I have had some productive push back from friends and ex-colleagues who have been trying to process the mostly mendacious AI news cycles. To be sure there are many, many valid concerns for how AI is curated and implemented, however, this particular concern appears to center around the idea that the upcoming wave of AI will negatively impact a large swathe of knowledge workers, so I am laying out my really high level thoughts to help counter some of that narrative.
Now most economists agree that the efficiency of the production of goods and services is the main constraint on the pace of economic growth. Additionally there is an assumed causal relationship between a growing economy and more hiring. In fact if we track the relationship between jobs and growth using Okun’s Law we see that higher growth leads to lower unemployment.
What I am hoping my friends (and hype driven media) have wrong about AIs impact on jobs is that when you drive up productivity, a company is incentivized by profits to do way more of that profit making activity, not less. My genuine, but unproven, opinion is that making people more productive will encourage companies, at the macro level, to hire more people to meet the demands of a growing economy.
AI will shape us but I am hopeful that it will not be in the way that our worst fears might suggest.
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