This is a really poorly argued article, not sure even where to start dismantling the author's arguments. (Almost feels like ChatGPT wrote this article).<p>But let's start with this "If H&R Block could replace 90 percent of its seasonal employees with AI, it would see its profits skyrocket, given that labor is its biggest expense. Those profits would be reallocated elsewhere, that would increase the potential for even more economic growth, and that would in turn create better opportunities for the accountants."<p>=> Lol, no. It doesn't work that way. H&R block, if any, will allocate more to share buy backs, and the size of the tax filing "pie" won't increase due to AI.
Kind of a click-bait title, eh?<p>A few paragraphs in, the statements felt generic and lacked supporting details to the point I got that uncanny valley sense of LLM writing. It doesn’t seem like this piece adds much that hasn’t already been said.
Mindblowingly poor argumentation.<p>a) No disentanglement of growth factors. Economic growth tied to expansion of consumer base is slowing for demographic reasons and more crucially, key markets in the knowledge economy are demand saturated - attention economy for example is not growing - it peaked in the pandemic and outside of policy intervention, there’s very limited growth potential.<p>b) Failure to spell out the transformer as machine that prints machines. The transformer extracts the rules of creation from the corpus of human created labor results and automatically produces the replication function. The technology may be in its infancy, but it will only improve.<p>c) Historically adjustment for new job creation has operated on a multi decade timescale, complimentary to the often massive infrastructure needs (wires, power plants, distribution infrastructure) but this technology does not have those requirements. The app stores, fiber lines, machines, API platforms all exist. Adopting products can happen in months. The loop from science to product is months (see vision transformer)<p>d) Do I spot trickle down economics? Are we gonna invoke this boomer level of delusional narrative for the next 20
years again despite the iron clad metrics showing it’s wishful thinking to appeal to certain ideological positions rather than grounded in any kind of reality. The gains from operational efficiency will become stock buybacks, yachts, macadamia
chewing cows and vanity dildos flying to space.<p>Appealing to history is all fine and dandy, but one has to spell out the divergent core conditions to have a serious conversation - this article feels like faith, not well reasoned forecasting or even science fiction
except for the very vague argument that tech disruptions in the past created more jobs there is not really any argument supporting that claim.<p>Would have been nice to explain how people would be employed in an AI scenario and how they would benefit from the surpluses created by it.
TLDR: "The future is bigger than we can imagine.<p>Change is equally hard to comprehend. Two centuries ago, 80 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. If you told one of those farmers that in 2024 barely 1 percent of the population would work on farms, he'd have a difficult time imagining what the other 79 percent of the population would do with their time. If you then tried to explain what an average income could purchase in the way of a Netflix subscription, airplane transportation, and a car, he'd think you were insane. The same principle applies to imagining life 50 years from now."
How to read an HN subject line:<p>WRONG:<p>In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment<p>RIGHT:<p>In the AI Economy, There Will Be Zero Percent Unemployment (reason.com)<p>TL:DR;<p>(reason.com)