As fears grow that artificial intelligence could wipe out white-collar jobs, Andreessen Horowitz general partner David George argues the technology could instead fuel a new wave of economic growth, higher productivity, and new industries.
In a blog post published on Wednesday, George argued that fears of an AI “job apocalypse” rely on what economists call the “lump-of-labor” fallacy, the idea that there is a fixed amount of work available in the economy. “The problem with that premise is that it defies everything we know about people, markets, and economics
Human wants and needs are anything but fixed,” George wrote. “Keynes famously predicted almost a century ago that automation would lead to a 15-hour work-week, but of course Keynes was wrong. He was right that automation created a ‘labor surplus,’ but rather than just sit back and enjoy the ride, we found new and different productive endeavors to fill our time.” CEOs, including SpaceX’s Elon Musk, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that AI could dramatically reduce the need for some white-collar workers in the coming years. At the same time, Economists at the IMF and World Economic Forum have also projected that AI could significantly reshape global labor markets, with entry-level job postings in the US decreasing by 35% over the last two years due to AI adoption.
George argues that those concerns focus too heavily on task replacement while overlooking how productivity gains historically create new industries and economic demand. “If automation caused permanent unemployment, the tractor should have broken the labor market forever,” he wrote. “Instead, farm output almost tripled, which supported a massive increase in population—and far from being permanently unemployed, those workers flowed into previously unimagined industries, factories, stores, offices, hospitals, labs, and eventually services and software.” George also argued that AI is boosting demand for some technical workers. He pointed to…