Comment by garethsprice

Good paper from 2015: "Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation": https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/inline-files/W...

tl;dr: Technology eliminates tasks not jobs, ie. automating routine work while making the remaining human parts more valuable: judgement, problem-solving, knowing what to build and why, communicating with a bunch of stakeholders.

This judgement and communication layer has been stubbornly hard to automate across every previous wave of tech and so it will be with this one.

Even if AI is capable of good judgement in a problem space, are the users of the AI able to ask the right questions to get it to express that judgement? (speaking from experience: no).

Banging out syntactically correct code loses value but communication and end-to-end ownership gains value; translating vague C-suite wishlists into working systems, knowing when _not_ to automate or use AI, navigating organizational constraints, understanding the domain you are working in, the organization you are working in, and directing technology in their service.

As long as there are capital owners they will have a need to exchange that capital for skilled, professional judgement in high value tasks, just the nature of what tasks are considered high value will adapt over time, as it always has.