Data: Labor scaremongering about AI is b.s.
Oh, look: AI is creating 5x new jobs for every redundancy, demolishing inaccurate alarmism from local Labor/left
{From Brendan Jowett X account}
The Economist did the thing nobody else bothered to do. They actually counted: They lined up every job AI created against every job it killed.
Customer service down around 10 percent. Admin and secretary roles down about 15.
Then they counted the other side.
Around a million new jobs. Five made for every one destroyed. I sat with that number for a second because it's the exact opposite of what I'd been told to expect.
The biggest winners of the AI boom don't touch a keyboard. They're electricians.
AI lives in enormous buildings full of computers that run hot enough to cook an egg, and those buildings have to be built, wired, cooled, and fed more power than a small city. So the money went there.
Around 320,000 more jobs than normal in the industries that build these things. Electricians. HVAC techs. The people who wire electrical equipment. Utility crews. Companies are so desperate for them that data center jobs pay about 40 percent more than the same work anywhere else.
The white collar side grew too. Roughly 730,000 above trend in the jobs sitting closest to AI. Engineers, software people, data scientists, plus a wave of roles that didn't exist three years ago like the people who label training data and the ones who bolt these systems into real companies.
Even the jobs everyone said to be doomed kept growing. Paralegals up 11 percent. Market research analysts up 6. The national average was around 2.
The million is jobs above where the trend line said we'd be. And "created by the AI boom" is doing heavy lifting. An electrician wiring a data center is real work. It is not AI hiring a million prompt engineers. But strip all of that away and one thing survives.
The apocalypse everyone promised is two years late. The thing that was supposed to erase work quietly built a small city's worth of it instead. We spent two years scared of the wrong number.--Brendan Jowett on X
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