Comment by TimByte

Yep I read the article.

I disagree with the implication the author is making with this though:

"But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two"

For one, laws of nature are understood through observations. That's how science works. Secondly, I can point at many examples across history way past the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, mitochondria, all the way back to the earliest supernovas...

Through a physics lens... With respect for the meta patterns that transcend emergence and exist in the relationship between complexity and entropy, there is a relevant law of nature.

When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.

the USA already went through this when we opened up trade to China and displaced manufacturing workers in USA, the mfg centers in USA that could not adapt withered away. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-... We also did this to a lot of Mexican farmers when the first NAFTA deal went through and small farmers in Mexico were displaced by cheap US farm imports. We keep repeating this, it’s not quite crisis theory of capitalism but workers and small businesses bear the brunt of losses every time.

Ricardian models of trade seem to hold well in real life, and they'd work well too if a lot of work was done by not just AI, but robots. As long as there's limit to the production capacity of the high tech population, there's something that is worth doing where the disadvantage of doing it by hand is lower. It does lead to lower wages there though, and that would basically require investment as to make real necessities dirt cheap, like they are in places where labor isn't worth much.

There's still the fact that claiming to be the owner of the automation, while other people aren't, will be untenable in a world with sufficient inequality. We've seen that happen before when the only justification for the difference in wealth was basically inheritance. Nobles losing land and rights, churches being dispossessed an such things. It'd be a likely outcome if 5% of the people claim to own all automation ever. But that's not about having everyone be unemployed because nobody has any economic value: That's what is unlikely.

Whenever a method to do work more efficiently comes to be and propagates at scale an explosion in diversity of work emerges. This happens at every level of abstraction in nature and has recurred throughout history all the way back to the dawn of life.

Just because I can't predict exactly what work people will do doesn't mean they won't do work. I can take a stab at a few guesses, surely others have more prescience, but the thing about complexity and fractals is it's easier to predict meta qualities than it is specific manifestations.

I mean oddly enough being a Youtuber I would say is not a bullshit job. The demand for entertainment is both genuine and necessary for our well being: soldiers in war play card games and see shows, since ages past the role of entertainer has always existed.

Cranking out some online commerce app looking for margin versus providing something which by definition can't be machine replicated sure doesn't look like a meaningless pursuit to me. The devil is very much in the details.