The article addresses that explicitly. Some questions in the "Anti-FAQ" are:
"Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even more easily automated."
"What if what's changed is that we're out of new jobs to create? What if we've already got enough hot dog buns, for every kind of hot dog bun there is in the labor market, and now AI is automating away the last jobs and the last of the demand for labor?"
"How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?"
and then there are responses to each of these.
Do you think the responses are unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why in some more detail?
"Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even more easily automated."
Is
If the problem is automation, and we didn't experience any sudden leap in automation in 2008, then why can't people get back at least the jobs they used to have...
Seems there is a pretty easy explanation- recessions and growth are a feature of our financial system, the noise of which dominates the underlying trend. So yes, people lost their jobs in the recession, but jobs have been recovered since the recession too- just not as many, which is what you would expect from a gradual trend.
Their responses to the horses question, which I think is a very good question, is merely
No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned. and then no mention of the reasons, for which I certainly don't see a dozen.
I can't read it due to the site apparently being down for me, but - the issue isn't in the creative and skilled job markets, it's with the people who never went to university, wound up working e.g. retail for life, and now have family which is living on the brink of homelessness so they can't retrain without having them looked after.
The individualist viewpoint is to say "they fucked up, so screw them", but this is going to lead to people dipping into even more severe poverty and possibly even dying. I think we as individuals have a duty towards the society we were brought up in, which has helped most of us in at least some degree - so what are we going to do about it?
The responses are pretty unsatisfying; there isn't really any meat there at all. Just a bunch of hand-waving "it can go any way". It also fails to recognize that computers don't need to be powerful human-level AI's to displace workers -- they've been doing that from day 1.
That's a straw man. It's obvious that there are still jobs around - (almost, there's always somebody crazy) nobody is arguing that jobs don't exist anymore.
The real question is if automation is finally faster than what society can adapt to. The article makes no effort to answer this.
"Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even more easily automated."
"What if what's changed is that we're out of new jobs to create? What if we've already got enough hot dog buns, for every kind of hot dog bun there is in the labor market, and now AI is automating away the last jobs and the last of the demand for labor?"
"How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?"
and then there are responses to each of these.
Do you think the responses are unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why in some more detail?