alt Hacker NewsIndeed these are scary times. I think people are right to be on edge, and I'm sympathetic for anyone who is out of work (I may soon count myself among them). But so were the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and Covid-19. "Outsourcing" was the big scare word when I started my career. With AI, things may truly be different this time. But it's early days, and we won't really know for sure how things shake out until we're looking back on the other side.
I think you can make the argument that AI is a more fundamental change to the structure of the economy than any of the previous "black swans", which were more about financial conditions (in the case of the .com crash and 2008 financial crisis) and a recession caused by a global pandemic. In other words it's more like the industrial revolution than a temporary economic event.
AI might have a financial component (malinvestment that needs to be corrected) but from my own first-hand observations, I can't deny that AI is reducing the value of many jobs that people would like to believe are "high skill" and therefore "high value". I've personally seen dev teams shrink by 50% while productivity remains the same because all of the devs are using AI to knock out tasks. A lot of software engineering isn't as complex and immune to AI as software engineers would like to believe.
American companies are already incentivized by the market to maximize profit by cutting labor wherever possible and I don't think anyone should be under the illusion that managers aren't aware of the fact that many employees are already using AI to do their work.