We sat down recently with Battery Ventures general partner Dharmesh Thakker to talk about the AI technologies he’s most excited about, and where he sees them already creating billions of dollars in value.
They haven’t even started all the plans they keep announcing. The point is, they are saying they aim to REPLACE humans with AI. Nobody should be so fucking naive to think they mean to hire humans back in support of this somehow. That’s just idiotic.
The new jobs may come whether they “mean to” or not, though.
All that money that gets saved goes somewhere. Yes, “trickle-down” is a lie, simply feeding more money to already-rich people won’t mean much to the economy. But if AI makes it cheaper to run a company it can also make it cheaper to start and grow a company. It’s not just giant companies that will be making use of these tools.
Employment rates aren’t looking all that different, though. They’re still a few percent from perfect.
Obviously it’s bad for the specific workers replaced, but the general concept of innovation being good is backed by a lot of hard numbers.
They haven’t even started all the plans they keep announcing. The point is, they are saying they aim to REPLACE humans with AI. Nobody should be so fucking naive to think they mean to hire humans back in support of this somehow. That’s just idiotic.
The new jobs may come whether they “mean to” or not, though.
All that money that gets saved goes somewhere. Yes, “trickle-down” is a lie, simply feeding more money to already-rich people won’t mean much to the economy. But if AI makes it cheaper to run a company it can also make it cheaper to start and grow a company. It’s not just giant companies that will be making use of these tools.
You find some examples of this ever happening. You are a naive optimist or a fool if you think this has ever happened.
Here’s an October 2023 survey on the subject from the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council on the subject of AI adoption. It found very extensive usage for a wide range of needs.
I was speaking to automation inadvertently creating new jobs in the space they take away from, as you had suggested.