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Comment by matt-p | Hacker News Reader

A huge number of these jobs will go yes. A call centre supervisor may be safe taking escalation calls that need a human and so on but the masses will be replaced by this kind of tech.

However what will actually happen is society will use these people to brick lay for houses, care for the elderly or something else. That's honestly a good thing for society as we have massive shortages there, and not a bad thing for the individuals as a whole.

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> However what will actually happen is society will use these people to brick lay for houses, care for the elderly or something else. That's honestly a good thing for society as we have massive shortages there, and not a bad thing for the individuals as a whole.

Labor "shortages" for those jobs exist because they are not financially attractive. Why is it a "good thing" to eliminate more attractive roles? How does this materially reduce the cost of living, or increase for the roles you point to?

Let's say answering a phone is 11/hour and laying bricks is 11.20/hour. No big shock that people will take the phone job, but if you remove that option more people will flow into the laying bricks job.

Except that's not reality, because the wage for most bricklayers in the US is $10-12 higher than the call center job.

A byproduct is the drop in wages in the bricklayer job, as the call center workers that were fired are now fighting for the bricklayer jobs.

Also, let's not forget an underlying pillar of society; real-estate must never decrease in value. That doesn't really fit with the theory that we're going to build a lot of real-estate.

The difference is nowhere near as stark in the UK, and for society a reduction in the cost of building houses or infrastructure is good.

One of the pillars of our society is that real-estate value must never go down, and so I'm skeptical that a lot more people are going to start building real-estate.

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