This is a risk raised by Yuval Noah Harari in his book that I am reading - 21 lessons for the 21st century. He does not provide a clear answer, but does highlight a fundamental difference with what has happened in the past. Until recently, machines replaced human labour, but not cognitive ability. Thus new jobs tended to be created as fast as old jobs were destroyed, and now fewer people (but still plenty) work in manual labour.

AI threatens to take a lot of jobs that are cognitive in nature, including the ones that require you to interact with people and perceive and respond to emotions. This happened decades ago to some extent with computers, which put roomfulls of accountants out of business, as well as plenty of draftsmen. AI threatens to add the ability to search for and interpret information and present it to people in plain language to those skills that get handed over to computers.

A deeper question is, does it matter? People who work in the most cognitively intense jobs, for example lawyers, doctors and engineers, these days often work absurd hours. If they could cut back from 50 hours a week to 25 hours a week, would that be such a bad thing - for them and for us?

These days, modern technology provides people in 3rd word countries with access to enormous quantities of medical information, as well as AI servants to interpret it for them. This could bring a revolution in medical care to them - at least for those aspects that do not require expensive machinery.

Also, will it stop people working as hard? In the west, people who do the more boring or manually intensive work tend to work shorter hours. They are more likely to stick to 40 hours a week. Professionals often work far longer, not because their kids are going hungry, if they even have any, and probably not because they are struggling to pay the mortgage (though plenty buy a house that is far in excess of what they need). Rather, it is because they are interested in their work, highly competitive, have no social life, and/or they are just plain greedy. Will the future be ruled by highly paid psychopaths?

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How many centuries of peace did we have leading up to the invention of the printing press?

MeisterEckhart wrote on Jul 12^th, 2025 at 12:13pm:

And writing, of course.

Interestingly, the Greeks, themselves, were once leery of writing... particularly the writing of their poems and plays as they believed not using memory alone, i.e. the oral tradition, would lead to the destruction of the mind.... Ancient Greek Oh Dearism.

I haven't read that one of Noah's yet.

In the Old Worlds. Humankind endeavoured to evolve from the Caveman mascot of strong body, small primitive brain.

In the New Worlds (Age). It's going to be the reverse of trying not to evolve into the Alien 👽 mascot of big brain, weak fragile body.

The slaves if the future will be Mental slaves. No longer a physically hard evolution to rise out of, now a mentally complicated world not to fall into. Hence why all this 'mental health issues' from societies dependent on technology.

Life was physically hard, but mentally simpler in the old days.
Life will be mentally complicated, but physically easier in the new days to come.

The great prophet of the cricket stumps Glenn McGrath said. "Always bowl middle stump". Douglas Adams would have been proud of McGrath.

MeisterEckhart wrote on Jul 12^th, 2025 at 1:15pm:

Good input. I've heard the same, especially with machine gun digital cameras, that taking photos is for people who don't want to remember the moment, but just capture it and store it away, to be forgotten. I can confirm this myself, I still remember those visual moments that would have made great photos.
Take calculators too. Those who didn't have them at school had to do the work inside of their heads, while those that did, let the machine do the thinking for them. Obviously the old school students had that 'natural' affinity to work things out for themselves.

There used to be a lot of professional photographers and specialist photojournalists. Not many these days.

FD,
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It will mean more work for less people.

At work they got the accounting package called Microsoft 365 -
they then sacked heaps of accountants and other financial data input people
and those left were saddled with entering all the accounting work
related to their jobs.

I was already behind the 8 ball - overloaded with work and then
I had to find another 2 to 3 hours a week to use Microsoft 365.
I'm glad I got out of that company.
Guess what ? - every other company did the same
- they all do it now -
you sign up for one job and you end up doing 10 jobs.

I’m obviously in a hands on role (literally -security) I don’t really need to concern myself about AI taking my job in my lifetime.

I do have a friend who was working in it and got a big trip to India all company paid for to train staff to replace his team in Australia.

It’s definitely difficult but look how many bank staff are now unemployed yet we pay more bank fees than ever!

The very simple solution to AI is don’t spend money with it!