Kevin Surace argues AI will eliminate specific tasks, not jobs, pointing to illustrations and customer support as examples. He notes that past technologies like computers and smartphones sparked similar fears but created new jobs overall. Productivity gains lower costs, raise demand, and lead to net job growth.
The impact on AI, everybody thinks, oh, it's jobs. Well, I like to say certain tasks are going away. Like I used to pay someone to do illustrations for me and I don't need to do that anymore, right? Because I can get AI to do that. I used to pay for people to write blog posts. I don't do that anymore because I can interact with AI to do that. Customer support is another one, right? AI virtual assistants are doing a better job than the people. However, what we have found in technology for hundreds of years is as technology comes along that makes people more productive, drives the cost of goods and services down because you're producing more for less, that drives the need for human resources up. And so this is how it's always been. People don't realize this, right? The desktop computer showed up from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s, and people were saying, that's it, we're going to lay off all these people. Well, we did. The secretarial pools went away and some other people went away. But all of a sudden there were all these IT jobs to maintain the PCs that were on people's desktops. And so, in fact, you know, we ended up employing more people, not less people, and we made people more productive at their own desk, etc. It's true with the internet, it's true with smartphones, it's true with AI.
