alt Hacker NewsAI is not replacing workers. It might automate a few steps in a workflow, which require dealing with natural language, image content or applying knowledge from the web or internal data stores.
It enables a bit more automation of work than it was possible earlier. Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.
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I see AI replacing workers, but maybe it is my circles. Most of my SaaS selling friends; these are long term, as in 20+ year solution sellers in ERP, HRM, trading, banking in certain niches therein making very good money, removing most of their staff while delivering faster and better with the few senior core people they kept. Junior/Mediors can please go away...
Seems to me there are way fewer farmers per capita and yet much more food produced, thanks to more & improved capital use in farming.
> Automation alone did never reduce jobs significantly.
Unless you mean "all jobs across the entire economy", this is pretty obviously false. People used to weave fabrics by hand, make screws and nails by hand, bake bread by hand. These jobs hardly exist anymore.
Of course this did not imply that all jobs disappeared and the economy collapsed. But the sense in which "AI is not replacing workers" is contingent on specific features of software development, not about automation in general.
If you take the ambitions of robotics and AI companies seriously then what they are trying to create is the equivalent of unleashing 100 million cloned copies of the smartest and most well adjusted people you know upon the economy at a fraction of the cost. If they succeed it would absolutely reduce jobs significantly. In fact, its a little hard to imagine how the average Joe would have any economic value at all.