"The piece represents the most expansive version yet of a case the firm's co-founders have been making publicly for months. Ben Horowitz made a version of the argument on the Invest Like the Best podcast earlier this year, pointing out that AI technologies have been advancing since at least 2012- when ImageNet changed computer vision -and the catastrophic job destruction hasn't arrived."
"The intellectual foundation of the a16z essay is a well-worn economic concept: the "lump-of-labor fallacy," which holds that an economy only has a fixed amount of work to be done, and that anything-a machine, an AI model, even an immigrant-that does more of it necessarily leaves humans with less. "The AI Alarmist, 'Permanent Underclass' panic isn't a convincing story," George wrote. "It isn't even a new story. It's the "lump-of-labor" fallacy, with updated branding.""
"The problem, he argued, is that human wants and needs are not fixed. As one technology lowers the cost of some activity, people don't simply stop wanting things-they find new things to want, creating new categories of work. The obvious example is the great economist John Maynard Keynes, who famously predicted nearly a century ago that automation would produce a 15-hour"
AI job apocalypse claims predict widespread destruction of white-collar and entry-level work and a permanent underclass of displaced workers. A Silicon Valley firm rejects these forecasts as “complete fantasy,” citing “unhelpful marketing, bad economics and worse history.” The rebuttal centers on the “lump-of-labor fallacy,” which assumes a fixed amount of work and that any technology doing more necessarily reduces human employment. The rebuttal argues that human wants and needs are not fixed, so lower costs for activities lead people to seek new things. New categories of work emerge rather than employment collapsing. Historical evidence is cited from earlier AI progress without catastrophic job destruction.
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