The Week the AI Story Shifted

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on The AI Daily Brief, we're discussing a week in which the AI story shifted, or at least started to fork. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
Now, last week, I told you about an experiment that I was going to be trying, where if Friday happened to be a comparatively slow day in AI, nothing is actually slow, I was going to start experimenting with some sort of weekly recap. The goal of the weekly recap is not just to rehash the same stories we talked about, but to put them in an overarching context that helps you understand in just 20 or 25 minutes what the big point of that week was. For people who aren't able to listen as much, it's a way to, in a single episode, have the broad brushstrokes of what happened, and for folks who are daily listeners, it's a chance to reinforce the themes that you've been hearing all week.
Now, I was very positively pleased with the response. A lot of you provided great feedback, and the numbers also suggest that this is a valuable type of episode to at least consider. I'm not sure that it'll be every week, and I think probably on some weeks I will need to use the open slot on Saturday for this, given that there will often be news that we need to cover in a normal form. But for now, we're going to do another weekly recap. If last week was the week that AI grew up, with the thesis of that episode being that we were starting to see a real maturation of the way that people were engaging with AI on a usage basis, in markets and more, this is almost a part two in some ways, where that new maturity started to diffuse into the stories that we were telling about AI, as well as the type of product priorities we have in the launches. The week kicked off on Sunday with this opinion post from Ezra Klein about why the AI job apocalypse probably won't happen, at least in the way that the most fearful folks have been suggesting for some time now. The main inspiration for Ezra in that post was the Alex Emes essay, What Will Be Scarce that we read a few weeks ago on Long Read Sunday. Now, Alex is a Chicago Booth economist, and the point that he's making in this piece is that when one sector of the economy gets disrupted, new surplus usually flow somewhere, it doesn't just dissipate. The big thing that Alex focuses on in his piece is the idea of the relational sector, where the value of a good or a service that we're consuming is not just based on the good or service itself, but in its particular mode of creation or transmission. In other words, where it matters who made the thing or who's providing the service in what way.
Alex argues that the relational sector definitionally will not be affected by AI in the same way as other parts of the economy and will indeed be the recipient and will see a proportional increase in its demand. Now, as an aside, if you're interested in blowing out this argument even more, you're gonna wanna come back for LRS. It is my most full-throated exploration ever of not only why I don't think there's going to be a job apocalypse, but the specific shape and texture of the type of jobs that I think are going to be created in the wake of AI. So come look back for that. But the point coming back to Ezra Klein is that Alex Emas' essay was not just floating around Twitter, but actually found its way to mainstream discourse. And frankly, mainstream discourse that was not of the group that has been predisposed to actually being sympathetic to AI or tech in general. Ezra Klein is someone who had AI Doomer and Chief Eliezer Yudkowsky on his show last October. In February, he interviewed Anthropics Jack Clark in a show that he titled, How Fast Will AI Agents Rip Through the Economy? Which is what I mean when I say that this essay represents a shift in the story and a shift in the vibe.
Now, a much more inside baseball type of source, exploring similar themes came from A16Z's David George. Why I say, of course, that this one is much more inside, is that A16Z Chief Mark Andreessen has been one of the loudest and most vocal AI accelerationists. And so, it's not surprising to see this particular essay, titled The AI Job Apocalypse is a Complete Fantasy, coming from someone in his organization. Still, what David provides in the piece and why it got resonance beyond just dyed in the wool accelerationists, is that in addition to a lot of opinion, there's also a lot of data in here. One of the charts he shows, which if you're listening is very worth going and looking at, is a chart of US employment by sector since 1850 It shows the decrease in agriculture employment from just under 70 percent back in 1850 down to less than 5 percent today. And more than that, it shows that since 1950, while a couple of areas, most notably manufacturing and construction, have gone consistently down, the real story is a diversification of the labor market into lots of different sectors. Leisure and hospitality, private education and health, professional and business services. A lot of things that didn't really or barely existed back in the middle of last century. He also shows a bunch of Jayvon's paradox type of charts, where a thing that you think would have a negative impact actually had very similar and opposite positive impact. More productive farming, for example, he pointed out, didn't lead to more farmers, but it did lead to more workers, as the world was able to take advantage of more productive farming to get a population boom, as the world could simply support more people. Another example he points to is the shift in the number of bookkeepers and accounting clerks in the wake of the introduction of the spreadsheet. While those two particular jobs would see a steady decline for the next 30 years, other related areas that were enabled by spreadsheets took off, including financial analysts and accountants and auditors. He also points out that productivity gains don't just make existing services cheaper and more accessible to a different set of people but also that they lead to entirely new categories of services that take advantage of that labor surplus. Nail Salon's pet care, exam prep and tutoring, and athletes' coaches' umpires and related work all had less than 100,000 workers in 1990, and now each have between 150,000 and 350,000. He points to the charts that we've started to see that suggest that the demand for software engineers is rising, and I think in an important chart, notes that in mentions of AI workforce impact on public market earnings calls, augmentation outmentioned substitution by a ratio of 8 to 1