Humans do those jobs now.
In America's factories, they are some of the best paying jobs in the locales around those factories. Often, generations of families have worked and still work at those jobs. I have a cousin, for example, who worked side by side with her mother in Michigan at an auto factory while attending college. Her husband was an engineer in that factory. Her own children grew up to work there.
Machines replaced the more complex jobs when her mother's father worked there. He wasn't retrained for a more fine detail aspect of assembly. He was pushed into early retirement because a machine replaced him on the assembly line. More basic and mind-numbing assembly jobs were relegated to humans on the line.
Now, those little jobs are slated to be taken up by AI systems. So yes, it will be taking their jobs. And, what's left for them to access will not pay as well as those factory jobs. That's generations of lost access.
Then, there are those Amazon shipping workers. You know, the ones peeing in a bottle on the line because they can't afford a bathroom break to keep that $20 or so an hour job. AI and machines need neither the bottle nor the break. And, they don't get wages.
My husband is in the service sector. He works pizza and deli in a grocery store. When the store put in those self-checkouts, they let go of half their register staff. The remaining checkers were relegated to being floaters where assigned in the store. Checkout shifted to only one or two manned open lines most of the time.
Corporations and the governments have seen this coming for decades. They've done the reverse of what was needed. They cut education and did nothing to stabilize economic factors like wage equity. These corporations and their boards pay little into the our tax system, taking massively from the infrastructure they contribute almost nothing to.
The factories don't actually want people to do the work. People need accommodations like bathroom breaks and days off and regular pay, and safety precautions. Machines and AI need no such accommodations.
The output is projected to skyrocket, lining the pockets of the people at the top, offering nothing to the people at the bottom. Even though workers like them will lose their jobs, neither companies nor governments seem particularly interested in anything like UBI in exchange for their projected increased wealth engine output. They'd rather put their wealth into a vanity cock-rocket to jockey around space.
Studio execs are already trying to wedge in AI-generated content over human content. It can even be used to fake a real person – as we saw with that dental ad faking Tom Hanks to sell their business. That's a big part of what the recent WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes have been about.
Things will undeniably get terrible for people replaced by AI. No one does anything about looming crises until they actually become active crises. It's going to be a sweeping calamity for Those workers. While something is bound to be cobbled together at some point, it's unlikely that will happen until AFTER it becomes a societal calamity.
