[novagameco]

Nobody is ever secure in their particular job, but white collar workers used to be secure in the economy. Now, AI threatens to upend a lot of white collar work without creating any new kinds of jobs to replace them. Anybody who says that AI will create more jobs than it replaces is just divining the future based on the impact of totally unrelated technologies (steam engine, electric motors) on the economy hundreds of years ago

[somenameforme]

I'd look at this from a different perspective. Why does one hire a janitor? Is it because you're incapable of cleaning a bathroom, mopping, or sweeping? No, it's because you have different priorities for your own time. Even if software capable of creating software, flawlessly to specification, was created - software developers would still have a job. Creating those specifications (and handling ambiguities), integrating the resultant product, dealing with ever-changing specifications, and a zillion other things will still be around, and probably always will be.

If anything, software based solutions (LLMs or perhaps something more domain specific and accurate, eventually) will just broaden the labor pool for software. So you'll see more people enter the field which will depress wages, but there will also probably consequently be more jobs.

[shortrounddev2]

I can't see how this creates more jobs

[somenameforme]

With lower wages, companies become able to hire more people for the same cost, it reduces the cost of startups, and so on. If janitors cost $100k+/year, you'd be seeing far fewer of them around!

[shortrounddev2]

It seems like the jobs would then be much lower quality then. That we're creating a system where the owners of the companies become richer while the employees become poorer

But I'm still not convinced that it would result in more jobs. If you saved money by automating away labor, why spend the savings on labor?

[jasode]

>But I'm still not convinced that it would result in more jobs. If you saved money by automating away labor, why spend the savings on labor?

The proponents argue the savings would be spent on laborers doing other (possibly new) jobs that are not yet automated and hired by different companies.

EDIT reply to: >I can't see what new jobs would be created, especially high value ones.

Yes, I agree about not being able to see new jobs. However, history has shown we (society) have always failed to imagine what the new jobs would be that takes the place of old jobs automated away.

Farmers and field workers replaced by tractors and harvesting combines. Human telephone switchboard operators replaced by automatic digital relay circuits. Travel agents replaced by website airline ticket bookings. [Thousands of other examples...] And yet the total # of people employed still keep going up instead of society dealing with massive 95% unemployment.

The paradox happens because the farmers and switchboard operators that were disrupted can't possibly envision new types of jobs that exist in the future. Understandably, the displaced farmer can't imagine there would be a job where somebody ... presses keys all day on a "typewriter like mechanism" that sends instructions to an "interactive tv". That basically describes what today's programmer does at his computer the entire day.

So, the new AI could usher a new wave of jobs. (Something more unpredictable than the immediate memes of ChatGPT "prompt engineers").

As we're living in the moment, we're also "blind to the future possibilities" like those farmers. If one could go back in time and tell that farmer in 1920s driving a Model T that there would be new and different jobs replacing farm work, you wouldn't be able to convince him. In the world that he's familiar with, our attempted descriptions would all just be speculative science fiction. Likewise for those of us today that's pessimistic about AI affecting jobs, is there really anything anyone could say that would change our minds? It's just predictions that we'd just dismiss.

The counterpoint to AI optimism is that _this_ new type of automation with powerful AI is unlike the tractors/microchips/websites in the past that replaced people and much more disruptive.

[novagameco]

> And yet the total # of people employed still keep going up instead of society dealing with massive 95% unemployment.

The total number of employed people goes up because the population goes up. The labor participation rate has been steadily declining for a while, only really increasing since 2020 as a correction to return back to pre-pandemic levels, which were still on a decline.

There is a myth that displaced workers will result in a higher unemployment rate. The official unemployment rate (U-3) shows people who are looking for jobs and cannot find them. In actuality, displaced workers often leave the workforce entirely and manage to survive in ways not registered by the Bureau of Labor statistics (often through government entitlement programs and welfare). Men, in particular, are more likely to drop out of the labor force when they've been made redundant. A whole generation of young men are declining the enter the labor force at all, opting instead to live with their parents long term or use school as a way to avoid getting a job.

People who worked in blue collar jobs and agriculture and were displaced over the course of the 20th century didn't all get "better jobs", many of them languished in broken communities and died deaths of despair. The coal miners didn't learn javascript

[shortrounddev2]

I can't see what new jobs would be created, especially high value ones. It seems like AI creates a race to the bottom for the labor force and its economic impacts will be unevenly distributed

[moritzwarhier]

> I'd look at this from a different perspective. Why does one hire a janitor? Is it because you're incapable of cleaning a bathroom, mopping, or sweeping? No, it's because you have different priorities for your own time.

I'm not sure if you are talking about a company or a person or what kind of entity really here.

I'll assume a private person.

So you think people who clean bathrooms do it because they don't have "different priorities for their time"?

That sounds backwards to me.

Edit: and it is, of course, logically.

What I mean is: to have different priorities for your time, you either need to be able to earn more money in the same time, or not need to earn money.

That brings to mind for me another fact: much of art, literature, philosophy, science and other things that we historically have built on was done by people who could afford other priorities in their life than cleaning their bathroom, preparing food, earning money to obtain food...

Of course this will stir up the question of meritocracy and how capitalistic society really functions for some.

But the way you put this question seems naive to me.

I don't think that most people who clean bathrooms for a living do that because they set this priority for their (life-)time.

That doesn't preclude being a janitor from being a potentially satisfying and certainly valuable job.

I know I'm mixing up the terms janitor and cleaning bathrooms here, but I felt that it was already unclear from your comment what kind of job you are talking about. Might be the language barrier.

A janitor hase more responsibility of course than just cleaning bathrooms.

[ExoticPearTree]

Used to, just as I imagine some other jobs were secure in the economy 100 years ago.

I personally don’t know what impact AI will have on the job market, but is is not going to be an overnight revolution.