Most AI layoffs will be white collar jobs. Voting/party blocs that have large blue collar bases won't care and have already been dealing with similar pressues, e.g. NAFTA and such, for decades. So there's going to be a strong sense of "haha now it's happening to you like it happened to us in the 80s and 90s." It won't be so bad. Cities may become cheap and fun again.

"... they could pass laws establishing and funding retraining programs that teach workers how to work alongside AI systems"

Computers were billed as the entryway to the future to the masses in the 90's and 2000's. So we got things like "send everyone to college" and ITT Tech. That didn't work, but a lot of money was wasted and a few people made a lot of money. This will be a repeat.

If AI is wildly successful and improves significantly beyond current capabilities and takes all of the jobs, the most aggressive adopters will self-terminate. The employers that survive this will not be those who can cut costs the most, but those who are most critical (and that will tend to be something that interfaces with the physical world, less digital). If it comes down to fixing the plumbing leak or Netflix, I guess I’ll be less entertained, or go outside. No amount of cost reduction survives zero revenue when no one has an income.

If AI continues at its current trajectory of being an incrementally improving blog post generator, then the only losers here are the big investors.

I too believe social unrest due to labor market disturbances is very likely. But I will feel some relief if that's all it comes from it. AI has the potential to automate everything, including company management and civil governance, at which point people will be out of the loop to a degree not seen before in history. The worst part is that it won't happen overnight; society will gradually anneal humans towards that redundancy potentially without any shock that would provoke our species to react decisively. Plus, we are starting from a bad place already.

To see this, I would be happy in so many contexts and situations. I'm not by nature a luddite and appreciate the value of AI in many things, even as it now is, but the sheer overload of shoehorning it into every possible thing for better KPIs while maximizing customer service "fuck-them value" by idiot executives and moron managers (choke on your own feces, all of you) still hoping to latch their suckers on the STILL BIG thing of the FUTURE!!! without a clue about its details and limits is revolting. Enshittification has been thus exponentiated!

Then, there's seeing government use it in its own disgustingly parasitical ways for accelerated mass surveillance, and to not even mention the absolute flood of utterly brain-dead spam sludge content that has flooded all social networks, online searches and just about every corner of the internet (including my inbox, thanks mom and friends who have no clue how to distinguish Ai slop from anything in the least bit valuable)

And I just want a large part of it to burn and die back. I'm with the artists and real photographers on this one.

Rant over.