It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc.
When my father joined an attorney's office as recently as the 80s, there was a whole team of people that worked with: Of course, there were the attorneys who actually argued the cases, but also legal assistants who helped create various briefs, secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents, receptionists who managed the attorney's schedules and handled memos and mail, filing clerks who helped keep and retrieve the many documents the office generated and demanded in a giant filing room (my favorite part of visiting as a kid: row after row of rolling shelves, with crank handles to put the walkways where they were needed to access a particular file), librarians who managed a huge card catalog and collection of legal books and acquired those that were not in the collection as needed... it was not a small team.
When he retired a few years ago, most of that was gone. The attorneys and paralegals were still required, there was a single receptionist for the whole office (who also did accounting) instead of about one for each attorney, and they'd added an IT person... but between Outlook and Microsoft Word and LexisNexis and the fileserver, all of those jobs working with paper were basically gone. They managed their own schedules (in digital Outlook calendars, of course), answered their own (cellular) phones, searched for documents with the computers, digitally typeset their own documents, and so on.
I'm an engineer working in industrial automation, and see the same thing: the expensive part of the cell isn't the $250k CNC or the $50k 6-axis robots or the $1M custom integration, those can be amortized and depreciated over a couple years, it's the ongoing costs of salaries and benefits for the dozen humans who are working in that zone. If you can build a bowl screw feeder and torque driver so that instead of operating an impact driver to put each individual screw in each individual part, you simply dump a box of screws in the hopper once an hour, and do that for most of the tasks... you can turn a 12-person work area into a machine that a single person can start, tune, load, unload, and clean.
The same sort of thing is going to happen - in our lifetimes - to all kinds of jobs.
I recall the mine water pump had a boy run up and down a ladder opening and closing steam valves to make the piston go up and down. The boy eventually rigged up a stick to use the motion of the piston to automatically open and close the valves. Then he went to sleep while the stick did his job.
Head on the nail. I try to explain this to everyone who thinks we are heading to global collapse. AI isn't good enough to replace a person. It enables a person to replace a team. That will take awhile since, as cool and great AI is now, it is not yet as powerful and integrated yet for teams to be totally replaced. Only as fast as people naturally leave, so instead of hiring someone to replace that job, one guy inherits his teammates job and his own, but has more tools to do both. It sounds like a person is being replaced, but I've never worked anywhere where people weren't complaining about being understaffed. The budget likely wasn't cut, so now they can hire someone to do a different job. A job an idea-fairy wanted someone to do but they lacked the bandwidth. The old position is gone, but new ones have opened. It is the natural was of the world. We innovate, parts of our lives get easier, our responsibility scope increases, our life is full again. For a person, that translates to never feeling rich if they allow their standard of living to match their income, and for a company, that translates to scope increase as well if the company is growing, shown as either more job openings or more resources for the employees (obviously the opposite for both cases if a person/company is "shrinking")
Many jobs even most jobs don't work you at or near the short term max capacity you can achieve because it isn't sustainable, lacks redundancy or because the nature of work flow and peer expectation creates a degree of slack.
Condensing the workforce as you describe risks destroying redundancy and sustainability.
It may work in tests with high performers over short dutations but may fall under over longer terms, with average performers, or with even a small amount of atrition.
Having cog number 37 pick up the slack for 39 doesn't work with no excess capacity.
The low hanging jobs historically created from progress are gone. You are talking nonsense. You are talking the equivalent of 'and then magically, new jobs appear, because jobs have appeared in the past'. And while you wave away job fears as a nothing burger, you randomly add in blaming people for not feeling rich because...they think progress should include their lives progressing for the better?
> secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents
Complete aside, just because you brought up this thought and I like the concept of it:
My mom trained professionally as a secretary in the 1970s and worked in a law office in the 1980s; at that point, if you were taking dictation, you were generally doing longhand stenography to capture dictation, and then you'd type it up later. A stenotype would've been a rarity in a pre-computer office because of the cost of the machine; after all, if you need a secretary for all these other tasks, it's cheaper to give them a $2 notebook than it is a $1,500+ machine.
> Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc.
My observation so far has been that executive leadership believes things that are not true about AI and starts doing the cost-cutting measures now, without any of the productivity gains expected/promised, which is actually leading to a net productivity loss from AI expectations based on hype rather than AI realities. When you lose out on team size, can't hire people for necessary roles (some exec teams now won't hire unless the role is AI related), and don't backfill attrition, you end up with an organization that can't get things done as quickly, and productivity suffers, because the miracle of AI has yet to manifest meaningfully anywhere.
> the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization
AI alone can't do that, even if you make the weakest link in the chain stronger, there are probably more weak links. In a complex system the speed is controlled by the weakest, most inefficient link in the chain. To make an organization more efficient they need to do much more than use AI.
