My biggest gripe with your reasoning is a hidden assumption that everything humans do is easily encodable in what we call AI today.
I don’t think this is the case.
I don’t think this is the case.
The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people.
Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k.
This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases.
Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created.
And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.
This assumes that humans will be unwilling to work if their wage is below living. It depends on the social programs of the government, but if there is none, or only very bad ones, people will probably be more desperate and thus be more willing to work in even the cheapest jobs.
So in this overabundance of human labor world, the cost of human labor might be much closer to zero than living wage. It all depends on how desperate to find work government policy will make humans.
I don’t think this is true. I think CEOs are replacing people on the assumption that AI will be able to replace their jobs. But I don’t think AIs are able to replace any jobs other than heavily scripted ones like front-line customer support… maybe.
I think AI can automate some tasks with supervision, especially if you’re okay with mediocre results and don’t need to spend a lot of time verifying its work. Stock photography, for example.
But to say AI is replacing jobs, I think you’d need to be specific about what jobs and how AI is replacing them… other than CEOs following the hype, and later backtracking.
Can you though? From my experience this is just a wishful thinking. I am yet to see actual productivity gains from AI that would objectively justify hiring less or laying off people.
How many people did it take to build the pyramids? Now how many would it take today?
Look at revenue per head and how it’s trended
Look at how much AUM has flowed into asset management while headcount has flatlined
I can not imagine a scenario other than complete model stagnation that would lead to the current workforce there of 213,000 people still having jobs to do.
Like it’s a strawman to assume I’m arguing that your nanny or the local firefighters are going to be replaced by an AI soon.
And it also seems like people expect some normative assumption when taking about job loss. I’m not making a normative claim, nor a policy one, just pointing out it seems stupid to not prepare or expect this to happen.