Reality is that it didn't cost any jobs. Everyone just moved up to making things more complex than what Wix can do. I don't feel my life is any worse off having moved from building static marketing pages to complex web apps.
It definitely reduced the amount and complexity of work there is to do. So, in a static market, it reduced the number of workers. It's hard to see in tech which is an expanding market.
There is no such thing as a static market though. There is no fixed demand of tech or really anything else. People will consume as much tech as they can afford. And if the product gets cheaper, the market just consumes more of it. Notice how the iphone never gets cheaper, it just becomes more capable. You can in theory buy a bottom tier smartphone for $50 which is more capable than the original iphone, but this isn't interesting to most people.
So viewing it in such a contrived way is just not useful. If anything, the more automation we get, the more demand for tech workers there is because it's able to deliver increasingly more value.
I believe AI will be amazing at driving job creation - it can be applied to almost all fields and it never works well on its own, it always suffers from limited autonomy.
Say your model makes 99% correct predictions, in 20-30 time steps that error rate drops to 73%, that is just not ok for automation. But real accuracy rates per time step are much lower.
Compounding errors even when they are small lead a system astray. I think there is no form of AI that achieves autonomy in any field. We're at minutes of autonomy, or seconds. Nobody can go on vacation and leave AI do their job.
On the other hand AI will open up new opportunities and markets. Demand will scale up to meet the new productivity level. We can always desire more, it's not a fixed sum game.
More fundamentally, LLMs are interpolating between and combining known skills. They don't do radically new discovery. Why? They train on human text instead of human text + world feedback. In order to surpass human experts AI needs labs, experiments or the ability to create its own experience.
I can only name AlphaZero, AlphaTensor and AlphaFold as superhuman AIs, and they have been trained on massive experimental feedback, not just text.
Exactly this. As certain types of jobs go away it frees us to do new ones. When we had an agrarian society there weren’t many massage parlors around even though they probably could have used them.
Additionally as programming languages and toolkits have become higher level and more accessible there has been more demand for programmers.
