Maybe this is obvious to people but I just realized the "AI will take everyone's jobs" line is being pushed so hard because huge multinational corporations want it to seem normal and expected when they replace huge numbers of jobs with AI. I'm looking at this latest move by Amazon and thinking of course, they're one of the central players in Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" trend in which companies that have monopolized a sector of the economy can sacrifice the quality of their service or product to maximize profits.
Some data points that support my thinking:From my extensive research on reddit (lol) it's clear that AI is only successful at doing very specific tasks and only then will extensive oversight. Even the most narrowly defined jobs have to deal with edge cases and anomalies and that's when AI screws up. So it's not capable of doing anyone's whole job well. But I've also been teaching high schoolers to write apps that incorporate it and it's just really hard to keep its hallucinating tendencies in check.
So any small to medium company that needs to maintain the quality of their product or service is just not going to be able to replace people with AI. It's only huge companies that will still reap their profits as their product suffers.
