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16 Musings on AI’s Impact on the Labor Market
Nuance is a must on this topic
3 min readJan 23, 2025
- In the short term, generative AI will replace a lot of people because productivity increases while demand stays the same due to inertia.
- In the long term, the creation of new jobs compensates for the loss of old ones, resulting in a net positive outcome for humans who leave behind jobs no one wants to do.
- The most important aspect of any technological revolution is the transition from before to after.
- Timing and location matters: older people have a harder time reinventing themselves into a new trade or craft. Poor people and poor countries have less margin to react to a wave of unemployment.
- Digital automation is quicker and more aggressive than physical automation because it bypasses logistical constraints — while ChatGPT can be infinitely cloned, a metallic robot cannot.
- Writing and painting won’t die because people care about the human factor first and foremost; there are already a lot of books we can’t possibly read in one lifetime so we select them as a function of who’s the author.
- Even if you hate OpenAI and ChatGPT for being responsible for the lack of job postings, I recommend you ally with them for now; learn to use ChatGPT before it’s too late to keep…
