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Innovation — that is technological progress — creates net jobs. AI is no different nor is continued automation.

gregjor 3y ago
Innovation can create jobs, but at the same time it can displace people from their jobs. Innovation in manufacturing created jobs overseas in places with cheaper labor and less regulation, while eliminating jobs in the USA. AI may do the same, whether by actually replacing people with technology or simply outsourcing overseas and calling it AI like Amazon and others have done. While the "labor market" works globally, across borders, employment does not. Just like food -- American produces more food than Americans need, but people in other parts of the world (and even plenty of poor Americans) don't have enough to eat. So while it's generally true that innovation can lead to net job creation globally, it has local effects that can lead to unemployment and displacement.
- realusername 3y ago
  The US is currently at a chronically low unemployment rate of 3.8% which means full employment. This fear of the global labor market and technological changes creating mass unemployment hasn't materialized until now so I don't see why it would at this point.
  - gregjor 3y ago
    That seems like a naive reading of the employment rate. A lot of Americans have jobs that don't pay a living wage, and don't have benefits. Many people do gig work to make ends meet. A person who used to have a good-paying manufacturing job but now works as a Walmart greeter with no benefits counts as employed, but with some significant qualitative differences because the manufacturing job went to Mexico or China. People with expensive degrees working as baristas count as employed, but they probably don't think of their situation as "full employment" as fake AI companies outsource jobs to India. The global labor market enables labor arbitrage. A person in India or Vietnam gets an offshored job and goes from 0 to 2. A person in Detroit loses their good job and gets hired at Burger King, going from 8 to 4. The savings goes into the pockets of people like Jeff Bezos. My point was to distinguish between global trends and broadly true -- at scale -- claims about innovation and technology improving employment conditions and local effects caused by job displacement. Those happen together. It does little good to laid-off programmers in California to learn that their sacrifice means thousands of Indian programmers now have jobs.
    - realusername 3y ago
      That's because people nowadays are working in jobs with pretty poor union support compared to the manufacturing jobs of the past so there's not much competition involved when raising salaries. As for the global trends, nothing points at job displacement until now, everything until now points to the pie getting larger, the opposite of your statement. I doubt you could fit the needs of any country on earth with just its local workforce nowadays anyways, even China itself can't. It's been a dozen technological revolutions and none of that happened already so I don't see why the next one would. Black swan events can always happen of course but I would not bet on it.

Innovation can create jobs, but at the same time it can displace people from their jobs. Innovation in manufacturing created jobs overseas in places with cheaper labor and less regulation, while eliminating jobs in the USA. AI may do the same, whether by actually replacing people with technology or simply outsourcing overseas and calling it AI like Amazon and others have done. While the "labor market" works globally, across borders, employment does not. Just like food -- American produces more food than Americans need, but people in other parts of the world (and even plenty of poor Americans) don't have enough to eat. So while it's generally true that innovation can lead to net job creation globally, it has local effects that can lead to unemployment and displacement.

realusername 3y ago
The US is currently at a chronically low unemployment rate of 3.8% which means full employment. This fear of the global labor market and technological changes creating mass unemployment hasn't materialized until now so I don't see why it would at this point.
- gregjor 3y ago
  That seems like a naive reading of the employment rate. A lot of Americans have jobs that don't pay a living wage, and don't have benefits. Many people do gig work to make ends meet. A person who used to have a good-paying manufacturing job but now works as a Walmart greeter with no benefits counts as employed, but with some significant qualitative differences because the manufacturing job went to Mexico or China. People with expensive degrees working as baristas count as employed, but they probably don't think of their situation as "full employment" as fake AI companies outsource jobs to India. The global labor market enables labor arbitrage. A person in India or Vietnam gets an offshored job and goes from 0 to 2. A person in Detroit loses their good job and gets hired at Burger King, going from 8 to 4. The savings goes into the pockets of people like Jeff Bezos. My point was to distinguish between global trends and broadly true -- at scale -- claims about innovation and technology improving employment conditions and local effects caused by job displacement. Those happen together. It does little good to laid-off programmers in California to learn that their sacrifice means thousands of Indian programmers now have jobs.
  - realusername 3y ago
    That's because people nowadays are working in jobs with pretty poor union support compared to the manufacturing jobs of the past so there's not much competition involved when raising salaries. As for the global trends, nothing points at job displacement until now, everything until now points to the pie getting larger, the opposite of your statement. I doubt you could fit the needs of any country on earth with just its local workforce nowadays anyways, even China itself can't. It's been a dozen technological revolutions and none of that happened already so I don't see why the next one would. Black swan events can always happen of course but I would not bet on it.