I've seen a lot of jobs simply dry up in recent years. This accelerated when investors pressured their companies to emulate Musk and clumsily nuke whole rafts of employees to juice their stock prices.
"AI" (LLMS and generative tools) are eliminating a lot of work. The numbnuts say "get another kind of work, duh" without realizing how many jobs can be done by software now or very soon.
Writing and editing - 10 years ago I got so many freelance writing job inquiries that I turned 99% away. Today I have to subscribe to a paid newsletter to see which few gigs are out there that 1. Pay enough and 2. Haven't moved to ChatGPT slurry.
Programming - Not so long ago the trope in 4chan/Reddit/Twitter was "learn to code", now junior developers are not being hired or trained because execs think AI can code just as well or better. (NOT true but getting close)
Driving - Consider how many people are employed around the world to drive. Cars, trucks, long haul, public transport, haulage, boats, diggers, farm machinery ...
Manufacturing - A lot of human labour is still employed outside of the automation, but that is partly due to humans still being cheaper or due to supervision. That is eroding.
Design - There are even generative AI tools that can create 3D CAD designs now.
Math and Finance - One thing computers do very well is math, up until now humans were needed due to "expertise".
Law - A great deal of law is knowing stuff.
Retail - Apart from the obvious that people need money to buy stuff, we have already automated away lots of sales, food preparation, or retail jobs.
Management, Assistants, Project Management, and Clerical - How many people do you know who work in an office or answer telephones?
Beauty and treatments - Think a robot can't cut hair or apply makeup?
Do you think these jobs can not be automated? Why?
@taskmaster4450 thinks the answer is everyone owning AI, Universal Basic AI, rather than Universal Basic Income that puts money in everyone's pockets like the sci-fi trope of "credits":
UBAI provides the ability to generate economic output
Why would I buy your AI-generated output when I also own the very same AI that generated it?
How would you buy my AI-generated work, where will your funds come from to pay me?
It is a baseline whereby the components of AI are available to all. This means data, compute, and algorithms.
- Who is paying for the upkeep of this everyone-owns-the-means-of-production (communism) if not the government? Big tech companies? If so, what will force them to make it affordable to average people rather than a wealthy elite?
Politicians are often the ones who hold the least amount of power. In the United States, we are seeing how bureaucrats, NGOs, and special interest groups (usually on behalf of major corporations/industries) wield the magic wand.
I would say the most powerful man in the USA government is an unelected billionaire who is overseeing the very departments that regulate his companies and give out government contracts to those same companies and his competitors. His only qualification for the role is his wealth. He's not even a legal USA citizen (his brother admits they were illegal immigrants due to dropping out of college on student visas), let alone elected.
The bill in the United States for Social Security and Medicare is astronomical.
Social Security is paid into by citizens and it wouldn't be at risk if it wasn't constantly being stolen from by politicians. It's impossible to steal from social security using a fake SSN, no matter what Musk says. He himself hypocritically admitted to using a fake SSN (remember he wasn't a legal citizen when he started working in the USA).
Right now "AI" doesn't provide thinking, it is just very good at mimicking it. It's currently at the level of an amazing "autocomplete".
Once it can THINK there will be even fewer people needed.