Will AI create more jobs than it destroys?

Howie Liu · Aug 25, 2023 · hedged

AI has the potential to lower the cost of producing goods and services and therefore increase demand, with individuals augmenting their capabilities to become more productive and more valuable through human-AI symbiosis.

Lower production costs expand demand, and people can use AI to augment rather than merely be displaced.

Scope: framed as 'I tend to be a believer'; risk that change happens faster than society can adapt in the transition phase

11:10 20Product: Enterprises are not Adopting AI Yet, When Will AI Break Into Enterprise, What are the Blockers, What Do Enterprises Need from AI & Why Services Companies Will Win in the Next 10 Years of AI Implementation with Howie Liu, Founder & CEO @ Airtabl

Reid Hoffman · Jun 10, 2024

AI will transform jobs and create many new interesting human jobs rather than putting people out of work, but facility with AI tools will become an essential baseline skill like reading

People wrongly presume a massive increase in cognitive capability just puts people on the dole; in fact most jobs already require baseline skills like reading and AI use will become another one

Scope: requires people learning to prompt and use the tools

56:38 20VC: Reid Hoffman on Foundation Models: Who Wins & How Do Incumbents Respond | The Inflection AI Deal: How it Went Down | Why Trump is a Threat to Democracy | The Future of TikTok | Lessons from Sam Altman, Brian Chesky and the OpenAI Board

Reid Hoffman · Jun 10, 2024 · hedged

A whole swath of new job categories will emerge around prompt engineering and AI research assistant direction

57:17 20VC: Reid Hoffman on Foundation Models: Who Wins & How Do Incumbents Respond | The Inflection AI Deal: How it Went Down | Why Trump is a Threat to Democracy | The Future of TikTok | Lessons from Sam Altman, Brian Chesky and the OpenAI Board

Aidan Gomez · Aug 19, 2024

AI will cause localized displacement in specific roles but growth rather than displacement in the aggregate

Customer support is one of the few clearly vulnerable roles, and even there humans are still needed, just fewer of them; AI can absorb the emotionally abusive conversations while humans handle the ones they'd actually enjoy solving

Scope: customer support given as the clearest vulnerable role

47:43 20VC: Chips, Models or Applications; Where is the Value in AI | Is Compute the Answer to All Model Performance Questions | Why Open AI Shelved AGI & Is There Any Value in Models with OpenAI Price Dumping with Aidan, Gomez, Co-Founder @ Cohere

Akshay Kothari · Sep 18, 2024

AI will create more jobs than it destroys

Scope: offered as a view most people around him disbelieve

37:53 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari

Jeff Seibert · Nov 22, 2023

When a team brings a leader a question, the leader must give a decisive answer within 24 hours — slower than that means the company isn't moving fast enough

52:58 Ai drives productivity rather than replacing jobs following prior technology patterns

Daniel Khachab · Oct 28, 2024 · hedged

The most significant challenge to Western business is labour shortage, not AI-driven job loss, and AI may help reallocate labour to where it is most scarce

Millions of open jobs go unfilled in healthcare, childcare, truck driving and hospitality

18:18 Labour shortage not ai job loss is the real challenge and ai can reallocate workers

Emad Mostaque · May 17, 2023

Entrepreneurship is the only solution to AI-driven job displacement, and governments should run regulatory sandboxes plus national models to spur the new jobs that replace the old ones

Tools must be given to people to create new jobs that replace the old ones, and sandboxes let societies adopt the technology and upgrade dumb national systems into intelligent dynamic ones

24:39 Entrepreneurship and government sandboxes are the solution to ai driven job displacement