Did the world crash when the automobile finally became ready for prime time, and all of those carriage drivers lost their jobs? No, it didn't.
Actually machine intelligence presents a problem which has no analogue in the previous advances of mechanization. Carriage drivers became cabbies -- indeed in Britain the legal terminology (also used popularly) "hackney carriage" remained unchanged from the pre-automobile era. What will street sweepers, garbage collectors, fruit pickers, truck drivers, and the like become when their jobs can be done more cheaply by AI-controlled machines?
The problem won't come soon, but it seems likely there will come a point when
all jobs that can be reliably and enjoyably done by people of below average intelligence, yes even the new ones created by the new technologies, will be able to be done more cheaply and more reliably by AI-driven robots (yes, even picking soft fruit), while at the same time the number of people of above average intelligence needed to do the remaining jobs will be smaller than it is now (e.g. a MOOC on quantum field theory delivered by the best expositor of the subject could displace the instructional role of hundreds of PhD physicists). So long as the allocation of rewards is done entirely in favor of the professional managerial classes as is done now (not in favor of capital as the left would have it -- shareholders aren't reaping the benefits, they are going into the pay packets of the people who are supposed to be the shareholders fiduciaries, but now function primarily in their own interests) this shift, unlike previous advances will create not just massive unemployment, but a massive unemployable underclass -- those not intelligent enough to hold down any of the new jobs that still require human beings to do.
The left has a program for dealing with this, and it looks like a combination of
Brave New World and
A Clockwork Orange. We on the right had better come up with something better than letting the market sort it out -- unless we're going to fix the market, which is now severely distorted by "pro-business" laws and regulations that are actually anti-market and give too much power to the professional managerial class (whether in business, government, or the non-profit sector) and too little to everyone else (both labor and capital), and even then I'm not sure the market has a good way of dealing with this.
