Concern About Job Loss From AI

AI

I think there is cause for concern for persistent job loss due to the use of AI. I have talked to people, read a ton of news stories, listened/watch many videos/podcasts, that various positions are being eliminated specially because AI makes the team so much more productive that is way more than the business needs. That will result in some people becoming unemployed.

From my own experience, with the introduction of AI tooling in my development environments. It has increased efficiencies dramatically. I had previously been using a chatbot to help me with some tedious work for programming which helped speed things up, but when AI was integrated into my tools it was a gamechanger. Code could be generated based on comments that were regular sentences in plain English. Often, based on what I coded previously, it would anticipate what I should be doing next.

If you extrapolate this out, then less man hours (and therefore less people) are needed to do the same amount of work before. As such, employers of developers can hire less people for a given amount of work. And that is the key. If the workload increases beyond the efficiencies that AI can bring, more people will still have to be hired to meet that demand. But if the workload demand stays the same, then it'll just mean less people are needed to program. Result: layoffs.

Granted there will be creative destruction, where old jobs will be destroyed and new jobs will be created, but I am not 100% sure they will be a net gain of new jobs (but I could be wrong). In other words, if AI eliminates the need for 10 jobs there may be 3 new jobs created to replace them. Do the math, that means 7 people will be perpetually unemployed. I can't see the future, new jobs could be created that we can't even dream of and there may be more jobs created than destroyed.

There is a ton of speculation of what the outcome will become. Maybe those new jobs that are created will result in much higher income and offset the cost of living increases dramatically. May some form of UBI will work too (not that I am a fan of UBI personally, but it may keep the lights on.

However it happens in the future, the lack of something to do, is a problem. My recommendation is to keep doing things that only humans can do, such as give a human personal touch to a situation. A robot may be able to do the task, but not with a personal touch. Only humans can bring that.