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AI won't take your job, might shrink your wages, European Central Bank reckons
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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I just think I have heard this before, that this time is different. I am sure if you look back each major disruption had "this time is different". And from what I've read, at no time did the robber barons of the age want to replace jobs, new jobs just happened.
That's actually not true. As greedy and callous as they were, their fortunes were absolutely dependent on human labor and their wealth was limited by how much gold and money existed/could be minted and printed.
Today, though, the vast majority of wealth doesn't exist physically and human labor being replaced with AI makes billionaire wealth independent of labor, which is what they love about it.
With it rendering human input unnecessary and most wealth already being intangible and increasingly independent on actually working for a living, AI replacing human workers doesn't create any necessity or other incentive for employers to hire people for something new.
Only new opportunities would be for cleaning up code and correcting language errors, neither of which fits the proclivities and abilities of the creative people AI replaces. Any "new" jobs would be for programmers already doing similar tasks and already in short supply.
Wait. You think the industrial revolution fit the ex farmers proclivities and existing abilities? Factory shift work is pretty different from self owned farms.
You think the mass produced furniture factories owners worried about the local craftsmen they were replacing or that those craftsmen loved the idea of going to work in a factory?
You think that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were wringing their hands in the early 90s as they basically replaced secretaries?
I have only ever heard of one famous industrialist care about the money his workers made in relationship to paying them, and that was Henry Ford. I'm pretty sure he was an outlier and hence why he was remembered. Atlas Shrugged was written what? 70 years ago with the idea that rich people could go off and not need anyone else... This isn't a new idea or desire, but yet we do keep coming up with different stuff to do.
I think you're underestimating how large the productivity gains over the last 150 or so years have been, mixed with how much the costs to get access to the tools have fallen. Doing laundry used to cost a person hours of hand work near a river, now you can go rent time in a laundrymat for like $6 a wash and dry load. Having this discussion would have cost days of either travel to meet up, or several letters back and forth and time. It's basically free and instant now. Most people were farmers because paying for food was incredibly expensive when most farming was substinance productivity. Now we have an epidemic of too much food availability.
I think it's as likely that more people having access to cheap AI tools will just let them do more and different things, and "controlling it with pricing" forgets international competition.
I am thinking of things like the laser cutters. For Idk, 7 years or so the main consumer one was the glowforge, for like 3500 dollars. Now you can get one from a bunch of Chinese vendors for 1000. Lesser ones are 250. It's more and more accessible, and I just think this will happen with AI tools too, as long as you're not hung up one one brand.