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As an amusing thought experiment, consider trying to explain modern economics to someone from a society just coming upon the division of labor:
"You mean to tell me that only 1% of your population has to work to feed everyone? That sounds great! Imagine how much everyone must enjoy all of that free time!"
Needless to say, that isn't how it actually went, and I expect AI to be similar: we'll find something else in which to spend our time and raise our expected standards of living to match.
The two questions we could break it down to are:
Is this the equivalent of the invention of the car in terms of it's impact on the horse drawn carriage?
and
Are we the HORSE in this scenario?
Once automobiles became strictly better than horses for the majority of tasks horses were used for, what happened to horse employment?
I'd agree those are the questions, but I'm not certain the answer to the second question is yes. There seems to be space for different outcomes there. While there are fewer horses in the US today than a century ago (a quick search suggests around half as many), I suspect the modal American horse lives a better life than its working counterpart of a century ago, largely because it's much more likely to exist as a pampered pet or show animal.
In some ways "yes, and humans retreat to doing only the things we enjoyed all along" seems like one of the best possible outcomes. I see art (see trends toward "handmade" and "bespoke"), governance (does GPT-3 demonstrate executive function?), and high-level resource allocation (what should we build/research?) as fundamentally human tasks. In the largely blank slate of oft-disagreed-upon human endeavor (admittedly, AI risk seems to focus on other possible endeavors), I don't forsee people voluntarily ceding control of what we decide to build and how it's paid for, at least with the existing technology: people like bikeshedding too darn much.
Indeed, and I'd prefer if it we could clip the space of outcomes that results in human obsolescence and liquidation out of contention.
The irony being that art is apparently one of the first things AIs got really good at.
I don't see how people will end up with the choice over ceding control or not.
Perhaps the silliness of the discussion is fretting over unemployment of humans at all when the scenario of mass unemployment is likely either "all humans killed off" or "all humans enter utopia."
So we're really just spouting off (bikeshedding, if you will) about the very narrow set of scenarios where AI is able to take over like 95% of human labor (both manual and intellectual) and we are left to figure out how to divide up the remaining 5% amongst ourselves in a way that makes everyone happy (HAH).
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