Recent AI discussions makes it almost certain that jobs would be affected. It makes me wonder what happened when suddenly humans were replaced by machines. Assuming a lot of jobs were lost was it that lots of people suddenly found it difficult to afford meals or was it not disastrous at all and was a smoot h transition? Can we compare it to today’s AI revolution in terms of adjustment with jobs?
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The industrial revolution made people more productive. Which led to an increase in consumption that consumed the additional production. As a result people didn’t lose jobs as much as the jobs changed and people moved with the jobs.
You’re overlooking a big revolution that came with computing. Computing dramatically increased the productivity of knowledge workers. For example, companies used to employ literal armies of accountants whose entire job was to add numbers and write numbers in books. Computers replaced entire rooms full of these people with a few people and a computer. Pretty much anything that we use computing for today was once done by a lot of people, which meant a lot of job losses. Except we didn’t have a massive wave of unemployment. Instead, people shifted to other jobs like software engineers.
The current form of the “AI revolution” is just an extension of this. It will increase productivity for a lot of people. Some jobs will get automated away, the question is what could replace those jobs. People are adaptive and they’ll usually find something to do.
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