After reading this very popular tweet today, it exceeded 10 million views in just half a day. Interested friends can take a look, but what I want to express is the opposite viewpoint.
It’s best to read the original text fully before looking at the content below, thank you.
AI Fantasies Brought by the Industrial Revolution
Indeed, many friends have recently been worried that the development of AI will replace human jobs, creating a vicious cycle. However, I think this resembles a well-written scenario novel rather than a path that is bound to occur on a macro level.
Historically, the real shocks of technological replacement have occurred during the two industrial revolutions, where steam engines, electrification, and assembly lines directly swept away handicrafts and many low-skilled jobs, leading to unemployment, wage pressure, and social conflicts. These facts have genuinely occurred, but in the end, they did not penetrate demand; instead, they opened up a longer cycle of prosperity.
The key reason lies not in the morality of technology itself, but in the fact that productivity improvements lead to price declines, and price declines release demand expansion. Demand expansion triggers larger capital expenditure cycles, such as railways, power grids, factories, and urbanization. Capital expenditure then reabsorbs employment and simultaneously fosters new industries, such as automobiles, appliances, chemicals, retail, and finance.
Therefore, the main narrative of the industrial revolution is not that labor replacement equates to recession, but rather that labor replacement can reduce costs, resulting in market expansion that transforms into capital expenditure and evolves into re-employment. Initially, there will be an impact on the market, but in the long term, it may not be a bad thing. Although this example is not entirely accurate, it illustrates the same principle, which is the layoffs in state-owned enterprises.
Returning to this framework regarding AI, the point of contention becomes very clear. AI will indeed create structural replacements in white-collar jobs, but whether it leads to a macro unemployment spiral depends on the relative sizes of two variables: the demand gap created by layoffs, and whether it is greater than the new demand expansion and capital expenditure that AI brings by reducing costs.
If the result of AI is to lower service prices and turn originally expensive cognitive labor into a common good, then demand will be released, and new supply systems will expand. Data centers, electricity, networks, security, compliance, hardware, and edge computing will all become new investment chains, which will naturally absorb employment.
Conversely, if AI merely becomes a tool for layoffs to reduce operating costs on corporate profit statements without forming sufficiently large new demand and new investment, it is more likely to lead to such a spiral. Therefore, I believe the core issue is not whether "AI will bring layoffs," but history has proven that technological replacement does not equate to market collapse. What truly determines the macro outcome is whether new demand and new investment can outpace the negative feedback from layoffs.
More indicative data:
1. Look at the capital expenditure and the investment rate of GDP, especially whether electricity, power grids, data centers, semiconductors, and communications have entered an upward cycle.
2. Observe whether the real wage purchasing power has improved due to the decline in service prices.
3. Examine the structure of rising unemployment rates, whether it is short-term job migration or long-term unemployment.
4. View corporate profit margins; if profit margins rise simultaneously with demand expansion and investment expansion, that is the path of the industrial revolution.
In summary, I do not believe that AI will necessarily lead to a structural collapse of the market. It is more like the innovations brought by the third industrial revolution; I still remember back around the year 2000, creating a website could cost thousands of dollars, but now the cost of creating a typical website is nearly zero.
The changes brought by AI may reduce “physical” labor and lean more towards “mental” and “structural” work. For example, in the future, there may not be a need to use basic programming languages to write code; it might just require providing AI with narratives and requirements. This change may lead to some programmers being laid off, but the demand for roles like "structural designer" will increase. Additionally, corporate costs will decrease.
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