If you are white collar then it's going to "disrupt" your field.
I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn't at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI "optimization" has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.
In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn't a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It's a wasteland.
I've been told to "go back to school." I'll be 41 soon. I'm still paying off my computer science degree. It's worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don't care. They'll do it anyways.
When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It'll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.
What is to be done?
Some trades will be automated away as well. I could see stuff like finish carpentry, and cabinetry going the way of the dodo. Panels/doors/trim will be cut by CNC, then robots will assemble. At some point i could see AI created cabinets, passed to an automated CNC, assembled and painted by robots, then given to a crew of two dudes who do nothing but installs. Paint and basic, non complex sheetrocking/taping/floating could be done by robots powered by AI. Eventually, some aspects of framing, and roofing, and maybe even foundation work. Not fully robot/AI but augmented enough that you no longer need a crew of 6 or 8 to rock/tape/paint a newly constructed home; instead a crew of two, or maybe three humans, to do the complex angles and stuff a robot cannot manipulate and refill the drywall banjo or reload collated screws when the robot gets jammed. Architectural drawings will be done by AI. Blueprints will be done by AI. I could see AI becoming the architect eventually.
service plumbing or new construction plumbing is probably far off if ever. Electric service work, and new construction too. Tile/flooring, HVAC, and a couple others that are similar enough that they aren’t worth repeating.
AI is coming for all of us, more or less. Not just tech jobs.
most of what you described won't ever happen because it'll almost always be more profitable to just pay people less money than to automate it away with lots of extremely expensive robots
Yes. I'm thinking trades like laying down network cable or electricians. Nobody I know in fields like this are seeing any issues with AI on their paychecks. Ain't no robots threating to take away the job of my engineer friend who installs pipe for the water company that hooks up to apartment complexes and business high-rises. His crew are still outside in the heat digging the ditch and getting muddy.
While automation and AI won't directly replace tradesmen and physical laborers, the massive layoffs in the white collar sector will create millions of unemployed workers seeking work in industries that won't be under threat from it. Wages will be driven down from the glut of available workers coupled with the shrinking middle class who employ their services. Much like climate change, capitalism will utterly fail to handle this transition.
The pigs at the top understand this :(