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Notes -
I agree with this -
...but this would suggest to me that the disruption will come from new entrants (startups and scaleups) who can effectively leverage AI tools to transform workflows. If Status Quo Inc don't incorporate AI effectively and sell their services for $1000/hour, but Insurgent Inc are able to sell materially equivalent goods for $100/hour, then clients and customers will eventually switch suppliers. Obviously this won't apply as strongly in industries with very strong incumbent advantages, but even here I would expect some disruption - see e.g., Palantir making inroads in military procurement.
I do think that disruption is happening, but again it's much more difficult than it seems. Startups typically take a few years just to get off the ground with a viable product, and then it takes like a decade for them to eat a whole industry.
And often before they eat the whole industry, they end up getting acquired by big Corpo and their value gets absorbed and spread out to all the people not doing a super efficient job lol.
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Everything that requires extensive capital investments and permitting will be very slow to change, as will the government, and areas where there are natural monopolies.
Disruption isn't really possible for the majority of the economy.
For sure there are sectors less prone to disruption, but I don't know about the majority of the economy. Finance alone is 20% of the US economy and there's huge potential for disruption there. Professional scientific and technical services are another 10%, and many of those (e.g., management consultancy) are also vulnerable to AI transformation. Healthcare (20%) obviously has massive legal barriers in place but AI will increasingly nibble around the edges (e.g. in healthcare administration, AI therapy).
The financial sector is both highly regulated and employs a disproportionately small number of people compared to it's share of GDP. While it accounts for 20% of GDP it only employs some 4% of the workforce, which is about half of manufacturing (which is supposedly dead in America) or less than a third of healthcare.
Even if the finance industry would be disrupted it would affect relatively few people, despite it's large share of GDP and would therefore not lead to wider scale panic. At best/worst we're looking at a mild upward pressure on unemployment.
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