What about technological unemployment from AI?

One potential harmful effect of AI is widespread technological unemployment.

In the past, technology has often been blamed for causing unemployment within certain sectors. Weavers, buggy whip makers, and bank tellers lost their jobs when they were automated, but technology also produced new kinds of jobs or transformed the jobs that were made obsolete. These new and transformed jobs have required workers to learn new skills, which was possible when changes were somewhat slow.

Some fear that the rate of job automation through AI could be much higher than in the past, and could affect a much larger proportion of jobs.¹ In particular, AGI might replace humans in most white-collar jobs quickly without offering many replacement jobs, which would lead to a brutal transition and possibly social unrest.² Others argue that there are many jobs that will not be automated in the short term, either because the AIs will not be capable enough, or because humans have characteristics other than our cognitive capabilities that make us desirable as workers. There is widespread agreement that AI will displace some jobs, but people disagree about the extent of this displacement, its speed and whether this would lead to the creation of new, non-automatable jobs.

If AI automates a majority of human labor — assuming it does not wipe out humanity in the process — we might enter a post-scarcity economy which would eliminate the need to work for subsistence. We might still expect people to want to work for personal fulfillment or to do tasks that we prefer be done by humans (e.g., tasks related to caring for other humans), but not needing to work to survive would probably help the transition.