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Comment by GodelNumbering | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the interesting aspects the 'AI job loss' community doesn't account for. As the technology unlocks things, more startups are created. And even at a lower nominal engineer-to-work ratio, overall demand for talent still goes up. Ultimately, we are not a single group trying to achieve a common outcome, we are a collection of many groups trying to compete against each other.

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What percentage of people work at a startup though? Not just new/small business, which could include restaurants, local services, etc., but tech/science startups that would meaningfully benefit from AI.

I'd bet you could 10x the number and still be in low single digit percentages of the US workforce. And it seems pretty likely that AI-enabled startups will also employ less people per-startup.

If AI causes a white-collar jobs apocalypse, I don't think startups are picking up the slack, although it'll plausibly cushion the blow somewhat for top-performing tech workers.

Yes. Startups are intensely competitive, exhausting, low-stability places to work. This is the definition of job displacement for most people.

They kind of touch on this:

> Imagine a future where a handful of people can conduct scientific research and engineering tasks much more rapidly, and with higher quality, than massive teams of scientists and engineers do today. By automating the loops of discovery, the world will be able to make much more rapid advances across countless fields of science.

The problem is that for this to actually become true, compute needs to become commodity again, otherwise this capability will select for people and environments with oversized pockets.

That's fine by me. I certainly won't be making any major discoveries on my own (not on this current life trajectory anyway), but am very grateful that other people have.

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