Kyle Balmer argues AI will replace specific tasks, not whole jobs. A Reddit user reported becoming three times more efficient with AI, creating a choice for companies: keep the same staff and gain productivity, or cut workers as output per person rises.
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AI is not going to replace jobs, it's going to replace tasks. What we're going to see over the next couple of years at least, is the replacement of individual tasks by AI. We won't necessarily replace whole jobs, not quite yet, but instead what we're going to see is, as this Reddit comment points out, work that used to take multiple people can suddenly be done by one person. That one staff member is suddenly three times more efficient. So in the abstract, the company now has a decision to make. Do you keep the same number of employees and basically three times the efficiency of the whole company, or do you replace two of those employees, keep the one plus AI, and cut costs? This is fundamentally the decision lots of companies are going to be making moving forward.