[mlsu]

These two ideas, that (1) AI is making people more productive and (2) we are laying off employees because AI replaces them. Those two ideas are mutually incompatible. When employees become more productive, you always always always want to hire more of them, because it’s a multiplier on your outputs and therefore an efficient use of resources.

That is why one of these narratives is total bullshit. Either “layoffs from AI” are layoffs for some other structural reason in the tech sector, or “AI makes employees way more productive” is total bullshit.

I don’t know which is the scarier lie tbh

[mmmore]

This assumes that demand is elastic and unbounded. It might be true that there's a lot of untapped demand for software, but especially considering individual firms, it's plausible that demand for their offerings might be capped. In this case it does make sense for firms to shrink.

Analogously, automation and productivity improvements in farming drastically decreased employment in the farming sector, from basically everyone to basically no one.

[squidbeak]

This is a simple economic fallacy. Your idea holds true if your business has room for growth, but you always need a market for those multiplied outputs. In an economy where every business has multiplied outputs, but demand doesn't scale with those outputs, what do you think happens?