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As a Software Engineer, Gawdat has no expertise in job creation. If an Economist said the same, I'd pay more attention.

It's very counterintuitive, but for 250 years tech has constantly eliminated jobs, while unemployment rates have stayed the same.

People have always predicted this would lead to mass unemployment, they've always been wrong, and yet they've kept predicting it.

One way to explain it is that unemployed people are an unused resource, and free market economies are very good at finding uses for those.



I think the current capabilities of AI are basically trash. But at the same time, just because something has not happened, does not mean that it cannot happen. I think AI becomes salable as a replacement for people not because it's amazing, but because there are things outsourced labor is truly bad at. So in the work units where execs have already proven they are happy to destroy jobs to gain incremental revenue, they will do so again. At the same ttime, CEOs will not replace themselves with AI simply because they will make the business decision not to.


Like in Detroit, and Germany's Ruhrgebiet?

Two examples out of plenty others, where people had to move out as means of survival.


Detroit's decline wasn't really caused by tech. More that unions jacked the wages and other costs for car production there so the production moved elsewhere.


Ah the unions, thankfully a problem that US software engineers do not have to worry about, between offshoring and AI based automations.


the rustbelt was caused by the rest of the world catching up after being bombed back to the stone age during WW2.

unions kept wages high and led to offshoring, but inefficient garbage tier cars from Detroit lost ground to better engineering and no planned obsolesce coming from European and Japanese models. A lot of that came from a decline in steel, coal, and acute pain points related to the oil crises in the 70s.


Are you saying that we can't tell people whose jobs were created by technology (cars destroying the jobs of carriage makers elsewhere) that they jobs were affected by technology?


I am saying people often overlook the destiny of those affected by technology changes, in name of capitalism.




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