[nomilk]

Interesting yc vid on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqwSb2hO1jE

tl;dr it argues when there's a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of production of a good or service, its per-unit cost goes down so much that demand skyrockets, leading to greater demand for employees in that sector. The examples it gives are radiologists (after neural nets were predicted to be able to perform their jobs essentially for free), and dock workers

If this happens in the case of SWEs, it would mean a 'unit' of software will be able to be produced much more cheaply, but the demand for and price (i.e. salaries) of SWEs might stay the same or increase.

[hshdhdhj4444]

The argument here is basically, let’s say a particular widget requires 3 human steps to make. If we replace the most expensive step with a cheaper automated alternative, the overall cost of the widget will fall and so demand for the widget will rise. And so even though the human effort to create one widget will reduce, the increase in demand will mean the reduced work per widget * new widget demand is often >= old work per widget * old widget demand.

The problem with this argument is that AI, or at least the vision of AI companies and governments are spending trillions of dollars on, purports to replace the human itself. Put another way it intends to automate all the 3 steps (as well as any ancillary services in marketing the widget, legal services in protecting the company, etc). So any increase in demand does not lead to any additional labor since the labor per unit is 0.

This video’s argument simply collapses the debate back to whether AI can largely replace human intelligence or not.

[CuriouslyC]

The Jevon's Paradox argument is not wrong but they're blanket applying it. Geoff Hinton has talked a lot about this, and he notes that while some things do benefit from Jevon's Paradox, there are a lot of things that AI is automating that won't. In terms of thoughtfulness and credibility I'll trust Geoff over YC.

[jacquesm]

That argument is so broken it's not even funny. A lot of assumptions would have to hold for that particular outcome to be true. There are many more and most of those simply result in corporations employing fewer workers and having higher profits. I'm sure that the next argument you'd get is 'trickle down economics' but that doesn't work either.

[baxtr]

Yes, but then many young people today won't pursuing a career in SW development because of the doomsday stories... which - if your case turns out to be true - will lead to an even higher shortage of SWEs.