Why AI Will Create More Jobs

There’s a lot of fear about AI replacing humans because AI is able to carry out knowledge work more effectively and efficiently than humans can. Once we have AI powered robots, manual labor will also be replaced.

However, this is true only if you look at the current model of employment. That is, a rich person or a few of them will pool up their resources to start a company, then they will hire people to work in that company. If AI can do the same job while being cheaper, the company has no reason to keep you employed.

But, if AI is so cheap, what’s stopping the employees themselves from starting their own business?

Mini Jobs

I call this advancement “Mini Jobs” because instead of large companies, we will have smaller ones doing one specific thing.

Let’s take a company like Microsoft for example. Once AI gets good enough, Microsoft will have no reason to employ more than a handful of software engineers. But if AI is so good that they can easily be used to replace an engineer with 20 years of experience, then it’s good enough to run a whole business.

The laid off engineer could leverage AI to start a software company solving a specific need because many people are unhappy with Microsoft’s generic offerings. Instead of trying to please everyone, that small company will please a specific niche, and generate loads of money for the engineer.

Mini Datacenters

Another fear is that power will be concentrated among a few billionaires like Elon Musk, and companies like AWS. But if AI is so good, people can simply learn how to build and operate their own data center. We’ll then have these “mini datacenters” powering people’s own products. Data centers will become similar to our current Internet infrastructure, where most people have a modem connecting them to the network. Most people will have their own datacenters, managed by AI.

We’ve seen how general purpose foundational models become more and more ineffective and costly to operate as the size of their training data increases. These mini datacenters will pair perfectly with open source models trained on specific data sets to solve specific problems in society.

Artists who don’t starve

One issue with being an artist like a painter or singer, is that you’ll be starving most of the time because people don’t like your art.

AI can easily solve this issue by creating art that people actually care about. By using statistical models to understand the specific types of art that people love to pay for, more people can become artists without risking starvation.

I predict that we will soon have a boom of artists making good money from AI generated artwork.

Some people claim that AI generated artwork is boring and generic. I’d argue that if people are paying for it, it’s good enough.

There are many people right now working jobs they hate when they’d rather be singing or playing a guitar. With AI, they can be sure that whatever art they create will be liked by others. By generating income from their passion, they can avoid working dead-end jobs.

AI Will Save us All

Both Feudalism and its successor Capitalism took advantage of the fact that a single person (or a few) without enough resources can’t generate income on their own. That’s why they need to work together with other colleagues in order to make a living.

AI will kill this model by giving power to the individual, who will be able to create their own job instead of having to rely on a “lord”.