No, it won't (necessarily) be AI that's creating the new jobs. In general, when a new technology comes along and automates away some jobs, you can't expect the same technology to provide the new jobs.

To give an example from the recent past: 'hipster' baristas that make you a five dollar coffee are a fairly new job. At least at scale.

But I doubt you'll be able to find any technology that automated some other job but created barista jobs.

It's just that the market will find stuff for people to do for money, unless prevented to do so by incompetent central bank policy or (too) onerous labour market regulation.

(The labour market can take quite a lot of regulation, and still be able to get people jobs. Have a look at Germany today for an example.)

> It's just that the market will find stuff for people to do for money

Will it ? Let's take my example, I'm a 41 year old male with around 15 years experience in software development. Lets say 4 years from now myself and million others are losing our development jobs to A.I. What does the market have for my skills? I can try going into healthcare or teaching (though that's quite an extensive retraining + salary reduction), I can go into the trades (same) or get some other work that's hard to automate like caring for old people (very low salary). All of these options involve massive salary reduction, and that's in the positive scenario that I actually am able to retrain and survive such a shift mentally. It's quite likely many software devs won't be able to become plumbers and nurses and will become chronically unemployed.

Well, we have many examples where in the past technology (and to a lesser extent trade) have let to some sectors of the economy using fewer people than before.

The situation you describe isn't all that special.

Yes, losing your job (or your career) is not fun, and can be painful. Massive salary reduction can happen.

No, that hasn't lead to widespread unemployment in the past. At least not widespread enough to be visible in aggregate statistics, especially over the noise of the 'normal' business cycle. However, individuals can obviously have pretty long spells in unemployment, but that can also happen without a shift in technology.

> Yes, losing your job (or your career) is not fun, and can be painful. Massive salary reduction can happen.

I'm just trying to get the point across that unemployment might rise so gdp may fall, in fact I think it should be the baseline scenario and not thinking some new jobs we can't imagine yet will be created. It's so hard to imagine these new jobs because if the machines will out perform us cognitively it follows we will be able to get intelligent robots into the real world quite soon after. Then seriously what the heck is left? Fewer jobs, not more.

There is one "cure" I can think of for this and that's something closer to socialism, the market will have to step aside and the government will create massive amounts of new jobs. For example classes can be 5 pupils per teacher instead of 30 pupils per teacher. Nurses can attend to 3 patient beds instead of 8. But letting the market sort this out ? I don't think so.

> It's so hard to imagine these new jobs because if the machines will out perform us cognitively it follows we will be able to get intelligent robots into the real world quite soon after. Then seriously what the heck is left? Fewer jobs, not more.

So I admit that this is a serious possibility that we need to consider.

But for the argument to make sense, we can't just talk about the general 'Oh, new technology will make a bunch of jobs obsolete.' We have to specifically talk about what (might) make AI special in that it might be even more general than electricity.

You didn't mention these special factors in your original comments.

I am not sure whether AI will be different or not, or rather I don't know how different it will be.

So far I see it as a good sign that we have many relatively equally competitive models from different providers, and some of them have open weights and some of them even have completely open sources (including training algorithms). So at least it's unlikely for the technology to be monopolised by any one entity.

> There is one "cure" I can think of for this and that's something closer to socialism, the market will have to step aside and the government will create massive amounts of new jobs. For example classes can be 5 pupils per teacher instead of 30 pupils per teacher. Nurses can attend to 3 patient beds instead of 8. But letting the market sort this out ? I don't think so.

If you want to involve the government, I'd rather give everyone a basic income, than to give our pupils inferior teachers and our sick people inferior nurses. (After all, we are assuming that humans will be worse at these jobs than the AI.) Also, I'd rather have people enjoy whatever it is they want to do, instead of being forced into some government provided make-work programme.

I can feel this already with my own use of language models.

All the questions I had before language models, I have answered with language models.

That doesn't mean I have no more questions though. Answering those questions opened up 10X more questions I have now.

In general, everyone knows that answering scientific questions leads to new and more questions. It is the exact same process in the economy. There is a collectivist sentiment though in society and the economy that wants to pretend this isn't true. That the economic questions can be "solved", the spoils divided up and we live happily ever after in some kind of equilibrium.

As far as new jobs, they are here now but they surely sound as ridiculous to think about as being a professional youtuber in 2005. Or I think of the person making a geocities website in 1997 vs a front end developer. There is no date that a front end developer emerges from the html code monkey. It is a slow and organic process that is hard to game.

> As far as new jobs, they are here now but they surely sound as ridiculous to think about as being a professional youtuber in 2005

How many people can make an actual living out of Youtube? Surely they exist but to reliably live off it for decades (not just 1-2 years of temporary fame - which is also very hard to come by) I'd say fewer than one in ten thousand people will make it. I can't call "Youtuber" a career path with that kind of success rates anymore than I can call being an actor in Hollywood a career path.