AI and the Loss of Jobs

I’ve been reading a lot of articles on AI and how its impact will get rid of a large amount of jobs. Yet each time I do, the final message I get left with is “don’t worry, new jobs will rise up to make up for the losses”. Talking with folks as well, I’ve heard this sentiment from a lot of people too, especially outside of the tech industry. As a result, I’ve started reading up on automation in the past, to get a better idea of what might be coming down the pipeline. I’ve gotta say however, I don’t share the optimism that many folks do. In fact, I think that the incoming loss of jobs is going to be much more detrimental to society than people realize.

To start off, I want to discuss what automation actually is, and discuss what things in the past we have actually automated. I think that when folks look to the past, they don’t actually see what was automated, they see what was replaced. This creates a very distorted view of what jobs were actually lost, as what we replaced does not equate to what was automated. For example, the automobile replaced horses and carriages, but we didn’t automate the horse. What we automated was the way in which energy was created to push and pull carriages. This is a very important distinction, because many of the jobs that were lost due to the introduction of the automobile were easily replaced. For example, while we no longer needed people to raise horses, we now needed…