Economists Once Dismissed the A.I. Job Threat, but Not Anymore

littlexsparkee

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47594409

motbus3

A friend told me something curious about AI. The recent increase on talks of AI being sentient or having feelings is an excuse to not make a case against AI companies. At first I rejected the claim as being non sense, but it made sense... There will be no way of proving AGI is a thing or not with a machine capable of generating any text. But also it will make it seems it is unpredictable and uncontrollable and they will sell this as a pain of growth and they had not ways to know that this "conscious-like" machine would be able to do this. This humanisation campaign lead by Huang and others is the perfect excuse for technology laymen law man who will take for granted that a ML "neuron" is exactly a biological neuron, and that machines take decisions and actions based on will and not pure statistical computing.

nacozarina

lol clankers are definitely coming for the economists when the cashiers & janitors were replaced with robots, nobody complained about poor ppl displaced, they complained about well-fed ppl inconvenienced. It won’t be any different moving forward yet ppl will still manage to act surprised.

ls612

One of the most robust findings in labor economics is that in the long run capital and labor are complements, not substitutes. What this means is that over time, as capital productivity has increased, demand for both capital and labor has increased, rather than demand for labor falling while demand for capital increased. I'm skeptical that AI will be different than all of the previous inventions of the industrial era in this regard.

mitchbob

https://archive.ph/2026.04.03-192245/https://www.nytimes.com...