"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

Summary

Over the weekend, I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percent of jobs. It doesn’t exist. Worse than that, actually, there’s hundreds of years of evidence and sophisticated analyses from hundreds of sources showing the opposite is true: AI will almost certainly create more jobs than it displaces, just like thousands of remarkable technologies before it. I don’t want anyone to think I’m raining on this parade without first attempting to convince myself that the opposite was true, and that AI really would be the first technology in 120 years to displace a massive portion of the workforce. So, dry though it may be, let’s walk through the logic together. The majority of statements that have received press (and there have been dozens in the last 5 years) center on the claim that AI will destroy 20-50% of the current need for human labor. I’ll attempt to address each of the most robust points inherent in those arguments, rather than trying to argue that any one innovation or upgrade to a model’s capability hasn’t done it yet (or won’t): If AI is going to make such a huge percentage of jobs redundant, there must be historical analogies–i.e. other technologies that massively upended labor markets. What are these and how have they affected jobs in the past? MIT’s Technology Review noted that this “fear of new tech taking jobs,” is far from new. The automation of farm work is the most notable and most labor-impacting example we have from history, rapidly unemploying a huge portion of human beings in the developing economies of the late 19th and 20th centuries. And yet, at the conclusion of this era (~1940s/50s), the conclusion was that “technological unemployment is a myth,” because “technology has created so many new industries” and has expanded the market by “lowering the cost of production to make a price within reach of large masses of purchasers.” In short, technological advances had created more jobs overall. Last year, Quarterly Journa...