As I'm sure the author is aware, it was only with the advent of new types of business (specifically the rise of on-line banking) that the numbers of tellers actually declined. My guess is that many current businesses will attempt to shoehorn AI into their "ways of working" and thus the gains of AI will be diluted until "AI native" businesses become a staple of the economic environment.
Thanks, Saul. I agree with much of this, and it's partly why I brought up electrification in the piece. The real gains came when factories were reorganised around electricity, rather than simply replacing steam engines.
I'm less convinced, though, that we need to wait for AI-native businesses. Online banking was, after all, largely adopted by the very banks it was supposed to disrupt. Existing firms can change quite radically, particularly when competition forces them to. And I'd be careful about attributing the decline in bank tellers to online banking alone.
But even if AI eventually makes entire business models obsolete, what does that actually tell us about employment overall? Very little, I would argue. We can see which jobs might disappear, but we have no comparable knowledge of the activities that will become economically viable as costs fall. That's really the distinction I was trying to make in the article.
As I'm sure the author is aware, it was only with the advent of new types of business (specifically the rise of on-line banking) that the numbers of tellers actually declined. My guess is that many current businesses will attempt to shoehorn AI into their "ways of working" and thus the gains of AI will be diluted until "AI native" businesses become a staple of the economic environment.
Thanks, Saul. I agree with much of this, and it's partly why I brought up electrification in the piece. The real gains came when factories were reorganised around electricity, rather than simply replacing steam engines.
I'm less convinced, though, that we need to wait for AI-native businesses. Online banking was, after all, largely adopted by the very banks it was supposed to disrupt. Existing firms can change quite radically, particularly when competition forces them to. And I'd be careful about attributing the decline in bank tellers to online banking alone.
But even if AI eventually makes entire business models obsolete, what does that actually tell us about employment overall? Very little, I would argue. We can see which jobs might disappear, but we have no comparable knowledge of the activities that will become economically viable as costs fall. That's really the distinction I was trying to make in the article.
True-there is a clear asymmetry at play here with a huge “undiscovered country” of opportunities.