Work is almost over. Good riddance to it. Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the fruits of full automation?
> We are going to have ... the super low wage unskilled laborers in a race to the bottom, trying to compete with machines, and a huge, empty nothing in the middle between those groups... and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.
That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power. If they are shortsighted enough to take entirely for themselves the wealth the machines create - rather than using it to guarantee basic security for everyone - then we're in for rough times. I'm betting with you on that one.
They should, but:
>That is largely up to the people who now have all the money and power.
And that's why they won't. At least not until their poverty destabilizes the economy. It's expensive and reduces profits for the people making the decisions, at least in the short run.
Something that seems to get missed a bunch when talking about the upcoming lack of work for humans is that a job category doesn't need to be fully automated to cause widespread lack of employment.
Simply automating a job enough to allow 2 people to do the work 3 used to do puts 33% of those doing that job out of work. 33% unemployment is already an economic nightmare and the actual ratios of "X people to do the work Y used to do" will quickly become much more severe than 2 to 3.
Some people will inevitably say "this has happened before", but this time a lot of the automation is going to be purely software. You are not going to have enough new jobs for people "maintaining the robots" at anywhere near the scale required to make up for the lost jobs like you did with the previous more mechanical style of automation.
Your mistake is assuming that a sizable portion of the work these jobs involve can't be replaced by "dumb AI", which is what ML is all about, and that they require a fully general AGI.
If the proposition is that this would lead to fewer humans being needed for these jobs, I suppose that could be the case. In my own field, my criticism of automating, say, legal research and writing, is that the time it would take for me to check the work would be nearly the same as doing it myself. I don't see much efficiency gain, which is why I think the only thing that would truly be better than a human would be an AGI.
Also, if you look at most of what's been automated away, there's very little what we would consider (and even what people 40 years ago would have considered) artificial intelligence involved.
If you look at the legal field, what's changed is the means of gathering and disseminating information. Legal researchers can be much more productive with computer searches, and consumers can get access to advice and forms in some cases without the need of direct face time with a lawyer.
Some of the changes weren't even primarily driven by technology at all, but by new ideas for business models. I think that something like legalzoom could have been done with the technology available decades ago (phones, mail, and catalogs).
And that's going to happen sadly before we reach Star Trek utopia, and there will be large-scale civil unrest, even in the US, within the next 30 years, I'm betting on it.
And let's not even talk about impoverished countries with exploding populations that are already struggling to provide jobs - an endless cycle of regional warfare, an endless Arab Spring.