[Epa095]

He talked about exactly this in the article

  The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two. The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”

[FloorEgg]

Yep I read the article.

I disagree with the implication the author is making with this though:

"But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two"

For one, laws of nature are understood through observations. That's how science works. Secondly, I can point at many examples across history way past the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, mitochondria, all the way back to the earliest supernovas...

Through a physics lens... With respect for the meta patterns that transcend emergence and exist in the relationship between complexity and entropy, there is a relevant law of nature.

When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.

[lenerdenator]

> When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.

... work that can be done better, and cheaper, by AI.

That's the goal. The idea is not for the people who have invested trillions into AI to find another way to give you money. They think they've given enough money. Now it's time for them to make money. They do that by telling your boss that you're dead weight and that their AI agents can do the same work for a fraction of the cost without vacation days, sleep, office space, or any of the other things associated with humans.

And it's a law of nature that we have people in our species who will gladly take short-term financial gain over long-term social stability. If you can't observe that, then you're not looking very hard.

[stevenwoo]

the USA already went through this when we opened up trade to China and displaced manufacturing workers in USA, the mfg centers in USA that could not adapt withered away. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-... We also did this to a lot of Mexican farmers when the first NAFTA deal went through and small farmers in Mexico were displaced by cheap US farm imports. We keep repeating this, it’s not quite crisis theory of capitalism but workers and small businesses bear the brunt of losses every time.