AI Is Going to Create More Jobs, Not Fewer

Full episode transcript

AI is going to create more jobs, not fewer. I think it is going to bring us into a golden age and create a better life than most of us can even imagine. The fear says AI will take the jobs we have today and leave everybody standing around with nothing to do. My argument is that this starts with the wrong assumption. It assumes work is a fixed pile, human wants have an ending, and once a machine handles today's tasks, history just stops. Every technological revolution makes certain jobs less useful. A tool augments a job, replaces part of it, or makes the old way of doing it look ridiculous. That can be brutal for the person living through the transition. I am not pretending otherwise. But changing particular jobs is not the same thing as eliminating work itself. We keep confusing those two ideas, and then we use the pain of a real transition to justify a fantasy where humans somehow run out of needs, ambitions, and ideas forever. The funny part is that the first people everybody thought were in danger were truck drivers, factory workers, and people doing manual labor. What I am actually watching change fastest is software engineering. AI was created by people who code, so of course code is one of the things it tends to be very, very good at. The people who built the tool, understand it, and use it constantly are also the people whose work is being rearranged most aggressively. Meanwhile, I am not seeing manual labor, trucking, or factory work change at the same speed. There have been attempts to put driverless vehicles on the road for years, but the physical world is still hard. The contrast matters because the popular picture of automation had the order backward. The screen-based knowledge work looked protected, while the physical jobs looked disposable. Right now, software is taking the harder first hit. That does not make physical work immune. It means this revolution is arriving in a different order than people expected. Business software and software as a service are getting hit in insane ways right now. What it means to create software is changing. Teams are being forced to ask how many people and how much time a product really needs when one capable person can direct agents through a huge amount of the build. But I do not think this is the death of the software engineer, the founder, or technology as a whole. It looks more like a shift in how the work gets done and who learns to work the new way. And the engineers who understand agentic AI are not sitting around mourning. They are using it like crazy. There is a whole culture around vibe coding now, and yes, it feels like a mania. It has the energy of a San Francisco gold rush. Everybody thinks they can build an app. People are staying up all night making products, starting businesses, and trying ideas they would have talked themselves out of six months ago because the build looked too hard or too expensive. The barrier to creating a business has never been lower if you know how to use these tools. Things that used to take a long time to learn, coordinate, or pay somebody else to set up can now be attempted by one determined person. That does not mean every app becomes a good business. Most ideas still have to survive contact with customers, competition, and reality. But the cost of finding out has dropped, and when more people can take a real swing, we should expect more attempts, more strange ideas, and more useful things to come out of them. That is the economic mechanism people miss. AI does not only substitute for a task. It makes new capabilities affordable. It lets a small team try something that previously needed a bigger one. It lets a person move from thinking about a business to actually building the first version. Once the cost of action falls, the number of things worth attempting expands. Some old work gets compressed, absolutely. But compression in one place creates room for activity somewhere else, and we cannot predict all of that activity from the job titles we have today. My deeper reason is simple: humans do not run out of things to do. We always want more. We want a better house, a better business, a better tool, a better experience, a better life for our kids, and then something beyond that. No matter how capable AI gets, we are going to keep finding work because desire does not reach a final checkpoint. Give people more capability and they do not become furniture. They look around, imagine the next thing, and start reaching for it. I also reject the idea that people are not meant to work. Work is in our bones. It gives us meaning because it lets us do, give, provide, build, and become useful to somebody besides ourselves. People say family or hobbies can provide meaning, and of course they can. But what is a family if you cannot be the one who does, gives, and provides? They are just roommates. The point is not that every person needs a miserable job. The point is that contribution is part of how human beings understand themselves. So when AI gets better at the boring, shitty, hard work—the repetitive, annoying bullshit—that does not make human beings irrelevant. It gives us more time and more energy for the parts that require taste, judgment, courage, relationships, imagination, and care. I am not promising that every transition will feel good or that every company will handle it well. I am saying the destination is not a planet where nobody matters. The useful direction is less human life spent grinding through work we hate and more human effort pointed at creation. The job-apocalypse story treats the economy like a room with a fixed number of chairs. AI sits down, so a human has to stand up forever. That is not how I see it. AI can also build a bigger room, make new chairs cheaper, and give more people the tools to design rooms nobody had considered. We are not merely dividing today's work between humans and machines. We are expanding what can be done, what can be afforded, and what one person or one company can realistically attempt. That is why I am not worried about there being no jobs. I am worried about whether people learn fast enough, whether institutions adapt, and whether companies use the tools to create instead of only cutting. Those are real transition problems. But they are different from believing humanity reaches the end of useful activity. New capabilities create new expectations. New expectations create new products, services, responsibilities, and work. Some of the jobs will sound obvious in hindsight, and today we do not even have the language for them. Marc Andreessen has made the point that this doom story shows a severe lack of imagination. That is my paraphrase, not a quotation, and I think the point is exactly right. To say AI takes today's jobs and therefore we are all doomed assumes we never invent another product, another business, another need, another experience, or another form of contribution. It assumes the most inventive species we know suddenly becomes passive at the exact moment it receives the most capable tools it has ever had. I do not buy that for a second. My bet is not that nothing changes. Everything changes. Some roles shrink, some disappear, and a lot of people will have to learn a new way of working. My bet is that humans respond the way humans always respond: we want more, we make more, and we find new ways to matter. AI lowers the barrier, carries more of the grind, and gives ordinary people capabilities that used to belong to large teams. That is not the end of work. That is the beginning of a golden age of work, if we have the imagination to use it.