Erik Brynjolfsson says an AI "job apocalypse" is unlikely
wpintelligence.washingtonpost.com
wpintelligence.washingtonpost.com
The job disruption is real and it will be an job apocalypse for plenty of people.
If a company is now paying for ai tokens and you now have 5-20% higher cost but you are relevant more efficient, you will reduce your team by 5-20%.
It is already a job apocalypse for people who learned language and no longer get a job for translating or text analysis. People who want to be an illustrator have a job apocalpyse.
And we have not even SEEN what it will look like in 4-14 years. Physical AI / Robotic is progressing like crazy too.
I routinely talk to people at my current non-tech job who don't even know what Claude is.
Technologist talk about tokenmaxxing while I can't imagine more than 10% of the non-tech workforce could even explain what a token is.
This level of automation is going to have an extremely slow roll out because of regulatory and sociological reasons.
There is no equivalent to the contagion of AI coding agents outside of programming. I am still fighting just to get access to Claude Cowork at work. I have quite a few automation ideas but there is not much in it for my manager. They have to sign off on something they don't understand with the best outcome their department shrinks. I can understand from their perspective, the status quo is perfectly fine. The risk is long term to the whole business not being competitive but neither my manager or I will be at this company by the time that materializes.
There is this cultural sorting function too that if you don't like change you probably don't work in tech. The culture that creates is night and day different to the non-technology workforce culture. Most people outside technology hate change. Time and time again, I have seen that even the most simple and obvious changes don't get made, even if it makes the task easier because of this bias against change.
We truly do have distorted view on anything outside our bubble.
Also Brynjolfsson: It will likely impact entry-level jobs. There are huge implications for business and the economy, including some increases in living standards, but also, potentially, job disruption. We must act now to address this gap. We can’t just sit back and wait for the tsunami to hit us.
Also Brynjolfsson: If companies don’t hire people at the base of the pyramid, then they’re not going to have those people later when they need them. Now, AI can do a lot of those basic tasks. Some companies, such as law firms and investment banks, are not hiring as many people at the base. In the short run, I can see that logic, but, in a few years, where are they going to have the most experienced people? So they need to think harder about that.
So there's that. Basically what he's hoping is if everyone does what he recommends re: regulation and policy, then maybe the job apocalypse will become unlikely.
If the number of jobs stays constant but a lot of those jobs have been downgraded to fungible operators of AI, that's very bad.
The Work from Home programmers surely aren't, since they've been displaced.