The printing press created whole new industries, why won't AI and robots do the same?
Prior to the printing press a Bible costs the equivalent of approximately $40,000 at today's minimum wage, but why would someone who is doing very precise work, skilled work, and requiring a certain amount of education work at minimum wage?
So let's say it cost $50,000 before a printing press and $5 after. Before the printing press very, very few could afford a Bible, now everyone can.
Because books were so expensive there wasn't a publishing industry as it is today. Today we have about 4 million book titles published each year (most are self published).
But it also made schools and education much cheaper which in turn led to many more industries as a result.
However, AI is fundamentally different. When the printing press came out there were millions of people on this earth that would have wanted a Bible while less than 1% of them could actually afford one. With AI the world's markets are already saturated, you aren't going to be tapping into a market that is 100x bigger than what we have today.
Also, when the printing press came out it could not be autonomous. Yes, it was about ten times faster than copying the bible by hand, but people were used to hand drawn pictures and many other things so there was a slow transition. It took about 200 years before there was a public school in the US. It took about another hundred years before Prussia and Austria had public schools.
Without people being able to read you weren't eliminating many "scribe" jobs, and since bibles now cost about a tenth of what they were before you might be selling enough of them to keep most scribes employed with a printer. The transition to AI, robots and drones began in earnest after 9/11. For 22 years it was behind the scenes. They weren't really laying off people, simply changing their job description and cutting back on new hires, and using the robots for growth. But that has dramatically changed for China in 2023. College grads can't get jobs, businesses shut down, cities are ghost towns. At the end of 2023 and start of 2024 we began to see large scale layoffs. This will be an accelerating trend for all of 2024. It is estimated in one year we will have AGI and so 2025 will be exceptionally bleak for the job market. Unlike in previous technological and industrial advances, the easiest jobs to replace will be white collar. The hold up with blue collar jobs is not the AI, that part will be easy, nor is it the training, that part also they have already solved. Nor is it creating a robot that can do everything a human can do, they have already solved that as well. The hold up will be in manufacturing, distributing and installing them. That will be a massive undertaking. But you can be sure before 2024 is over they will have begun that process.
Now you have another problem, suppose I am the bank, I loaned money out for a mortgage and a car payment and a new business loan. I realize over the next 12 months 40% of the people I have loaned money to and 40% of the credit card holders are going to be unemployed (I don't mean that will happen in 12 months, simply that the banks will be aware that it is in the process of happening). What are they going to do? They will call in those loans as fast and as quick as they legally can.
What I can see happening right now, they saw would happen back in 2001. They have been preparing for the last 22 years. Now they talk about UBI, but I haven't seen any real moves to make that a reality. Instead what they have done is vaccine mandates for all fortune 500 workers and all students, and so, although we are not seeing massive layoffs we are seeing massive early deaths among fortune 500 workers while the companies themselves seem to chug along without the slightest problem. You can believe that the plan is to have 200 pot smoking people binge watching TV at home while collecting UBI, or you can look a little closer at this vaccine mandate and #DiedSuddenly phenomenon and then consider that they are telling you Disease X is about to hit and it is 100% deadly.