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by satvikpendem 107 days ago
The premise is flawed, I don't see AI taking jobs because companies want to grow in productivity generally speaking and would rather just make their existing employees do more; all productivity saving technologies have always been net positive in the amount of jobs created.
3 comments

> all productivity saving technologies have always been net positive in the amount of jobs created

To what extent has the net increase in jobs been because there have just been more people who needed to work in order for society to not collapse?

Population growth is slowing (expected to peak in 2080-ish). To some, AI feels like a different sort of "productivity enhancer" than we've seen in this past.

I don't think the person's premise is flawed. It's more that you just disagree with it.

The counter argument to that is what happened with horses. Since domestication every advance of human civilization lead to having more horses. Until cars were invented and improved - which eliminated overnight 90% of the number of horses used.

So the fact that in the past new technologies have created new jobs is not a guarantee that AI will create new jobs.

On top of that have a look what happened say during the industrial revolution in Britain. You'd have a village with 2000 workers producing clothes or materials to make clothes. A rich guy opens a factory in that village that employees 200 people and produces more than the whole village before that. 90% are unemployed, the 10% that work in factory have far worse working conditions. Studying graves from that time shows the height of people went down during the industrial revolution - as the conditions in the factories were far worse than what they had before. Hence the luddite movement - but as the reach people owned the mass media, the luddites were portrayed as crazy. Eventually, many years later, new better jobs did appear.

Just by the law of large numbers, tech companies can’t grow 700% in the next decade like they have in the prior decade.
Depends on the company, I don't necessarily mean big tech, or even tech companies as we classkfy them currently.