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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

AI is not replacing workers. It might automate a few steps in a workflow, which require dealing with natural language, image content or applying knowledge from the web or internal data stores.

It enables a bit more automation of work than it was possible earlier. Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.

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If you take the ambitions of robotics and AI companies seriously then what they are trying to create is the equivalent of unleashing 100 million cloned copies of the smartest and most well adjusted people you know upon the economy at a fraction of the cost. If they succeed it would absolutely reduce jobs significantly. In fact, its a little hard to imagine how the average Joe would have any economic value at all.

Amazon website is equivalent to 100 million cloned sales people who work at retail shops. It didn't cause global unemployment.

When was the last time you went to the mall? If no retail shops around you have closed down, I'd be surprised. The effects will take forever to reverberate through, but it's not like Amazon hasn't had an effect on the job market. Instead of being sales associates there's now Amazon warehouse workers. Instead of human copywriters, there's human fact verification as a service.

I see AI replacing workers, but maybe it is my circles. Most of my SaaS selling friends; these are long term, as in 20+ year solution sellers in ERP, HRM, trading, banking in certain niches therein making very good money, removing most of their staff while delivering faster and better with the few senior core people they kept. Junior/Mediors can please go away...

> Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.

Unless you mean "all jobs across the entire economy", this is pretty obviously false. People used to weave fabrics by hand, make screws and nails by hand, bake bread by hand. These jobs hardly exist anymore.

Of course this did not imply that all jobs disappeared and the economy collapsed. But the sense in which "AI is not replacing workers" is contingent on specific features of software development, not about automation in general.

I did mean "all jobs across the entire economy"

But that suggests that if AI were to displace all programming ever, then as long as there were still some jobs, you would still consider that "AI is not replacing workers". Does that not stretch the meaning of "not replacing"?

It won't cause significant global unemployment. People would be doing some garbage work and still getting paid, instead of a desk-based white collar work.

Seems to me there are way fewer farmers per capita and yet much more food produced, thanks to more & improved capital use in farming.

And where did the farmers go? The children of farmers were absorbed into jobs that were created for automating the farming and other industrial work. Farm automation did not cause unemployment overall.

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