If the job still gets done it's a good thing that jobs gets replaced by AI.
The flaw isn't in who does the work, but how the economic system around it is set up.
This is dead on the money. The traditional example is moving shoe manufacturing to China. The model says that if we move shoe manufacturing to lower wage countries, then US GDP will increase. As a result, the average income in the US will increase, even if the shoe makers in the US cannot find new jobs.
"But what about those shoe makers?"
"Well," the mathematical model says, "even if we have to provide financial aid to put those former shoe makers into jobs for which they are currently underqualified, the net economic benefit of moving the manufacturing overseas is a win for the US (and for China)."
It's actually all quite true. The mathematical model is as well-tested as gravity. But there's the rub -- right now we're just straight up shifting the cashflow out of labor and into capital gains. From those who work for a living to those who have investment money to put at risk -- without a commensurate job retraining program or economic incentives for employers who migrate those labor resources into the new economy. Done that way, it's absolute shit for the laborers. But what's worse is that leaves them as a wasteful drag on the economy instead of developing them as a productive economic resource. In the long run, it is worse even for the wealthy who are doing a little better in the short run. It is, from a purely objective economic standpoint, fiscally stupid.
And not only are we allowing the shift to happen, we're encouraging it by having a lower capital gains tax rate than the labor tax rate (complicated math, it's higher than the 15% or 20% that the left claims, and lower than the 40% counting corp tax that the right claims, but the real tax incidence of capital gains on the investor is substantially lower than the real tax incidence of income tax on a laborer with the same income).
We are creating the exact sort of economic conditions that have sparked most of the major economic revolutions since the dawn of civilization. And we're seeing the same rise of nationalist rhetoric fueled oligarchy that was at the center of each of those previous examples -- with one major change: This time it's happening in multiple countries at once. Abbot, Harper, and Cameron are as deeply tied to Wall Street and the surveillance industrial complex as Obama and the rest of the party-line Republocrats are.