This ongoing discussion feels classist. I've never seen such strong emotions about AI (and automation) taking blue-collar jobs, some shrugs at most. It's considered an unavoidable given, even though it has been happening for decades. The only difference now is that AI is threatening middle-upper class jobs, which nobody saw coming.
I do not see the difference between both. Can somebody that does explain to me why now is "critical" and not so much before?
My first job was to write C code for industrial machines that replaced humans doing manual work. Sometimes I even had to go watch them work so I could fully understand what they were doing.
In my second job as a developer, I wrote a Django application that automated away a whole department in the company. I saw 100 people getting fired due to a script that I wrote.
That was all happening in the third world country were I came from. These were real people getting fired, with families that depend on them. Most of them were already in poverty even before being fired.
These artists complaining sound like a very 1st world problem to me. I doubt that anyone actually "lost a job" because of this technology so far.