I often see this sentiment regarding AI or automation and it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed.
I disagree with this premise, there is still a lot of work to do. We don't even have space elevators, nanobots, immortality drugs and all other manner of technologies yet, and just like every other technological innovation in history, I assume that we will reallocate people to do said work. Work expands to fill the time and space (and workforce) available.
You would have to define work for this to be meaningful. Generally, demand for "work" is unlimited if the price is zero, but demand falls to zero as price increases. Humans are willing to work for at least what buys them "bare necessities", food and maybe shelter (in a madmax-style world.)
In these discussions, it is suspected that AI will "underbid" larger groups of workers than in previous waves of automation.
> it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed.
I've mentioned this before in other AI threads, but humanity has an uncanny ability to use all resources available. As you say, the amount of work will only grow with the increased productivity from AI.
The amount of work isn't fixed, but the definitions of useful work have changed.
AI threatens to make all human-sourced work redundant. Because AI is really an automated culture machine - in the widest sense. It will eventually be able to innovate, rather than replicate, culturally ground-breaking work in art, science, engineering, business, politics, and media.
What jobs are humans going to do then? All that's left is manual labour - and eventually that will be automated too.
This isn't exaggeration. It's already happening in a very limited way with today's super-crude AI 1.0. AI 5.0 won't be a step change, it will be something entirely new.
Of course, if something was actually intelligent just as we are, but didn't need food etc, then the 'means of production' would now be wholly and completely owned by capital, and there would be no place for workers of any sort.
But with LLMs we are as close to that as climbing Everest takes us to the Moon. No small feat, but not particularly relevant. After all, all they do is return statistically likely text responses from text inputs, based on a very large corpus of text previously written by humans. Any claim above that is technical hubris and/or funding strategy.
Robotics is much more difficult than software. It will be quite a while until an AI can autonomously build a space elevator. Until then, people will still work. And after that, perhaps we can finally sit back and relax.
I guess it depends on amount of talent as well. Lots of people are stuck in low end jobs while the demand for high skilled labor is also high. Maybe some argument is that if low skilled workers can do high skilled labor with the help of intelligence augmenting machines that demand can be met finally.
I disagree with this premise, there is still a lot of work to do. We don't even have space elevators, nanobots, immortality drugs and all other manner of technologies yet, and just like every other technological innovation in history, I assume that we will reallocate people to do said work. Work expands to fill the time and space (and workforce) available.