alt Hacker NewsThat's the story of all technology and the argument AI won't take jobs pmarca etc has been predicting for a while now. Our focus will be able to shift into ever narrower areas. Cinema was barely a thing 100 years ago. A hundred years from now we'll get some totally new industry thanks to freeing up labor.
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Also the nature of software is that the more software is written the more software needs to be written to manage, integrate, and make use of all the software that has been written.
AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software.
The same thing happened as higher level languages replaced manual coding in assembly. It allowed vastly more software and more complex and interesting software to be built, which enlarged the industry.
The agricultural revolution did in fact reduce the amount of work in society by a lot though. That's why we can have week-ends, vacation, retirement and study instead of working from non stop 12yo to death like we did 150 years earlier.
Reducing the amount of work done by humans is a good thing actually, though the institutional structures must change to help spread this reduction to society as a whole instead of having mass unemployment + no retirement before 70 and 50 hours work week for those who work.
AI isn't a problem, unchecked capitalism can be one.
This assumes we won't achieve AGI. If we do, all bets are off. Perhaps neuromorphic hardware will get is there.
Cinema created jobs though, it didn't reduce them. Furthermore the value of film is obvious. You need to extremely hedge an LLM to pitch it to anyone.