July 21, 20251 min

AI might start killing jobs en masse and sending inequality to the moon. We don’t know. But it hasn’t yet, and it’s important to understand why each burst of AI pessimism so far has been a false alarm.

Noah Smith with the most level-headed assessment I've read so far about the seemingly omnipresent assumption that AI will be a massive job-killer and the fact that this isn't visible in any data (so far).

I think, in general, people are afraid to say “I don’t know.” I have a hypothesis that “I don’t know” is essentially coded as agreeing with whatever outcome is less politically or culturally aligned. I have no data for this, though.