AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs
AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs
摘要: AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs
Happy Labor Day!! Your labor is still valuable.
Noah Smith
Sep 07, 2026
Photo vi
正文
AI keeps stubbornly refusing to take our jobs
Happy Labor Day!! Your labor is still valuable.
Noah Smith
Sep 07, 2026
Photo via
Wikimedia Commons
It’s Labor Day, so here’s a post about how human labor is alive and well in the age of AI.
I live in San Francisco and hang out with a lot of tech people, both in the AI industry and outside of it. And one thing that almost everyone I know here believes is that
AI’s main economic effect is to displace humans from their jobs
. Most people don’t have concrete arguments for why this should be true; it’s just an article of faith. The conventional wisdom is pretty well summed up by the first line of this tweet:
Tim Urban
@waitbutwhy
I really wish the rise of LLMs didn't come along with catastrophic job loss, massive privacy invasions, and maybe also the apocalypse. Because when you put those side effects aside, it is the COOLEST MOST WILD TECHNOLOGY EVER.
7:46 PM · Aug 24, 2026
254K Views
260 Replies
228 Reposts
4.71K Likes
In fact, AI companies
themselves
have spent years talking about how their inventions are going to render large swathes of humanity economically obsolete — an odd marketing pitch, perhaps, but one that seemed to reflect their honest expectations.
AI has the worst sales pitch I've ever seen
Noah Smith
Read full story
A lot of times, San Francisco tech people are out of step with the general public. This time, though, the public seems to agree.
A recent Ipsos poll
found that most Americans expect AI to compete with human workers more than it complements them. And
Pew finds
that this belief has even strengthened in recent years:
So basically, most people think AI is a job-killer. And yet somehow, this job-killer keeps stubbornly refusing to kill jobs. In the aggregate, the labor market is about as healthy as it’s ever been. The prime-age employment rate — the single best indicator of how many Americans have jobs — continues to hov