And again, that's hypothetical. Where's the proof there will be no jobs? People have been saying this, and being wrong, since the dawn of civilization.
There will always be jobs. The question is whether the job will pay the wage that a person requires to survive and thrive.
I'm literally willing to pay someone 100 food calories right now to clean my kitchen. This job exists. It literally exists. But no worker can perform this job and live. Heck, even I need to subsidize myself if I am going to work at cleaning my own kitchen. I need an external income to buy those calories.
There are two major points of concern. The first is capitalism itself, the shuttling of assets, which can absolutely steamroll upwards. You already know this. But the second is the major innovation of AI vs the previous innovations of machinery.
Previously, a machine replaced a person. The result was
greater productively coupled with a lost job. The unemployed person then retrained to do something else. Whether he's less or more productive than his previous job, the aggregate wealth has grown. Additionally, this retraining has a cost. Overall, the cost of retraining has grown linearly over time. It's harder to learn how to type than to learn how to swing a hammer.
With AI,
the potential for development has grown exponentially. There are two different trendlines. One is exponential (the ease of replacing a worker with a machine), the other is linear (the cost to retrain). This means that for any job, it will increasingly become easier to make a robot replacement relative to retraining someone.
Meanwhile, with every layoff, the incentive to create the
next robot grows and the labour demand for the unemployed worker falls. He has nothing we want, and the only way to compete is to lower his wage. The robot can go below 2000 calories per day, but he cannot. Then we're back to the capitalism problem; the people have trouble selling their labour, so they sell their assets instead. And they're shuttling upwards.
You're dealing with two different trendlines. Retraining costs increase linearly. The ability to create someone's replacement is growing exponentially. And with each turn of the wheel, the assets will go upwards. You'll have nothing the capitalists want. Anything someone else wants from you can be provided cheaper by the capitalists. You have no mechanism to get food.
The whole system can be mollified with a proper income tax, but it will have to be spent on either direct payments to people or on work programs that actually run at negative efficiency.