> an increase in efficiency

An increase in efficiency in and of itself, maybe, but there is no such thing. The increase in efficiency has largely come from deskilling the job. Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.

[edit: it's important to mention that this is compatible with programmer ego trips. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and I've been doing it for a long time, but AI has made me far more eligible for jobs in languages that I have never used on platforms that I have never worked with.]

But another factor is that just because you can do work faster doesn't mean there's more work to do, so if you were hitting all your deadlines before with two employees, now you can fire one. Which one that will be is the result of a reverse wage auction.

> Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.

That's not that self evident yet. If AI is a multiplier it might be the other way around i.e. can a $300k engineer + unlimited tokens generate more a $200k in extra value compared to a $100k engineer? That should be much easier to achieve with AI than without it? The more you spend on tokens the more it makes sense to hire the most highly skilled people you can find since their salaries are no longer that significant.

I don't think the dynamics are similar to what they are e.g. during the industrial revolution since AI is more than capable of clicking the submit button on its own.

The issue is that wages are based on supply and demand and rarely directly related to how much value you generate.