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It's a striking inversion of the pandemic, when the people who could work from home were the safest — and the essential workers who couldn't were the most exposed. That inversion is also why (like Edwards) Kinder rejects a standard San Francisco answer for AI job loss, which is to skip straight to universal basic income. If everyone gets a check big enough to replace a displaced software engineer's salary, she asks, why would anyone keep showing up to police the streets, build houses, or staff hospitals?

Casey Newton
6d ago

If David Ricardo woke up and somebody told him all those jobs did get automated, and then asked him, 'What do you think the prime-age employment rate is in 2026?', I think he'd be surprised to be told it was the highest it's ever been other than 2000. What David Ricardo ended up missing is that you have these economics of structural change, where everything that got automated became cheap. People had more money to spend, and then they started spending it on services.

1w ago

But as AI becomes more and more agentic — as we turn over more complex and longer-lasting tasks to intelligent machines — it's going to be harder and harder to keep them aligned with what humans actually want. And if there's one thing humans will always have a comparative advantage at, it's knowing what we want.

2w ago

I don't think we're going to call them engineers. But if we talk about people writing code, or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more engineers than there are today. That's my prediction.

2w ago

Agents aren't copilots; they are replacements. They do work in place of humans — think call centers and the like, to start — and they have all of the advantages of software: always available, and scalable up-and-down with demand.

4w ago

If you or I go and vibe-code something, we think we've replaced the engineer, replaced the accountant, replaced the lawyer. But then you actually look — that was the first 80% of the job. The extra 20%, it turns out, is all the value creation of that profession. All the expertise and domain knowledge is in that last 20%, not the text that got generated.

4w ago

why judgment becomes more valuable as routine work gets automated, and how to build the prioritization muscle required to move faster, stay focused, and make better decisions when everything is changing.

1mo ago

A core part of JFK's message was that innovation without inclusion is not progress; it is a slow-motion eviction of the American worker from their own economy.

1mo ago

For years, tech companies have asked contractors to behave like machines so that machines can learn to behave like people. Now Meta is asking its own full-time employees, who once occupied the top of the digital labor hierarchy, to do the same.

1mo ago

AI-assisted writing is creeping into newsrooms under the guise of efficiency. But the tradeoff may be more profound than publishers are willing to admit.

1mo ago

There's a crucial difference between asking AI to categorize things repeatedly versus using it to build code that handles structured data through APIs. Yash used OpenClaw to build a Slack digest that pulls notifications via API endpoints—AI built the tool once, but the categorization runs on deterministic code (except for the final action/read/FYI sorting).

2mo ago

So far, AI is replacing tasks, not jobs. Alex Imas and Soumitra Shukla have written that as long as there are a few things that only humans can do, this pattern can be expected to hold.

2mo ago

This Generative AI momentum is creating a lot of optimism around the potential of one person companies or solopreneurs using agentic AI. If Agentic AI works out, small businesses might have a new array of powerful tools as well.

2mo ago

The fact that we call most of the new tasks "services" doesn't change the fact that the set of new human tasks seems to have expanded faster than machines have replaced old ones.

2mo ago

Until now, working with AI has been copy-paste. You take information from one app, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude, get a result, then manually move that result into another app. You're the middleman between AI and the tools you use in your work. Plugins remove you from that role.

3mo ago
stratechery.com
Agents Over Bubbles

In other words, many of the biggest flaws from the original ChatGPT have been substantially mitigated, at least for verifiable use cases like coding: LLMs are much more likely to be right the first time, they reason over their results to increase their chances, and now agents actively verify the results without humans needing to be in the loop.

3mo ago

The deeper problem appears to be that the tech is not a meaningful job creator or increasing productivity outside of a few roles even in technology companies.

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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