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"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

Over the weekend, I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percent of jobs. It doesn't exist. Worse than that, actually,

MIT did a nice summarization: “the number of studies that support the labour replacement effect is more than offset by the number of studies that support the labour-creating/reinstating and real income effects.” This 2023 paper looked at 127 previous studies of technology supposedly replacing labor forces from the 18th century to the present, concluding that “the labor displacing effect of technology appears to be more than offset by compensating mechanisms that create or reinstate labor.” The Economic Policy Institute did a deep dive into what drives labor market demand and unemployment, concluding: “Productivity growth (which technology sometimes enables and other times drives) has not historically been associated with higher unemployment or higher inequality,” and that “Anxieties over widespread technology-driven unemployment lack an empirical base.” Perhaps the closest analogy to AI is the personal computer revolution of the 1980s. Most of the current, press-driven AI hype cycle, however, skyrocketed in late 2021 with OpenAI’s release of GPT-3 (longtime readers here will recall that Britney Muller showed off techniques extremely similar to what’s now associated with modern LLMs back in July 2018). I found it particularly revealing that one of the most commonly cited examples of AI killing labor needs in the software field is the death of StackOverflow, and yet, a robust analysis of that site’s usage from 2008-2020 shows that “What really happened is a parable of human community and experiments in self-governance gone bizarrely wrong.”

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