Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” may have gotten it completely upside down. Plumbers will live on the nice side of the river and programmers and lawyers in the slums on the other side.
“30% of American workers have zero AI exposure at all. Cooks. Mechanics. Bartenders. Dishwashers. The technology reshaping professional careers is completely irrelevant to roughly a third of the workforce.”
Robots with AI will replace these jobs next.
I remember hearing that traffic is the only thing that doesn’t discriminate. It will delay the programmer making $150k/year just like the plumber making $300k.
Another analogy I found chiling is how his "engineer" protagonist didn't have the foggiest notion of how to fix his own car, but an "obsolete" near-vagrant man on the road immediately figured out it was his fuel pump, and repaired it using scraps. This is akin to our "prompt engineers" now, who are skilled in telling Claude what do to, but have no idea how Claude does it, or how to fix any errors Claude makes.