"In 1798, Thomas Malthus looked at deer and saw doom. In nature, he noted, unchecked populations grow until they consume everything: deer overgraze the forest, starve, die off. He believed humans would follow the same curve, and he predicted the population would always outpace food supply, triggering famine, war and collapse. The math was clean - the logic brutal - and for a while, it all seemed inevitable. Except it never happened. Instead of famine, we got fertilizers and ever-growing crop yields."
"It found that AI doesn't just fail to destroy jobs. It actually increases average wages by 21%, while reducing wage inequality. That's not the story we're used to hearing. This isn't because AI generates more work or disproportionately rewards the most skilled. It's because of a third factor, the researchers call simplification, a new technical channel where AI tools reduce the skill required to perform complex tasks. In other words, they flatten the ladder."
"This could mark a profound shift in labor economics. As AI automates the edges of specialized work - coding, summarizing, analyzing - it allows people with lower formal training to compete in spaces previously closed off. The productivity gains are real, but they don't flow solely to the top. And here's a deeper pattern: never in history has the arrival of a major disruptive technology"
Thomas Malthus predicted unchecked populations would outpace resources, causing famine and collapse, but human adaptability produced technology, fertilizers and greater complexity instead. Contemporary fears claim AI will destroy jobs, yet empirical findings show AI increases average wages by 21% and reduces wage inequality. A mechanism called simplification lowers the skill required for complex tasks, allowing workers with less formal training to perform high-level work. AI automates peripheral aspects of specialized roles, enabling broader competition in previously exclusive spaces. Productivity gains occur and the distribution of benefits can flatten occupational ladders, potentially reshaping labor economics.
Read at Brooklyn Eagle
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