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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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I hear you, but i disagree - at least based on what we know presently. If you look at US unemployment stats (which are a bit fucked from Covid), they jump in 2023 a little, but have since been decreasing each year since (employment is increasing). You can argue it's because the Trump admin is cooking the books in hwo they report unemployment, but an almost identical trend is seen in the UK stats.. Canada.. Germany.. Italy (barely even an AI blip in their stats)..
Are they all cooking the books?
If you believe the AI hype crew, AI is "improving in leaps and bounds weekly", but that simply doesn't align with reality.
Yeah, LLM AIs (the predominant AI tech in the AI© industry) have increased in quality as the sum total of all earth's investor-class capital is poured into them... But that isn't being translated in significant real world applications and job losses.
Companies tried (and are trying) AI©, and have mostly found it just isn't any better or more reliable than a human in the vast majority of real world applications.
If you are a white collar worker and you only make a few minor mistakes now and then - boss doesn't care, you're human. On the other hand if you're a white collar worker and you make only a couple mistakes now and then but wow they are batshit crazy ones that defy your coworkers attempts to understand them - you're fired. That's AI.
I think there's a reasonable, rational position somewhere between the ai hype cringelords on the one hand, and the egotistical humanists on the other who refuse to believe that ai could ever match human output. I think it's hard to look at what has happened over the past 5 years and have any confidence that ai will be constrained to some trivial, manageable ceiling.
I understand the skepticism people have around claims of the transformative power of ai. Some of those claims are just companies trumpeting their own products, and these breathless tech articles about how this or that tool is going to change everything, it's tiring. But I think that can numb us to the signs that something transformative and irrevocable is actually happening.
Even if we assume that current ai is at its limit of progress (it isn't), if an agent costs $10k/year and works 24 hours per day, there is a far greater tolerance for mistakes than a worker who costs $50k and wants vacations and benefits, and sleep. Gates makes this point, and I think it's strong.
Layoffs due to ai replacing human work are happening in the tech sector already, which I think is arguably a canary in the coal mine situation.