This, on the resurgence of the Rise of the Robots fears about the threat of widespread AI job losses, gets some of the way to articulating the niggling issues I have with this apocalyptic narrative:
Even if you do believe the technology has got or can get good enough to replace workers at scale, the economics simply don’t make sense.
Of course, we’ve spent the last two decades witnessing many, many things that made no economic sense yet that happened anyway thanks to a combination of complacency, willful ignorance, ideology, bloody-mindedness, and spite. Just because something makes no economic sense doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
But despite non-AI industry stocks having been hammered over the last couple of weeks, think what needs to happen to enable this AI revolution. Most developed nations had energy and clean water supply challenges even before factoring in a data centre building boom. We still have a deep reliance on rare earth metals for the hardware that the AI needs to function (the clue’s in the name).
What happens to prices when demand surges to unprecedented levels and supply struggles to keep up? And how does that change the balance sheet projections when deciding whether to replace human workers with a grandiose form of a new SaaS subscription, whose monthly costs and reliability could shift at any moment?
Remember the $7 *trillion* Sam Altman was asking for to invest in infrastructure? That’s likely to be a substantial under-estimate of the amounts needed given how much every industry upstream of the AI companies is already struggling to meet their projected needs.
