Machines won’t kill work

Brooks’s column came to mind while reading a Wall Street Journal profile of ChatGPT creator Sam Altman. In the profile Altman professed his support for guaranteed income in the U.S. given his belief that remarkable advances like the one he’s brought to life will erase all sorts of work. Altman is surely right about artificial intelligence powerfully destroying countless sources of income, but that’s why he’s arguably incorrect about the future need for guaranteed income. To see why, it’s important to consider the evolution of work in the age of machines. It’s been all about job destruction, but most certainly without the bread lines. Figure that human beings toiled as farmers for almost all of human existence, only for the tractor and other mechanization of past human effort to destroy the work done by nearly every living human. Was this poverty-inducing? No. The simple truth is that job destruction is a powerful sign of economic growth. That is so because investment is what precedes economic growth, and investment is all about producing more and more goods and services with fewer and fewer labor inputs. The paradoxical reality is that job opportunities are greatest where jobs are most rapidly being destroyed. Yes. Say it over and over again: job creation springs from job destruction. Work emerges from investment that erases old work forms. Which is another way of saying that progress born of investment unearths all new ways to work. The internet, like the tractor before it, had a profound impact on how we work precisely because the internet erased so much of the toil we did before it reared its beautiful head.