I think that replace as in company with no employees is very farfetched.
But if "AI" increases productivity by 10% in an industry, it will tend to reduce demand for employees. look at say internet shop vs bricks and mortar: you need far less staff to service a much larger customer base.
manufacture for example, there is a constant drive to automate more and more in mass production. If you compare car building now vs 30 years ago. Or look at raspberrypi production now vs 5 years ago. They are producing more Pis than ever with roughly the same amount of staff.
If that "10%" productivity increase happens across the service sector, then in the UK that's something like a loss of 8% of _total_ jobs gone. Its more complex than that, but you get the picture.
That is actually a good point. I fully agree that we are at a level where AI can displace some labor due to an increase in productivity, if demand for the increased productivity does not exist.
In software development, a theoretical 20% increase in productivity without a 20% increase in demand could technically mean that somewhere in between 0% and 20% of your workforce is now unnecessary. And this is indeed true across many other industries.
And I fully agree we don't need 100% unemployment to have catastrophic results. Hell, 10% unemployment is already enough to make things pretty grim out there.
But you will agree that "AI increases productivity that reduces the amount of labor needed" is substantially different from "AI replaces humans". Framing is important if we want to have a meaningful conversation and speak the same language.
> But you will agree that "AI increases productivity that reduces the amount of labor needed" is substantially different from "AI replaces humans"
You are 100% spot on! thats the thing that really annoys me about futuroligist breathlessly saying "a new economy!" and all that junk, is that its just like the advent of steam, electricity, or the telegraph or lorries, or desktop computing.
The thing that futurloigist _forget_ is that these things caused unemployement, and huge social change.
