I'm not sure I would classify your average warehouse worker as particularly intelligent. I would say AI already has the decision making and communication capabilities to do this sort of work. We're just lacking the robotics. In fact one of the main issues in our society is the vast gulf between the most intelligent and the least.
> I'm not sure I would classify your average warehouse worker as particularly intelligent.
I'm not sure I wouldn't. Just because corporations treat them as mindless fungible automatons doesn't mean they actually are. Some of the most brilliant and creative solutions to problems I've seen have been in warehouse settings by warehouse workers.
> I would say AI already has the decision making and communication capabilities to do this sort of work.
I wouldn't - especially if GPT-whatever is the AI in question. If a picker or packer "hallucinated" facts with anywhere near the frequency ChatGPT does (for example), one'd be canned within the hour.
Handling exceptions is another area where software (AI or otherwise) notoriously struggles. A human has a much easier time sensing whether or not a product is broken or defective (before shipping it out) than an AI does. A human has a much easier time understanding when processes need to be broken due to impossible constraints than an AI does.
There is a place for software automation of warehouse processes (that was, in fact, my career for a time), but we are very far off from that software replacing humans entirely - and certainly not without designing warehouses specifically to be as accomodating as possible to that software.
> In fact one of the main issues in our society is the vast gulf between the most intelligent and the least.
The gulf is in socioeconomic privilege, not intelligence. The rich and powerful like to claim they're more intelligent than the unwashed masses in order to rationalize their wealth and power, but the reality is that - in an actually egalitarian society, wherein everyone actually has equality of opportunity - the vast majority of those "geniuses" would fail to be particularly exceptional.
That we as a society haven't identified and corrected this is the main issue in our society.
if >90% of your work can be replaced by a machine, it still stands that it's pretty mindless work. If you only need to turn your brain on to handle edge cases then it's off by default. Even if machines handle those cases poorly, it can still be cheaper to use them and eat the loss of a higher defect rate. If that's the case, then the actual value provided by a worker's decision making process trends to zero.
You also seem to be under the impression that our hierarchies are of privilege, not of competence. The actual differentiating factor between people who climb the socioeconomic ladder and those who do not is grit (not intelligence). The willingness to work harder and persevere longer than average (unsurprisingly) makes the difference. Fortunes are made and lost in a few generations. The people who make them earn them, mostly through sheer hard work. That isn't to say that organizations don't grow to become bloated and corrupt. Ideally at this point we should allow them to fail and the cycle to continue. Our main dysfunction seems to be propping up organizations that ought to fail, for fear of the temporary instability caused by their failure.
> if >90% of your work can be replaced by a machine
My point is that the amount of work in a warehouse that can be replaced by a machine - even with perfect robotics - is far less than 90%.
> The actual differentiating factor between people who climb the socioeconomic ladder and those who do not is grit (not intelligence).
You forgot an "f" in "grit". The notion that success is simply a matter of hard work is a fairy tale told to us by people who've worked far less for their immense wealth than the rest of us worked for our pittances, specifically to trick the working class into accepting a shit deal.
The reality - that the richer you are, the easier it is to become even richer - should be entirely unsurprising to anyone who understands positive feedback loops - or, for that matter, to anyone who's ever played Monopoly. Wealth buys power, and power enables extracting more wealth; rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
Put differently:
> The people who make them earn them, mostly through sheer hard work.
There is not a single billionaire on this Earth whose wealth came about "mostly through sheer hard work". The vast majority of that wealth comes from having already had some wealth, which they then invested to produce more wealth, and so on indefinitely. That wealth gets passed down to their descendants, the same way it was passed down to them.
The starting point for "wealthy enough to enter the passive income feedback loop" is land - one's home often being one's first major investment. From there, the path is rather tried and true: buy another house, rent out the old one, rinse and repeat until you can afford apartment complexes and commercial properties, rinse and repeat that forever. For anyone who ain't a complete imbecile, private land ownership is an infinite money cheat - one for which the rest of us are paying through the nose.
> Our main dysfunction seems to be propping up organizations that ought to fail, for fear of the temporary instability caused by their failure.
That propping up is a direct result of the positive feedback loop at play. More wealth → more political power → more wealth → more political power → ∞. Of course the socioeconomic system effectively under the direct control of the rich and powerful is going to primarily serve said rich and powerful at the expense of literally everyone else; bailing themselves out is in their vested interest.
Meanwhile, what's their message to the ever-growing working class getting the short end of the stick? "Work harder." "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." "It's all about grit." "Don't listen to anyone saying that privilege matters." Hopefully you can see why your argument doesn't really resonate with people who have been applying increased grit and only getting back decreased pay relative to
You've not addressed my main point - that our hierarchies are of competence, not of privilege. Not just anyone can take a few hundred thousand dollar investment and transform it into billions. Leaders of successful corporations are extremely competent and hard working. I would consider fortunes by the likes of Buffet, Gates, Bezos, Jobs, and Musk to be self-made, given their ROI is many orders of magnitude above market. Many of these folks also work 90hr weeks.
This is further substantiated by the fact that 70% of intergenerational wealth transfers fail, and by the third generation, 90% of people with wealthy grandparents are middle class. Raising competent people in a privileged environment is very hard. In our hierarchies of competence, the incompetent offspring of the wealthy tend to fail. Competence is simply something that can't be bought. If our hierarchies were of privilege then this would not be the case. Also grit as a key differentiating factor of economic success is highly substantiated by research.
> rinse and repeat until you can afford apartment complexes and commercial properties
What you're describing is a real estate investment business. Not just anyone can run one successfully. Otherwise these business would never fail, which they plainly do.
Grit without competence is simply not enough (neither is competence without grit). Our world is getting increasingly complex to navigate, and that leaves behind increasingly high numbers of people who simply do not have the attributes required to succeed. Also, there are plenty of self-made, property-owning, middle-class folk in the trades. Many of them started poor. All they do is work hard and run their businesses competently.
If you've a degree in English, History, Politics, or Philosophy; a pile of student debt; and you're struggling to find gainful employment, then that's on you. Choose a career the market demands.
