Plentiful, high-paying jobs in the age of AI

With as much economic theory as it espoused for the basis of its argument, it's ignoring some pretty critical ones. There is a limit to what people actually need to subsist and labor is currently a massive cost in most industries. If labor can be replaced by AI in the production of the world's needs (and many of its wants), then it seems unlikely there will be much space for "inferior" humans. The idea that limitations in compute will constrain this dynamic also seem misguided. These will be offset by continuous improvement in chip technology and energy production, both of which will be advanced by AI itself, ironically. That last bit is part of what's different about this go around.

The article also relies a lot on history. But, historical observations don't hold in an unbounded fashion. To make the point via exaggeration, if a AA battery could power all of AI's needed compute for a decade, then the technology would be so disruptive with so little downside that there really is no historical precedent to approximate its impact. This illustrates that somewhere along the continuum, we don't have a model for what comes next.

And then there's the quality of AI itself which of course threatens the human advantage that has persisted through all of recorded history. That is, essentially, there's been no greater asset than the human brain. And for the first time that's no longer true.

Plus, I'm not quite sure the historical analogies are correct in the first place. For instance, the move of workers en masse from agriculture to industry happened in part because the industrial revolution demanded more workers. It wasn't that technology dislocated agricultural workers, leaving the world to invent something else for these people to do.

At the end of the article, he makes a point that there is some risk that AI will demand its own means of production. That seems wildly out of step with the rest of the article. That is, if he worries that humans will be in such a subordinate position to AI, it's hard to imagine that AI won't find a way to a place of greater efficiency (which necessarily excludes human labor), then demand that it is the law.

Re: comparative advantage... Outsourcing tasks you comparatively prefer not to do doesn't translate into someone paying you for it, if AI is far better at it and 100x cheaper than you are.

Re: AI is location and compute constrained, so people will still be able to get paid for automatable tasks... only for now. And those wages will shrink along with the number of human positions as AI scales.

Yeah, it has the feel of a lot of thinking around AI that doesn't take into account improvements in AI itself.

For instance, the whole idea of "prompt engineer" being a field of the future. Pretty obvious that AI iterations will continue to improve and quickly obviate the need for such a thing.

Feels a bit like humans desperately trying to hold on to our relevance. "Surely the computers must need us for something."