✨ Brace yourself: The AI Revolution isn't about job creation
'A supposedly powerful general-purpose technology that left every firm’s labor demand utterly unchanged wouldn’t be much of a GPT.'
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
If you’re baseline concerned that advances in artificial intelligence will hurt workers, then you’ve probably been extra worried lately — at least if you’re an AI news tracker. A few recent items from business and academia:
In a recent podcast, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff said the company, a provider of cloud-based customer relationship management software, has cut 4,000 customer support roles this year after deploying AI agents to handle a growing share of the company's work
A Stanford study using ADP payroll data finds generative AI is already reshaping U.S. jobs, hitting young workers hardest. Since 2022, employment for 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-exposed fields like customer service, accounting, and software development has dropped 13 percent, suggesting entry-level opportunities are shrinking.
A Harvard study LinkedIn data of 62 million U.S. workers finds generative AI adoption favors senior staff while reducing junior opportunities. Since early 2023, firms adding “AI integrator” roles saw sharp junior employment declines —driven by slower hiring, not layoffs — while senior jobs kept growing. The effect is strongest in retail and wholesale, with mid-tier graduates hardest hit and elite or low-tier grads less affected. “Overall, the results provide early evidence of a seniority-biased impact of AI adoption and its mechanisms.”
Stories of job losses linked to AI are often framed as reasons to panic, especially when amplified on social media. Yet from an economic, Up Wing perspective, they should be greeted as tangible evidence that something real is happening. A supposedly powerful general-purpose technology that left every firm’s labor demand utterly unchanged wouldn’t be much of a GPT.
Counterintuitive, perhaps, but nonetheless true: Jobs are not the goal of an economy, and that includes a 21st century, AI-powered one.
