What do you define as “replace a human job”? We are already seeing AI that can replace at least 50% of a job for very much cheaper than the 50% of the cost of paying a worker to do those parts of that job. In principle that means that many employers can fire half their workforce and get the remaining employees to pick up the other 50% of the jobs from the fired employees.
In practice this would involve huge disruption and uncertainty, and perhaps they can avoid that bother by letting go their most obviously least productive employees, lowering costs a little (say to 95%) to do the same or slightly more work with much reduced disruption. Over time, the employees who use more AI in the workflows take less effort to do the job. We are seeing this already.
This obviously isn’t a stable long-term economic behaviour. Those conservative employers probably will continue to decrease workforce slowly, while being eroded by employers much more willing to accept disruption eating into their markets at greatly reduced costs.
However, it takes time. The more capable that AI becomes per unit cost, the greater the advantage that disruption-tolerant employers will have, possibly leading to multiple larger failures of conservative employers or possibly rapid culture changes to avoid such failures, replacing large segments of workforce at some later point.
In this model (which matches what we are already seeing), the job losses are inevitable but come some economically significant and somewhat unpredictable time after the cost of AI drops well below the cost of employing a human to do some tasks.
There’s nothing that requires an economy to maintain a continuous equilibrium of perfectly distributed cost/productivity balances at all times, and we see plenty of past examples where it has not. Continuous changes to parameters in a complex system often result in sudden changes in behaviour, not just continuous ones.
it doesn’t matter whether you’re fully replacing one job, or partially replacing multiple jobs. my model still implies that the market value of human labor diminishes more than the amount of money needed to keep everyone at the same level of consumption as they did before
What do you define as “replace a human job”? We are already seeing AI that can replace at least 50% of a job for very much cheaper than the 50% of the cost of paying a worker to do those parts of that job. In principle that means that many employers can fire half their workforce and get the remaining employees to pick up the other 50% of the jobs from the fired employees.
In practice this would involve huge disruption and uncertainty, and perhaps they can avoid that bother by letting go their most obviously least productive employees, lowering costs a little (say to 95%) to do the same or slightly more work with much reduced disruption. Over time, the employees who use more AI in the workflows take less effort to do the job. We are seeing this already.
This obviously isn’t a stable long-term economic behaviour. Those conservative employers probably will continue to decrease workforce slowly, while being eroded by employers much more willing to accept disruption eating into their markets at greatly reduced costs.
However, it takes time. The more capable that AI becomes per unit cost, the greater the advantage that disruption-tolerant employers will have, possibly leading to multiple larger failures of conservative employers or possibly rapid culture changes to avoid such failures, replacing large segments of workforce at some later point.
In this model (which matches what we are already seeing), the job losses are inevitable but come some economically significant and somewhat unpredictable time after the cost of AI drops well below the cost of employing a human to do some tasks.
There’s nothing that requires an economy to maintain a continuous equilibrium of perfectly distributed cost/productivity balances at all times, and we see plenty of past examples where it has not. Continuous changes to parameters in a complex system often result in sudden changes in behaviour, not just continuous ones.
it doesn’t matter whether you’re fully replacing one job, or partially replacing multiple jobs. my model still implies that the market value of human labor diminishes more than the amount of money needed to keep everyone at the same level of consumption as they did before