noahpinion.blog

Roundup #86: Unintended consequences

High-skilled immigrants don't compete with locals for a fixed pool of jobs; they lure investment to an area, so that the pool of jobs expands. This second effect, more often than not, outweighs the competitive effect, so that native-born Americans actually benefit from the presence of foreign skilled workers.

noahpinion.blog

Why I didn't sign the "We Must Act Now" statement (yet)

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the inventors of modern AI, famously predicted the end of human radiologists within a few years, only to see a boom in hiring and salaries for radiologists when it turned out that AI actually complemented their skills. So how the heck are businesspeople and inventors supposed to 'steer' AI toward being complementary to human workers?

asteriskmag.com

Boarding China’s Last Bus

China's AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.

platformer.news

The CEO of AWS on why Amazon is hiring 11,000 interns and junior employees

Excel may have eliminated the jobs of people who calculated by hand, but those people learned to use computers — and the labor force expanded overall.

platformer.news

How to help knowledge workers who lose their jobs to AI

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?

platformer.news

An economist's case against the AI jobs-pocalypse

I think some of the conversation around AI is deeply, deeply classist …. It feels like some of that comes from being a little high on your own supply of how amazing your technology is when you hawk it. And it comes from this idea that some workers are better or more special than others, which makes your technology better or more special. That's also a way of saying the value of other workers is a lot lower — so it doesn't matter if they're displaced, it only matters if these workers are displaced.

longreads.com

Short Naps, Long Hours: How Autism Clinics Squeeze Medicaid Dollars Out of Preschoolers

Medicaid often pays about $70 per hour ($83 in North Carolina) for therapy largely provided by workers with high school diplomas who earn around $20.

noahpinion.blog

Yes, Europeans are poorer than Americans

The people who have the money and skills to move between the U.S. and Europe are probably disproportionately highly paid professional workers (who can earn more in the U.S.), while working-class people who would like to take advantage of Europe's urban safety and generous welfare states find it harder to move.

ai-supremacy.com

What JFK can teach us about AI job loss

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.

noahpinion.blog

AI's big messaging pivot

In fact, this shift represents more evolution than revolution. Years ago, Altman did seem to generally agree with the folk consensus that AI's purpose is to make most or all humans obsolete; in 2014 he warned that we could be faced with "a new idle class", and explored the idea of Universal Basic Income as a remedy.

noahpinion.blog

Salarymen, specialists, and small businesses

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.

ai-supremacy.com

The Problem with AI Anxiety in 2026

We shouldn't seek to quell AI anxiety, we should embrace and analyze it. The truth is, the U.S. labor market is in serious trouble, and it has little to do with AI so far.

ai-supremacy.com

The U.S. Labor Market and its AI problem

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.