Good article. Nice to get some counter arguments to the utopian/libertarian/dystopian world views that dominate the debate here normally. None of those views are new. You can go back hundreds of years and find very similar points of view as early as the the seventeenth century when modern science was born, early industrialism, pre and post WW-II, etc.

The real world is much more resilient and stubborn. The industrial revolution indeed wiped out a lot of jobs. But it created a lot more new ones. Agriculture and food production no longer is >90% of the economy. The utopian version of that (we all get free food) never happened. The dystyopian version (we'll all starve) didn't happen either. And the Luddite version (we'll all go back to artisanal farming) didn't happen either. What happened is that well fed laborers went to work doing completely different stuff. Subsistence farming now only exists in undeveloped countries and regions in e.g. rural Africa.

The simple reality is that we have 8 billion people probably growing towards 10 billion. These people are going to buy and spend stuff with their income. Whatever that is, is what the economy is and what we collectively value. If AI puts us all out of work, people aren't going to sit on their hands and go back to subsistence farming. They'll fill the time with whatever is is that they can create income with so they can spend it on things that are valuable to them.

This notion of value is what is key. Because if AI lowers the cost of something, it simply becomes cheaper. We need a lot of valuable and scarce resources to power AI. That isn't cheap. So, there's an equilibrium of stuff that is valuable enough to automate with it that people still want to pay for by committing their valuable resources to it. Which as they become scarcer become more valuable and more interesting from an economic point of view. The economy adapts towards activity that facilitates value creation. We're opportunists. It all boils down to what we can do for each other that is valuable and interesting to us. Whatever that is, is where there will be a lot of growth.

I'm in software, I'm not worried about less work. I'm worried about handling the barrage of stuff I don't have time to do that I now need to start worrying about doing. There's no way I'm going to do any of that without AI. It's already generating more work than I can handle. This isn't frivolous stuff that I don't need, it's stuff that's valuable to my company because we can sell it to other companies who need that stuff.