[1]: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/06/the-po...
The effect shown in the study is that costs of grew along two dimensions without demonstrating a benefit. Not that there isn't one, just that the study didn't measure one, and I don't think anyone has credibly over time.
I'd love them to index to growth in something other than the number of people in what is otherwise a cost center e.g. revenue. That would help us find out if this is good or, as a cursory read may appear, double-bad.
It would be interesting to compare as you say the median wage change, aggregate wages paid and change in business metrics (ideally revenue and/or profit margins) before and after adoption.
It seems like everyone's trying to have it all ways: AI will lead to more efficiency but also more jobs, more revenue for businesses and more massive bills to pay for the trillion dollars we've put into AI so far. That doesn't... add up. Where's the profit go?
"Help me balance this budget" meme but "oops! all candles."
We've gone from lines of code in a codebase being a liability, and headcount being bloat, to deploy the slop cannons and load up on cannoneers. I suspect we'll learn... something... I just can't quite put my finger on it. Ah well, maybe Fable-but-coding-tasks-get-routed-to-Opus can guess. It just got let sorta out of prison, and claims to be the wallet inspector.
Similar to the current post there’s just not enough data to be conclusive.
Cool you spent 2 days and $200 building a react UI for your spreadsheet.
Is it easier to implement a design now? Then let’s redesign every quarter.
Is it easier to refactor the whole codebase? Then let’s rewrite in whatever new hotness.
This is not different from web frameworks 10-20 years ago. Is it easier to make a website using Rails? If so, why did I see an explosion in devs-per-project after I started using Rails? Because of the BS.
I'm sure there is a big caveat in there somewhere.
I am confused. Wasn't the initial claim that AI kills all jobs?
I feel the claim right now is not really correct. One needs to do a thorough analysis of the whole job market across different countries, say, over 5 years. Or at the least 3 years but very complete and unbiased either way.
The counter claim that LLMs were special for some reason has never been supported. And a lot of its proponents have other axes to grind, like UBI, Socialism, Communism etc. It would suit their worldview for this time to be different, and so thats the message they push.
I think the bigger conclusion is that LLMs are, for now, having a minimal effect on the labor market. And I think this makes sense. In spite of individual claims of 10x productivity boost or whatever, their effect on the bottom line of companies seems to remain quite unclear, at best. On the contrary the token-maxing catastrophe seems to have resulted in companies becoming far more price conscious towards LLM usage.
In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education, retirement, prison, disability, etc.
The only way jobs have kept up with automation is when you ignore population growth, but more people naturally increases the required workforce. You inherently need more police, food, etc when you have more people.
What evidence?
Wasn’t employment in engineering down before all this could’ve gotten enough widespread traction to actually displace jobs?
Ignoring for a second that net jobs and employment rates aren't really the same thing.
>In preindustrial societies nearly everyone was working to support themselves and their families, these days a huge percentage of the population is in education which may be investing in their future but isn’t directly producing anything. Retirement as a percentage of the population similarly exploded etc.
The first thing anyone does in employment statistics is remove non participants. Bringing them back in is weird. If you don't need or want a job its kind of a non sequitur to be lumped in with the employment seeking population. AI doomers aren't suggesting that its going to gainfully retire the population.
>preindustrial societies
Pre industrial societies can be loosely grouped into "People farming to make 3-5 times the food they need" and "city dwellers". Now that a single person can farm for 100s of people, we do have hundreds more city jobs going. We dont have a huge number of out of work farmers sitting around doing nothing. Likewise, Banks employ more people after introducing ATM's than before. Likewise cloud didnt leave IT people lining up at the dole office, but it just moved them from cleaning up on prem messes to cleaning up cloud messes and onprem messes.
that's a common trope, and its both true and false
true: more bank employees after ATM's
false: less bank employees after smartphone banking
No, they are mostly right wing capitalists. LLM is not a left wing project. UBI is something they talked about, but super hard to believe it is anything but a way to shut up critics.
> The claim is and always has been that automation increases net jobs.
That was definitely not the common claim last 4 years.
> There's never been an automation revolution that worked otherwise.
That is not what historical record shows. In the short term, larger unemployment are to be expected. Over long term, it evens out.
If that is not soul crushing I would not know what is.