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I've all of the sudden seen AI blackpilling break out into the normie space around me. Not so much about FOOM, and paperclipping, or terminator scenarios, but around the sudden disruptive nature, and especially around economic upheaval. Not exactly sure why. Veo3 has been part of it.
For example, coworkers suddenly aware that AI is going to completely disrupt the job market and economy, and very soon. People are organically discovering the @2rafa wonderment at how precariously and even past-due a great deal of industry and surrounding B2B services industries stand to be domino'd over. If my observation generalizes, that middle class normies are waking up a doompill on AI economic disruption, what is going to happen?
Let's consider it from 2 points of view. 1 They're right. and 2. They're wrong. 1. is pretty predictable fodder here - massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption, with difficult to predict state on the other side.
But is 2 that much less worrisome? Even if everyone is 'wrong', and AI is somehow not going to take away 'careers', people in mass worrrying that it's so will still manifest serious disruption. People are already starting to hold thier breath. Stopping hiring, stopping spending, running hail mary's, checking out.
Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact. (They keep framing 'If we can cut costs, we'll come out on top, instead of following the logical conclusion, if everyone stops spending the B2B economy collapses.) - I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get. The film industry seems about to completely topple, not because Veo3 will replace it immediately, but because, who's going to make a giant investment in that space right now?
I suspect the macro economic shock is going to hit faster than most are expecting, and faster than actual GDP gains will be made, but maybe I'm just an idiot.
My gut feeling is that this AI wave will be a short panic and then basically blow over. To predict massive job loss you have to assume that jobs are already distributed rationally, and that companies are good at adapting to and using new technology efficiently. Neither of these are even remotely true!
If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have. On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?
So the idea that just because there's a new technology coming out that can do a bunch of fancy new stuff, does not convince me that we'll have massive job loss at all. What will likely happen, and what has already been happening for a while, is that the people in white collar roles who can use these tools will just shift off more and more work to them privately, and pretend they are still just as busy. The roles might get a tad more competitive.
But we're not going to be in a doomsday scenario where everyone loses jobs, even IF AGI comes out tomorrow.
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.
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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