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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I’ll keep repeating this: if you don’t have a career future you who are smart, engaged, knowledgeable and passionate, then no one does in any field. Personally, I believe this tech will change work, make it faster, let us get more done and remove our blockers faster. Like the introduction of the computer to the office, we will have to adapt and re-learn, but will also be more productive. You sound like a person to loves to learn and so would be at an advantage.

But if this really is going to destroy wide swaths of jobs, if it becomes a human-level AGI copilot that lets a CEO run a Fortune 500 with just a few dozen prompt engineers, then forget trying to become a plumber. We will have the most massive wave of unemployment in history and it will end either in basic income and quality of life for all or a butlerian jihad.

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> then forget trying to become a plumber

I think the election of "plumber" is just a saying, but I expect plumbers to be one of the safest professions. You need to make a hole in the wall, avoid the electricity wires and structural columns. The pipes inside the wall sometimes are not like the pipes in the paper blueprint, in particular when the building is old and had some fixes before you. Identify the hole, decide what to change and solder the new parts. Now cover that, and make a bad looking repair of the wall. Did I miss something? It need a lot of advancement in robotic and image recognition and other non textual AI.

Yes, if 95% of white collar professionals are put out of work, there will be so much competition for the trades that their labor value will be destroyed as well.

Not to mention more people will just do it themselves like they do in poorer countries already.

> if it becomes a human-level AGI copilot that lets a CEO run a Fortune 500 with just a few dozen prompt engineers

if thats the case everyone in the world will want a piece of this easy pie, this results in competition, that results in needing more talent to compete.

and when (or better yet if) we ever get to AGI, then it will be the end of humanity anyway. we will have far more pressing problems than looking for a job

u forget that there are torches and angry mobs of people, right?

at some point a forceful redistribution of wealth will happen naturally, like it did in history many times before.

With enough progress in robotics, the redistribution will be preventable.

Not at all. At some point you have to have you money somewhere, and good luck if bank employees as well as people working as private security turn against you. These robots also have remote killswitches, and are prone to EMP.

There simply is no way to keep your wealth against the masses AND be able to exchange wealth for real physical goods and services

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