History doesn't repeat but it rhymes... similar themes repeat endlessly.

The US started out agrarian. The found fathers' dream was every citizen a citizen-farmer living in the country or small communities. Capital (money) was important but nothing special.

The key concept of the US constitution was that the government served the people.

The industrial revolution in the US overwhelmed that vision. Also it meant that capital (money) became hugely important because it funded the "means of production" as Marxists say (factories and infrastructure.)

The US became hopelessly corrupt in the Victorian period, then we had a period of progressivism that was based on Christian morality, we had prohibition, we had lots of anti worker abuse laws that were enacted, unions became really powerful. (early 1900s.) But capital was still key to industrial power.

What's happened since WWII is that capital and business influence really run the country. Citizens are so poorly informed that all capital has to do these days to throw an election is pump enough money into an election.

In the scheme today the concept of serving the people is now completely absent. Today things are more like - the system will do X, you adapt or you suffer the consequences, peon. Nobody owes you a job. You don't deserve a living. Whatever stake you think you have in the system is an illusion.

Brains have been important all along but now brains may be redundant with AI.

The overall arc of our system is that individual rights have become suppressed in favor of capital's interests. In other words we all serve capital, capital does not serve humans. But that was before AI.

AI is just like that. An inhuman force that does not have a defined reason to serve man. Just like money.

I've seen scifi like predictions from AI experts that AI could independently decide that humans were option, and essentially find ways to erase humanity (IE, through engineered plagues) because we have no essential function in the system.

AI will function exactly like the past except more so. The post WWII years of freedom and prosperity were a fluke of history.

blue collar labor

Allegedly, they are close to having human-equivalent robots, maybe 5-10 more years tops. Manual labor won't be safe either once that happens.

I'm still skeptical about the capabilities of the AI. They still can't do tasks that aren't in their training data.

What they're doing is firing lots of workers, and having humans "review" the AI work. But if your workload is 5x-10x and you're reviewing AI work, all you can actually do is rubberstamp the AI output. There isn't time to carefully review everything. But, the human reviewer is still there to take the blame when the AI fails. They call this "accountability sink".

In software at many places, all the code is written by AI. Some places even forbid "manual coding". The AI will generate many more lines of code than a human would for the same task. A lot of the code looks good, but has subtle errors when merged. The remaining software engineers are spending all day reviewing AI slop instead of writing code. You also have a lot more volume of code, because everyone is now fixing tickets at 2x-5x the rate before. A lot of them are getting disgusted, because reviewing AI output is boring after awhile and frustrating because the AI code is good enough but with subtle flaws.

Firing half the workers and doubling everyone's workload also means salaries will crash. If you don't want to review AI slop all day, there's someone who was just fired who's desperate for a job.

This might be a ticking time bomb, where businesses have code that is 100% AI written. The humans are screwed the first time there's a bug the AI can't fix. With enough technical debt, the AI eventually starts introducing new bug regressions every time it fixes something.