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Thursday, June 04, 2026
AI taking all our jobs
The more I hear online about people fearing that AI will take our jobs, the more I wonder whether this narrative is based on a personal bias of digital natives. If your job consists of writing emails and Word documents and Powerpoint slides all day, a fear of getting replaced by AI is probably justified. And it is exactly the people sitting on a computer all day that also discuss the most online. But it that the real economy?
If you look at the totality of all jobs, you will realize that most people have jobs in which they manipulate physical objects in some form as core function of their job. Take the stereotypical entry level / student job of flipping burgers. ChatGPT can't flip a burger. You would need an AI-powered robot to flip that burger. And between the cost for the robot and the cost for the AI, it isn't obvious that the minimum wage human doing the job isn't actually a lot cheaper than the robot. Also, even an entry-level human employee tends to do better when things go wrong. Imagine the flat-top griddle having an electrical failure and not heating anymore. A human would notice instantly that his burgers aren't sizzling anymore and react in some way. A robot might happily keep flipping raw burgers, with catastrophic consequences when that raw burger reaches the customer.
In the absence of physical object manipulation requiring a robot, from the remaining jobs there is still a very large part that requires direct interaction with humans, typically customers. You don't need a robot for that, but you need your AI to not mess up by hallucinating. There are famous examples, like the Air Canada chatbot inventing a refund policy, and the airline being forced by the courts to pay that refund. Basically the courts found that a company is liable for their employees messing up, regardless of whether that employee is human or AI. That can get expensive for a company, when a tech-savvy customer persuades your chatbot to sell him a $70,000 car for $1, an error a human salesman is unlikely to make.
If I use the version of Google Gemini that is included in a regular Google search, or I use a regular ChatGPT chatbot, that use of AI is free. That is the typical tech business model of reaching a dominant market position by providing a service at a loss. Which is inevitably followed by some form of "enshittification", because sooner or later the company needs to provide its services at a profit to themselves. Those trillion dollar AI data center investments don't pay for themselves if you don't charge your customers sufficiently. AI companies already charge "pro" users and commercial users, and some companies had to put caps on AI use, because AI use quickly got too expensive. So even for the jobs that an AI can do well, the question is how much cheaper it is going to be than a human, and how the quality and reliability of the output compares in the end.
Sam Altman is predicting the Billion-Dollar Company of One, a startup built by one person with a laptop, an internet connection, and an army of AI agents, worth a billion dollars. While I don't think that is impossible, it is obvious that there are huge parts of the real economy in which such a company is unthinkable. The company can't be involved in any manufacturing, can't be involved in any handling or delivering of physical objects, and can't be involved with any services to humans that can't be done purely online. Robo bricklayers? Robo hairdressers? Robo plumbers? All of these are still decades away even in the most AI-positive scenario, and might never become a practical reality out of cost reasons. I am absolutely positive that AI will not take *all* of our jobs. Although we might end up with some surprises on which jobs AI eventually will replace; for example I can envision a future in which much of porn is AI generated, putting a lot of pornstars out of work. But if you look at a general classification of occupations, you immediately see a huge number of jobs that AI is extremely unlikely to perform in the foreseeable future.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:43 AM Permanent Link
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While all of that is clearly true, the fear of AI "taking all our jobs" isn't necessarily coming from the people with those jobs. The AI companies are making specific claims about their software being able to replace vast numbers of jobs because that prospect is one of the things driving their stock market valuation. Also, to be fair to the AI companies, they're talking about "white collar" jobs, not the "blue collar" jobs you're listing. Those were always part of the second phase of the plan, to be replaced at some future stage by, as you suggest, robotics. These people live in a world fueled by the movies they've seen and the books they've read. Unfortunately they've been quite successful in convincing people who didn't grow up immersed in those technological fantasies that it's all just about to happen, rather than that it might be something their grandchildren or great-grandchildren will see.
I think that is a bit uncreative.
The fear is likely not that all jobs will be replaced but that it will remove the stepping stones and the more advanced jobs to create an unbridgeable gap between basically meat interfaces for AI and the few who control the AI.
Because yes, a minimum wage human or intern is cheaper than a robot (although I disagree on the level of effectiveness. You would fit robots with thermal sensors to ensure food safety and humans are constantly breaking the ice cream machine and their only reaction is taking McFlurry off the menu).
While I don't think that AI will do much to jobs, what if the scenario was that studying chemistry would only lead to you moving the sensors to the right positions and the AI would control the experiments, analyse the data and publish new patents?
New technology needs to improve the lives of humans in order to be adapted and I don't see how removing the majority of jobs would achieve that.
Tobold: "The company can't be involved in any manufacturing, can't be involved in any handling or delivering of physical objects, and can't be involved with any services to humans that can't be done purely online."
Actually, quite a few things can and are already outsourced and handled by contractors. Apple isn't involved in manufacturing, delivery is done by DHL, UPS & Co., service I think is still provided by direct employees but could also be done by third party wearing an Apple polo.
Obviously not a one man army and starting out with actual hands on work, but there might be one lucky Flappy Bird kid that finds the corn.
"That is the typical tech business model of reaching a dominant market position by providing a service at a loss."
This is where Cory could have used a course in business so he wouldn't just only look at the money (and going for more than "Evil corp is out to get you!").
Companies operate at a financial loss if you put blinders on and are purely looking at their books as what their are buying can't be calculated that easily.
They are buying the most important thing a company can want: market fit.
Why do you think the companies being accused of enshittification have reached a dominant market position in the first place? They didn't start out in their current form.
It's the tale of the two piggies enjoying their free stuff. The customers are paying in their usage data. The company sells their product at the lowest possible price (free + ads) and gets the most vital information back.
You can't put "tweaked doomscroll algorithm" on the books and give it a price, but that is what makes the company more valuable, increases reach and leads to the dominant market position.
Once that testing period is over and the usage data loses value, the company, like every other company, is looking for ways to cut costs or shifts focus on actual monetisation of the features it is offering.
Their goal never was to "lure you in with a free product", it never was free but you were not paying in money so you didn't care.
The fear is likely not that all jobs will be replaced but that it will remove the stepping stones and the more advanced jobs to create an unbridgeable gap between basically meat interfaces for AI and the few who control the AI.
Because yes, a minimum wage human or intern is cheaper than a robot (although I disagree on the level of effectiveness. You would fit robots with thermal sensors to ensure food safety and humans are constantly breaking the ice cream machine and their only reaction is taking McFlurry off the menu).
While I don't think that AI will do much to jobs, what if the scenario was that studying chemistry would only lead to you moving the sensors to the right positions and the AI would control the experiments, analyse the data and publish new patents?
New technology needs to improve the lives of humans in order to be adapted and I don't see how removing the majority of jobs would achieve that.
Tobold: "The company can't be involved in any manufacturing, can't be involved in any handling or delivering of physical objects, and can't be involved with any services to humans that can't be done purely online."
Actually, quite a few things can and are already outsourced and handled by contractors. Apple isn't involved in manufacturing, delivery is done by DHL, UPS & Co., service I think is still provided by direct employees but could also be done by third party wearing an Apple polo.
Obviously not a one man army and starting out with actual hands on work, but there might be one lucky Flappy Bird kid that finds the corn.
"That is the typical tech business model of reaching a dominant market position by providing a service at a loss."
This is where Cory could have used a course in business so he wouldn't just only look at the money (and going for more than "Evil corp is out to get you!").
Companies operate at a financial loss if you put blinders on and are purely looking at their books as what their are buying can't be calculated that easily.
They are buying the most important thing a company can want: market fit.
Why do you think the companies being accused of enshittification have reached a dominant market position in the first place? They didn't start out in their current form.
It's the tale of the two piggies enjoying their free stuff. The customers are paying in their usage data. The company sells their product at the lowest possible price (free + ads) and gets the most vital information back.
You can't put "tweaked doomscroll algorithm" on the books and give it a price, but that is what makes the company more valuable, increases reach and leads to the dominant market position.
Once that testing period is over and the usage data loses value, the company, like every other company, is looking for ways to cut costs or shifts focus on actual monetisation of the features it is offering.
Their goal never was to "lure you in with a free product", it never was free but you were not paying in money so you didn't care.
As some large companies begin rolling back or limiting AI usage due to its costs I wonder if instead of mass adoption in the white collar space we are instead going to see AI usage limited to a few select specialized roles. These costs are only going to keep rising as eventually these AI companies will want to turn a profit.
I could see a scenario where things like Claude tokens are budgeted to only a select few people in the company and the rest of the workforce is doing traditional programming.
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I could see a scenario where things like Claude tokens are budgeted to only a select few people in the company and the rest of the workforce is doing traditional programming.
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