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It depends on the demographic profile of the unemployed people. If all the truck drivers have to switch careers, that will probably be a great asset to maintaining our infrastructure. If all the middle aged female email senders are laid off... maybe they will retrain in healthcare? But I'm not certain that would actually lead to a better experience of healthcare, just more money disappearing into an infinite abyss that's already eating much of our economy.
Since buying a house, I have sometimes interfaced with trades adjacent tools, bits of plumbing, digging holes, car engines, and a swamp cooler. For the most part, my husband is able to use the tools and handle the parts, and I am not, because my hands are not strong enough. This is not because I'm not good with my hands -- I am very good at crafts, and pick them up almost instantly. It's about physical strength, and it's not even like someone with weak hands can still do the task, but badly (this is the case for things like ceramics -- strength is useful for ceramics, but weak people can still make worse, smaller pots. I suppose the same is true of holes, but also, we can rent equipment for the holes if it comes to that, so it's automatable anyway). Most of the time, someone with weak hands simply cannot do the task at all.
If all the middle aged female email senders are laid off, that would just mean getting back to pre-1950 levels of female labor force participation - if that... it's not some kind of a catastrophic AI-based breakdown of society.
Money is little more than an accounting device; therefore "money disappearing into an infinite abyss that's already eating much of our economy" is merely a reflection of some kind of a real-world value destroying process that just happens to look like that on paper. In the words of comrade Stalin, "each problem has a name and a surname".
If anything, GPT makes the demographic profile problem much easier... before we were facing rhetorical questions about whether or not a coal miner is able to learn to code in a reasonable time frame - now you can equip just about any literate and diligent man with a ChatGPT and have him be at least somewhat decent at a wide range of tasks.
But that's actually besides the point. We the humankind are submerged in an endless ocean of unsolved problems and work to be done; you could have ALL the humans, the truck drivers, the scientists, the men, the women, the geniuses, the midwits; all the machines, all the GPT instances burning as much GPU instances as we're able to produce... and I bet that you still wouldn't be close to draining it for the Thousands of years.
Have you yet colonized the universe?
Have you yet cured all diseases?
Have you yet extended your lifespan to at least measly 300 years?
So, can you buy a $100 strength enhancing exoskeleton at walmart, powered by dirt cheap electricity?
Actually forget the science fiction stuff... there's a scarcity of things that in all honesty should be cheap and available in abundance given the current level of technology.
Meanwhile the entire internet is chock full of discussions about how there is no work left to be done, all because our industry has finally in a long while, managed to produce a tool with some actual pull that also happened to be too subtle and widespread to be banned immediately. Is this not madness?
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