... Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.)
Note: the above is not claiming AI or LLM can do these jobs. it’s claiming “IF” they can then they will. No greed required