I've heard this schtick so many times I have a name for it - the "magic job theory": "AI will create all these jobs that no one today can even conceive of!"

And yet no one can name these jobs.

In contrast, we have all sorts of writing all through the industrial revolution, and everyone knew what the jobs were going to be, whether it was coal mining, working in factories, making bicycles, or eventually "The Graduate"'s "plastics".

There are about 10 million professional drivers in the United States, though that includes a lot of people who drive as a second job. If self-driving cars become as good as humans, what will all these people do for a living?

Most paid writing is commercial writing, particularly since the Internet has exposed those hundreds of millions of people who are willing to write for free.

Most commercial writing doesn't need to be excellent - it just needs to be competent. LLMs aren't that far from being competent. Where today we have one editor and eight writers, if LLMs get even a little better, we'll have one editor and no writers. It's very hard to believe that this huge glut of competent human writers thrown onto the market in a few years won't degrade the value of human writing, even if it is somewhat better than the AI.

The stated plan is for AI to destroy almost every job, not just writers and drivers but lawyers, computer programmers, burger flippers, radiologists, and factory workers.

So what are we going to do for jobs? Be influencers? Or AI prompt engineers?

The reason that the 0.1% are pouring trillions into AI is that they expect to make their money back, and more. The place that that money is expected to come from is our wages.

Saying AI will create these magical new jobs that will replace the hundreds of millions of jobs that it plans to kill without being able to name any of those jobs, is just wishful thinking.