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Ask HN: How will socio-economic mobility look like in an AI future?

1 points by wannabe44 ↗ HN
The advantages which previously resided with intelligence or skills now move to capital. This takes away one of the last pathways us peasants had towards socio-economic mobility. Intelligence is effectively commoditized.

In a post-AI future, presumably non-knowlegde-work jobs like Pizza Delivery worker, Kindergarten teacher or even Plumber would still exist. But these jobs have little place to shine since they entirely depend on human bottlenecks. Similarly jobs where regulation exists or workers are unionised might exist for a while. But those jobs do not present a clear pathway from lower middle class to upper middle class or higher.

What would be the choices of an intelligent youngster in such future? Crime is obviously one option. As such, we might see more intelligent people gravitate towards crime especially since they don't feel any responsibility towards the society, and it may work pretty well if they grow up with criminal ambitions and aren't autistic like us programmers.

If robotic advances take the menial jobs like food delivery as well, the only remaining pathways to prosperity would be crime, politics and prostitution. Or am I just a deranged person to not have more imagination?

3 comments

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GlibMonkeyDeath
Human intelligence is still going to be valuable. Just because an automation tool exists, doesn't mean two different people will get the same results from it. Solidworks is a powerful automation tool, and put a lot of draftsmen out of work, but someone with a degree in mechanical engineering is going to get very different results using this tool, compared to a random person off the street.

And the real world is still unpredictable - just look at anything in biotech. There is literally no way in many cases to "compute" an outcome correctly, without doing the actual experiments. It's not just a matter of intelligence - many biological processes are simply unknown. That's also what will keep skilled blue collar workers employed for the foreseeable future - many if not most job sites are unpredictable.

So some jobs will continue to be lost to automation, but the smart kids of today who learn to use the new AI tools will be in a good position to prosper, I think. But they will still have to have domain skills to use the tools effectively.