[nradov]

There are lots of new jobs in building data centers, plus all the components that go into those. For example, worldwide employee count at Amphenol is way up over the past couple years. They make a lot of electrical connectors and similar items.

[pesus]

Temporary construction and manufacturing jobs are not actual replacements for the jobs lost. They'll be done after the data centers are built, and then we're just back to AI having destroyed tons of jobs with no replacements.

[nradov]

Construction is never "done". New stuff is always being built. And eventually the old data centers will be demolished or remodeled, which also takes a huge amount of labor.

I think a lot of HN users still somehow don't understand the "lump of labor" fallacy.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...

[pesus]

Construction is in fact done at some point. You cannot build an unlimited amount of anything, let alone data centers.

Do you honestly believe there will be enough constant construction on data centers to replace millions of jobs lost to AI? Even if that was somehow true, there are tons of people that are not capable for one reason or another (age, physical fitness, etc) of doing construction work. Construction work also pays significantly less than many of the jobs being lost as is, so it's not a good replacement in that regard. And what happens when construction gets further streamlined and/or automated and requires fewer people? Or none at all, in the future?

Even your most optimistic hypothetical scenario results in millions of people doing hard manual labor for poverty wages. If anything, this just strengthens the case against AI and AI companies.

[nradov]

Construction is in fact never done. If it's not data centers then it will be something else: high-rise residences, bridges, spaceports, oil refineries, whatever. People always want more stuff and we'll never hit a limit in our lifetimes. Skilled construction work is tough and occasionally dangerous but it pays pretty well.

https://mikeroweworks.org/

Speculation about science fiction automation scenarios is not a sound basis for public policy. Lots of things could happen in the future. We can't reasonably plan ahead for all possible contingencies.

[rainsford]

I like to think I'm generally more optimistic than average that AI growth will be a a net benefit to the economy, standard of living, and employment, but "AI creates jobs building AI data centers" is a terrible argument in favor of that optimistic idea.

Ignoring the fact that the number of data center construction jobs a given data center produces is probably vastly lower than the labor displacement possible with the compute power said data center will hold, the idea of losing your job due to AI only to get another job building data centers for more AI is some genuinely dystopian stuff.

I feel like AI would be a lot more popular if the proponents of building AI hadn't seem to have all gone to the Darth Vader school of PR. AI is a valuable tool because it allows skilled labor to be vastly more productive, not because it displaces skilled labor into jobs where they build they build the infrastructure for the robotic overlords that replaced them.