I started to notice a intense automation and Artificial Intelligence Investments from companies and that made me wonder, what would happen or what should be done with the people who can’t be trained for a new job and can’t use his current skills to to get a job.
How would he live or what would he do in life? More importantly, what should be done with him to make him useful or at least neutral rather than being a negative on the society?
It’s not necessary about their “value” to society. People need to eat in order to survive. That means having a way of supporting themselves. Having no way of supporting themselves means a lot of people are going to die.
I’d say that’s a net negative to society.
And the problem runs deeper than “retraining” or “upskilling”. With the emergence of technologies that replace human workers…there will simply be a massive excess of unemployed workers hitting the market. Period. Skills or not. Where are they going to work, when there are now ten people applying for every available job?
Why do they need to work, though? If AI can replace so many people that there aren’t jobs for them all, wouldn’t that also mean AI is producing enough to sustain those people, jobs or not? At that point, why must society continue to expect everyone to support themselves if society’s developments as a whole make that unnecessary?
OP’s question seemingly indicated that they felt someone who couldn’t earn money was immediately a net negative to society. I don’t believe that’s true now (stay at home parents are a good, but far from only, example), and I can’t see me believing it’s any more true in a future where AI can replace large segments of the workforce.
Unfortunately, that isn’t what’s happening. AI isn’t “producing” anything that people need to survive. It’s just replacing people. We aren’t seeing any net gains to society that would be able to support so many people no longer being needed in the workforce.
If they were training AI to produce food, build housing or anything that people actually need more of right now, I would say you are absolutely correct to assume that people would be just fine with this transition. But that’s not what they’re using AI for.
Optimistically, AI could and definitely should be used for those things…and the logical conclusion would be to implement a form of UBI so that we can all benefit from this. But do you honestly see that happening?
I don’t. And I think that’s what OP is also seeing. We aren’t ready, as a species, to make that transition yet. There isn’t even the slightest intention on behalf of our current leadership, of providing for an entire population of jobless people. They will ultimately be left to fend for themselves. And as it stands right now, society isn’t equipped to function with that kind of excess population.