> It’s very possible that AI could save 50% of work hours in a week and still have no impact on wages or jobs.
I like this sentence because it is grammatically and syntactically valid but has the same relationship to reality as say, the muttering of an incantation or spell has, in that it seeks to make the words come true by speaking them.
Aside from simply hoping that, if somebody says it it could be true, “If everyone’s hours got cut in half, employers would simply keep everyone and double wages” is up there with “It is very possible that if my car broke down I’d just fly a Pegasus to work”
The cited statistics is in reference to time saved (as a percent of work hours), not a reduction in paid working hours.
But more generally, my comment is not absurd; it's a pattern that has played itself out in economic history dozens of times.
Despite the fact that modern textile and clothing machinery are easily 1000x more efficient than weaving cloth and sewing shirts by hand, the modern garment industry employs more people today than that of middle age Europe.
Will AI be the same? I don't know, but it wouldn't be unusual if it was.
> The cited statistics is in reference to time saved (as a percent of work hours), not a reduction in paid working hours.
This makes sense. If everyone’s current workloads were suddenly cut in half tomorrow, there would simply be enough demand to double their workloads. This makes sense across the board because much like clothing and textiles, demand for every product and service scales linearly with population.
I was mistaken, you did not suggest that employers would gift workers money commensurate with productivity, you simply posit that demand is conceptually infinite and Jevons paradox means that no jobs ever get eliminated.
Ugh, I didn't posit that demand is infinite, nor did I even mention Jevons paradox.
In the the past 200 years we've seen colossal productivity gains from technology across every area of the economy. Over the same period, wages have increased and unemployment has remained stable. That's where my priors come from. I'll update them if we get data to the contrary, but the data we have so far (like this paper) mostly confirm them.
That is the result of using fuel. In spite of efficiency gained, more work is possible; more work is demanded, too: a dress is not lasting a decade now, hopefully one season.
More people are also available since the fields are producing by themselves, comparatively. Not to mention less of us die to epidemies, famines and swords.
I like this sentence because it is grammatically and syntactically valid but has the same relationship to reality as say, the muttering of an incantation or spell has, in that it seeks to make the words come true by speaking them.
Aside from simply hoping that, if somebody says it it could be true, “If everyone’s hours got cut in half, employers would simply keep everyone and double wages” is up there with “It is very possible that if my car broke down I’d just fly a Pegasus to work”