Let's assume you're 100% right (because I'm sure you are) and the "unintended consequences" are avoided.
What kind of pros and cons do you expect to see for the average person working an average, non-degreed job on the 5 year timeline?
Discussion
Non degree jobs may stick around longer than office jobs. Even if ai/robotics gets super good, it’s still going to cost a lot to replace human labor. So, any labor-focused work may persist longer.
Pros: we won’t have as much work
Cons: we won’t have as much work
But I’m really not sure. In the current system this just leads to less employment and consistently higher prices. Two things you don’t want in your society.
I imagine we may have a shift to skilled hand labor jobs - trade school type things.
On the other end of the spectrum we’ll have more highly talented people who get paid well to guide our primitive ai, until they too get replaced.
The immediate time frame of 2-4 years is probably a great opportunity for startup founders who find ways to make something useful of Ai tools with combination of some other thing. Creator economy may boom more as people will have the means to do a lot more for a lot less. These don’t require degrees.
I’m the long term this doesn’t seem sustainable though, and something is going to happen - I’m not sure what.
How’s this for thought;
I own a great business that survived covid and lockdowns, now I am needing staff to as we are back up running!
I simply cannot get staff at all, allow me to purchase an AI robot to do what needs to be done as it’s costing me $$ not having staff and I will gladly purchase them!
No sick days, no holidays and no pay increases…I say for my business bring them on!
Haha! Yes, I wish I had a robot to work Saturday mornings for me. Where do I sign up?
In theory, AI should lend itself to lower pricing of good & services even with lower employment, but that doesn't provide much benefit to the people who can't find a job within their scope of ability. As with anything where the pros and cons are essentially the same, reaction comes down to individual perception. It's probably safe to assume that half of the people affected by job loss in your scenerio are going to be thrilled that they have the opportunity to break out of their cubicles and get their hands dirty. The other half are going to flounder, resist, and resent. That's a lot of people to be thrown into poverty in a very short period of time. So what's a viable mitigation for that? Government assistance programs might keep people fed but they are a trap of government dependence that's already really hard to escape. And ultimately its paid for by the people who create the most value. Almost everyone is charitable but almost no one is okay with being forced to be charitable, so the maximum assistance provided is only going to be as high as value-creators allow themselves to be forced into paying for aka the minimum amount required to prevent mass suffering. So perhaps a lucrative opportunity for someone clever might be to focus on utilizing AI to help people find direction in a newly emerging environment that also isn't demeaning through good intention? With AI, integrating psychology, opportunity-discovery, and training into individualized programs should be not nearly as painstaking a process as any of the existing models for career choice & development and definitely more thorough. If it's done right it could be reformulated for the emergence of intelligent robotics. That particular hurdle seems most likely to be the catalyst for collapse if things go south. Government contracts funded through tax systems would in theory have a warmer reception by the high value-creators since it would minimize their tax liability while decreasing individual long-term government dependence. Whether governments would go for that is a bit of a wild card but if it works and there's pressure, eventually, they'll be forced to support it. Until that point, I feel pretty certain many large companies would utilize something like that to lessen the public backlash of switching to AI based productivity.