Ex-Google exec: The idea that AI will create new jobs is '100% crap' | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Google exec: The idea that AI will create new jobs is '100% crap'

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22 pointshibern88 comments

It's not supposed to create new jobs, that's not what people say. Technology makes jobs more efficient, reducing the amount of human labor required. That makes whatever product that was being made cheaper. Now people have mire money to spend on other stuff. That "other stuff" is where the new jobs come from, new markets that previously weren't viable because of either lack of customers with disposable income or that product being made cheaper by some technology.

The problem is what happens when you need almost no workers because Agentic workflows have replaced all of them.

More jobs being destroyed than built means less money to spend by individuals, which means less profit, which means lower expectations, rinse repeat in a loop.

This is the deflation doom spiral, and the companies causing this cycle like most other problems think, this is a problem for next quarter; each time.

That assumes there is a fixed amount of stuff todo/needed.

Sometimes making something cheaper to make, just means you make more with the same people as demand is elastic and price driven.

The other question is if you need less people ( less say for farming ) is there anything else these people can do ( ie work in factories ) - that depends on whether there is fundamentally enough tasks to go around.

If you look globally it's quite clear that even the basics - like clean water, enough food and decent housing hasn't been sorted. ie there is plenty of work still to do done.

No, it assumes there is a fixed amount of stuff to do that is dependent on population (which changes, albeit slowly). This is how demographics and demographic cliffs come into this topic.

Your reasoning also conflates the economic concepts of "demand" with "need". The two are quite different. The latter assumes there is some cross section of exchange that can happen between supply and demand, whereas with the cohort of people in need, they are anyone that could benefit but which no exchange is possible.

You speak about opportunity cost, but you also neglect distortions. The suggestions you make do not happen in a vacuum and we are at a point where the entire bottom rung of sequential careers is being removed. Sequential pipelines fail over time when the initial inputs go to zero; they fail on a lag but if you take the entire cycle as any competent engineer would during design, its clear.

If you look globally, water, food, and decent housing hasn't been sorted and won't be sorted because its more profitable to keep these industries captured and distributed as a narrow peak spinodally. For a clear example the SROs of the 50s and 60s.

People don't realize they are in the grip of runaway money-printing schemes, and when you replace people with machines in aggregate, the real economy shrinks proportionally. When it gets beyond a certain threshold you see violence because these are the exact same living conditions and dynamics that led to 1776, only its worse because of fiat currency.

There may be great need, but so long as there is no demand to incentivize change it will forever lay out of reach. Economics is not so easily tamed with the money-printer its filled with invisible pitfalls.

What's worse is many of my Socialist friends that want to make the world better neglect these things, and some of them are fairly intelligent but they are dogmatic when it comes to any mention of incentives as being too close to Capitalism. Neglect in these areas though leads to eventual collapse, which we are seeing in slow motion with the collapse of the birth rate. People don't have children if they lack the economic means to do so.

Not sure I entirely follow - but I'd say while there are some places which are poor because they effectively have nothing to offer in exchange, many places that are poor are rich in resources and they are poor because the richer countries are in part rich because they to rip them off through corrupt resource extraction.

( a macro version of the rich exploiting the poor )

> People don't have children if they lack the economic means to do so.

Surely the very clear global trend is birth rate is inversely proportional to wealth - not the other way around.

He means more jobs than it destroys. It will definitely create new jobs but one new job will replace many. It brings to mind the Billion dollar data center manned by a hand-full of tech workers. AI is doing something similar, 1 new job will destroy X many more.

The wonderful promise of technology and innovation is to remove jobs.

heard someone say that touching a computer paid more than it should for nearly 30 years and now it's going to pay much less. Because everyone can do it, even computers.

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