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Notes -
I think people gloss over the part where I'm worried about mass AI layoffs because it's just a single sentence but I think it's a great place to start for this conversation. Disability is interesting in that it's not a binary question of yes or no but rather depends on your relative ability compared to the people around you and the society you're in.
Imagine a person who is so unbelievably dumb that they can only do work carrying buckets of water from the river because they were taught it as a kid when their brain was slightly more pliable and anything else, including any variation of bucket carrying just does not work out properly. This person obviously does not exist, but if they did then they would just not function anymore in today's society with plumbing and pipes. We don't really have any jobs that are "go get buckets of water from the river for us to drink, shower with and do laundry" anymore. Plumbing turned them from abled (to do the one job) to disabled.
Obviously again this person does not exist in real life and people are more adaptable, even the dumb ones. But in the context of dumb old people with aging bodies and injuries? They might have been able to do the job they've been doing for the past few decades, but transferring them over to something else will be difficult. And in the context of a bad economy with high unemployment? They might not be able to find anything. They're not entirely equal to the water idiot, but they're not that far off either.
In that same way, it's not just the idiot middle aged men anymore that we should be thinking about. A generalist AI in the 2030s might make all of us puny humans disabled by comparison. Technology historically has freed up labor to go to do other jobs, some that didn't even exist until the labor was around to do it. But this future AI might beat us at everything. You may go from your job subsistence farming to the car factory in the past. Now you may go from your current job taken by AI to a new job that also gets taken by AI.
Maybe we'll maintain some comparative advantage and still be worth having most people work despite the absolute supremacy, but this might be an issue coming up. What happens when no one can work anymore because the robots are simply better in every single way? Some would put up that as a utopic paradise, like that silly meme of fully automated luxury communism, others worry about an automated dystopia.
But either way, a major change may be coming. And perhaps all humanity will be disabled. And even if the generalist AI doesn't come for a while, remember the great recession was only 10% unemployment.
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