Concern over a jobless future continues to gather momentum. Anyone looking at the raft of AI tools emerging at the moment can’t but be impressed by their capabilities and their potential to undertake work that humans currently monetize. In my darker moments, I share those concerns - and have written and talked about them for some time.
However, what I and others fretting about AI’s impact on human employment https://nypost.com/2024/05/26/business/elon-musk-expects-ai-will-replace-all-human-jobs-lead-to-universal-high-income/ fail to acknowledge is the counterweight to the notion of human labor substitution - namely population growth.
Simply put, population growth and accompanying GDP growth (through history the two are inextricably linked) will continue to generate opportunity for people - particularly people armed with the new tools of the trade - for the foreseeable future, even with software based labor substitution.
In 1997, when Cloud Computing was in its infancy, the world’s population was 5.8bn and the IT industry was worth about $500m. Even though the Cloud and the Indian based outsourcing it facilitated were forces of labour substitution in the US and Europe, today the IT industry is worth $4.6bn and the world’s population has grown to 8bn. World population growth rates are declining from their post WWII high but estimates suggest that there will be 10.4bn people in 2080 and 11.2bn by the end of the century. What will the world’s GDP be then? Today it’s $105T. $200T? $300T?
One of the benefits of longevity is to have undergone change and to have witnessed growth. Both change and growth, to the younger person, are theoretical and abstract - one can intellectually understand them but they don’t really mean much. To the older person though the changes one has lived through and the growth one has experienced, both personal and societal, are astonishing - miraculous and scary, inspiring and bewildering.
Growth - of one’s family, garden, resources, the world around you - is hard to see in the moment but powerful when one stops to appreciate it. The child you taught to ride a bike is away in the big city holding down a big job, the small tree you planted now gives a delightful dappled shade, the pennies you saved are now quite a few pounds, the town you live in has twice as many restaurants as you when you moved there. One’s interests compound as the Sage of Omaha puts it.
Without an understanding of the counterweight of growth, software based substitution of human labor is hard to see beyond. With it however, one can see that the world will change, skills will change, what people do all day will change, distribution of the spoils will change, but as the world grows opportunity will continue to be all around us; perhaps not the opportunity we imagined - just as I didn’t really want the dappled shade to be exactly there - but opportunity all the same. AI based opportunity.
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