But I'm still not convinced that it would result in more jobs. If you saved money by automating away labor, why spend the savings on labor?
The proponents argue the savings would be spent on laborers doing other (possibly new) jobs that are not yet automated and hired by different companies.
EDIT reply to: >I can't see what new jobs would be created, especially high value ones.
Yes, I agree about not being able to see new jobs. However, history has shown we (society) have always failed to imagine what the new jobs would be that takes the place of old jobs automated away.
Farmers and field workers replaced by tractors and harvesting combines. Human telephone switchboard operators replaced by automatic digital relay circuits. Travel agents replaced by website airline ticket bookings. [Thousands of other examples...] And yet the total # of people employed still keep going up instead of society dealing with massive 95% unemployment.
The paradox happens because the farmers and switchboard operators that were disrupted can't possibly envision new types of jobs that exist in the future. Understandably, the displaced farmer can't imagine there would be a job where somebody ... presses keys all day on a "typewriter like mechanism" that sends instructions to an "interactive tv". That basically describes what today's programmer does at his computer the entire day.
So, the new AI could usher a new wave of jobs. (Something more unpredictable than the immediate memes of ChatGPT "prompt engineers").
As we're living in the moment, we're also "blind to the future possibilities" like those farmers. If one could go back in time and tell that farmer in 1920s driving a Model T that there would be new and different jobs replacing farm work, you wouldn't be able to convince him. In the world that he's familiar with, our attempted descriptions would all just be speculative science fiction. Likewise for those of us today that's pessimistic about AI affecting jobs, is there really anything anyone could say that would change our minds? It's just predictions that we'd just dismiss.
The counterpoint to AI optimism is that _this_ new type of automation with powerful AI is unlike the tractors/microchips/websites in the past that replaced people and much more disruptive.
The total number of employed people goes up because the population goes up. The labor participation rate has been steadily declining for a while, only really increasing since 2020 as a correction to return back to pre-pandemic levels, which were still on a decline.
There is a myth that displaced workers will result in a higher unemployment rate. The official unemployment rate (U-3) shows people who are looking for jobs and cannot find them. In actuality, displaced workers often leave the workforce entirely and manage to survive in ways not registered by the Bureau of Labor statistics (often through government entitlement programs and welfare). Men, in particular, are more likely to drop out of the labor force when they've been made redundant. A whole generation of young men are declining the enter the labor force at all, opting instead to live with their parents long term or use school as a way to avoid getting a job.
People who worked in blue collar jobs and agriculture and were displaced over the course of the 20th century didn't all get "better jobs", many of them languished in broken communities and died deaths of despair. The coal miners didn't learn javascript
