In fact, there isn’t infinite demand for software. Especially not for all kinds of software.

And if corporate wealth means people get paid more, why are companies that are making more money than ever laying off so many people? Wouldn’t they just be happy to use them to meet the inexhaustible demand for software?

I do wonder though if we have about enough (or too much) software.

I hear people complaining about software being forced on them to do things they did just fine without software before, than people complaining about software they want that doesn’t exist.

Jevon's paradox means this is untrue because it means more work not less.

Hm. More of what? Functionality, security, performance?

Current software is often buggy because the pressure to ship is just too high. If AI can fix some loose threads within, the overall quality grows.

Personally, I would welcome a massive deployment of AI to root out various zero-days from widespread libraries.

But we may instead get a larger quantity of even more buggy software.

You obviously haven't thought about economics much at all to say something this simplistic.

There are so many counter examples of this being wrong that it is not even worth bothering.

I love economics, but it is largely a field based around half truths and intellectual fraud. It is actually why it is an interesting subject to study.

That’s not basic economics. Basic economics says that salaries are determined by the demand for labor vs the supply of labor. With more efficiency, each worker does more labor, so you need fewer people to accomplish the same thing. So unless the demand for their product increases around the same rate as productivity increases, companies will employ fewer people. Since the market for products is not infinite, you only need as much labor as you require to meet the demand for your product.

Companies that are doing better than ever are laying people off by the shipload, not giving people raises for a job well done.

Well, that depends on whether the technology requires expertise that is rare and/or hard to acquire.

I'd say that using AI tools effectively to create software systems is in that class currently, but it isn't necessarily always going to be the case.

Nah, most of it just gets returned to capital holders.

No it's not that.

Tell me, when was the last time you visited your shoe cobbler? How about your travel agent? Have you chatted with your phone operator recently?

The lump labour fallacy says it's a fallacy that automation reduces the net amount of human labor, importantly, across all industries. It does not say that automation won't eliminate or reduce jobs in specific industries.

It's an argument that jobs lost to automation aren't a big deal because there's always work somewhere else but not necessarily in the job that was automated away.

They changed, significantly.

We lost the pneumatic tube [1] maintenance crew. Secretarial work nearly went away. A huge number of bookkeepers in the banking industry lost their jobs. The job a typist was eliminated/merged into everyone else's job. The job of a "computer" (someone that does computations) was eliminated.

What we ended up with was primarily a bunch of customer service, marketing, and sales workers.

There was never a "office worker" job. But there were a lot of jobs under the umbrella of "office work" that were fundamentally changed and, crucially, your experience in those fields didn't necessarily translate over to the new jobs created.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qman4N3Waw4