AI Won’t Kill Jobs – Regulation Might

As AI continues to grow more complex and capable, many are understandably concerned about its economic consequences. The true AI-related danger, however, is not its displacement of jobs, but the regime that will likely emerge to funnel its benefits to the state and its favored rent-seekers.

The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.

In the spring of 1812, British textile workers smashed power looms across Nottinghamshire, convinced that the machines would make their skills worthless and their families destitute. They were right about the disruption. Mills did displace hand-weavers. Communities that had organized themselves around a particular kind of skilled labor were genuinely torn apart. The Luddites weren’t stupid, and they weren’t wrong to feel the ground shifting. They were wrong about one thing: the conclusion. The labor those machines displaced didn’t vanish. It migrated into factories, railways, cities, and industries that hadn’t existed, filling wants that hand-weavers in 1812 couldn’t have imagined needing to satisfy.

We are the Luddites now. Not the smashing machines part—the being right about the disruption and wrong about the conclusion part. Artificial Superintelligence will displace work on a scale that makes the power loom look modest. The disruption is real. The conclusion being drawn from it—permanent mass unemployment, the end of human economic relevance—is the same mistake, wearing better clothes.