When we created cars that replaced buggies, that came with new machines for manufacturing, who need mechanics. The same for most physical automation. When we automated pen and paper business processes with SaaS, we created new managment positions, and new software jobs.

LLMs don't create anything new, they simply replace human computer i/o, with tokens. That's it, leaving the humans who are replaced to fight for a limited number of jobs. LLMs are not creating new jobs, they only create "AI automate {insert business process} SaaS" that are themselves heavily automated.. I suppose there are more datacenter jobs (for now), and maybe some new ML researcher positions.. but I don't really see job growth.. Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?

Creative destruction is a fundamental component of economic growth and has been happening since economies were part of humanity.

You are thinking too linearly. When the price of goods and services go down because the cost to produce those goods are services decreases, that means things are cheaper. Now that things are cheaper we have more money to spend on other goods or services.

Who knows what industries will be created because of this alleged release of human labor.

When the refrigerator was invented we didn’t just replace an industry of shipping ice, we created new industries that relied on refrigeration. That’s creative destruction. That’s economic growth.

This is not to mention that I find the scope and scale of AI displacement to be highly dubious and built on hype.

Automations do create jobs, but fewer jobs. Businesses wouldn’t invest so much money if they had to keep the same number of workers. Automation necessarily reduces the number of humans working in aggregate at one task.

What DOES go up with automation is demand. Fewer farmers today than 100 years ago, but significantly more mouths to feed.

What also increases is new kinds of jobs; entirely new fields. The automobile shrank the number of buggy whip makers, but taxi drivers increased. Then the internet increased Uber drivers on top of taxi drivers.

> Are we supposed to just all go work at a datacenter or in the semiconductor industry (until they automate that too)?

Datacenters are very automated. They already don't require many people and they're going to be needing less and less humans in them going forward.

Semiconductor manufacturing is also very heavily automated.

Neither datacenters nor chip manufacturing employ a whole lot of people. But I think you're looking at it wrong. Jobs come from people with money wanting to pay for jobs. That's not going to change.

The jobs of the future may be that you're a court jester for Larry Ellison, or that you do something else that's fundamentally pointless but happens to be something that a person with money wants. Companion, entertainment, errands. Now, that may sound dystopian, but on some level, so are most white collar jobs today. Microsoft employs 200k people. How many of these are directly involved in shipping money-making products - five percent? Ten? The rest is there essentially for the self-sustaining bureaucracy itself. And there's no reason for that bureaucracy to exist except the whims of people with money and power - delegation, empire-building, pet projects, etc.

Disagree. The input to output ratio is ridiculous. With the latest LLMs you can input very few words to generate a lot of production usable output.