we’ll all be able to kick up our heels and live in a post-work utopia, but I think there are reasons to be suspicious. Do you think that these sorts of predictions could actually come true? I am very skeptical that they could come true, even though I think AI has the potential to be a new type of technology. And the reason I’m skeptical that they could come true is that we’ve seen waves of technological change before. We’ve seen revolutionary technologies in the past. We’ve also seen the same doubts and fears expressed in those contexts, and they have not come true in the past. It’s certainly possible that AI could be so labor-displacing and revolutionary in its effects that it results in enormous job loss. That’s certainly possible. But there are two things we should keep in mind. One is that it’s very early in the game. And what we’ve seen so far from artificial intelligence is that the labor market effects, the employment effects, have been very, very small. And secondly, to the extent that there have been any effects, it’s more like an extension and a deepening of what computers do. That is to say, it’s deepening the grooves along which technological change has occurred over the past thirty-five years. It isn’t a radically new kind of change. Now, because we cannot predict the future, when we think about the likely effects of a change, like a new technology or a new form of automation, the best indicator of what we should expect is to look at the past. So what does the past tell us about the relationship between automation and job loss? Let’s start with what automation is. Automation is machines of some kind replacing things that workers used to do. This can be of two kinds. An entire worker can be replaced. Consider a spinner in the nineteenth century who sits at home and turns wool into cloth. And then a new technology enters the textile sector that automates spinning, making the spinner obsolete. The result is that the entire job is gone. But then consider a technician in the early twentieth century, when electricity enabled the invention of the electric drill. So now, with the electric drill, the manual task of drilling is replaced by an electric one, and later by a battery-operated one. The worker is not replaced, what’s replaced is a tool. These are two kinds of automation. Both of them have one effect, which is that productivity increases, but they don’t both necessarily displace the worker. In one case, that of the electric drill, it just changes the task. In the other case, it replaces the worker. When you say productivity increases, can you just clarify what you mean by that? It means that more stuff can be made with the same amount of labor. There are different ways of measuring that. Sometimes labor productivity is measured by looking at how much you can produce with the same workers in a certain amount of time, but that doesn’t really express what increasing labor productivity is. It’s not so much increasing production in the same amount of time but increasing production with the same amount of labor inputs. Now, those are hard to measure, and because they’re hard to measure, people substitute by looking at time. Setting that aside, the main thing productivity increases do is make it possible to make more stuff with the same amount of work, or the same amount of stuff with less work. Either way, it potentially means you have to hire fewer people. Because you may have to hire fewer people, that often means people do end

up losing their jobs when new technology is implemented. That’s the rational basis for the fear that technological innovation will result in job loss. Now, what we’ve seen in the past is that there’s a difference between job losses in certain jobs and job losses in the aggregate — that is, total job loss. The theoretical question, which we’ll come back to, is: Why is it that you can have job losses without having a decrease in overall employment? You mentioned that AI builds off of what computers can do. How is AI unique as a technological innovation? Let’s start with what computers do. Computers are really good at doing calculations. That means easily defined, easily replicable tasks with clear rules — for example, mathematical problems, algebraic problems, and logical problems. These have very clear rules. If you just give somebody a problem, they know exactly what to do with it. Microsoft Excel is flashing through my brain as you’re talking about it. In the labor market, these easily defined, easily replicable tasks were part of what’s called middle-skill jobs — such as building spreadsheets, doing accounting, and solving graphics problems. When you say those jobs were lost, what did they look like before and after? As I said before, there are two kinds of ways in which computers replaced people doing this work. One is when they replaced actual workers. So, imagine an accountant who had been employed in a firm to use spreadsheets or to make their surveys and annual profit-and-loss statements. Now with automation, a computer does that, and you don’t need the accountant anymore. But the second way it’s done is by replacing particular aspects of a job. So imagine that an accountant in 1970 was somebody who did three sorts of tasks in his job. But then, suppose that two of those tasks are taken over by a computer. So instead of doing manual calculations for the different kinds of losses and products, he just puts them in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet does the work. You’ve retained the accountant, but the kinds of tasks that the accountant is doing have now shifted. And it’s clear why that would lead to productivity gains. The firm can hire fewer accountants, and those accountants can take on more clients, do more work in the same amount of time. And while the accountant has kept his job, the job has become more productive. So that doesn’t necessarily result in job loss. In fact, the jobs themselves being automated don’t have to mean those jobs disappear. So, to give a good example that you sometimes see, automatic teller machines (ATMs) replaced what were called bank tellers. It was predicted that as ATMs increased in number, bank tellers as a profession would be wiped out — the job itself would disappear. What happened instead was that, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, the number of ATMs increased exponentially across the economy, but the number of job listings for bank tellers actually rose by about 10 to 15 percent, I think. So, how could this happen? How can something that makes a bank teller obsolete end up actually creating more bank teller jobs? Well, it’s because what happened was that ATMs increased bank profitability, and as banks increased their profits, they opened up more bank branches. More bank branches meant greater demand for jobs within banks. But why would there be more demand for bank teller jobs? Why not other jobs? What ended up happening was, just as with the accountant, who started using computers and

spreadsheets as his job changed, the job of the bank teller changed. Bank tellers were simply clerks in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Automation reinvented them as customer relations jobs. So now, when you walk into a bank, there are going to be bank tellers, but they don’t sit behind a window cashing out your checks. They greet you, and then you go and sit down with them, and you talk to them about what kind of financial services you want, etc. Automation and new technology are typically associated with job loss. So how could an increase in that technology not result in job loss? This is where I think people miss the overall picture by focusing only on part of it. Bringing in new techniques, new machines, and new technology does oftentimes displace existing labor by making it redundant. That does result in job loss. But people think that as the same technology proliferates and spreads across the economy, it will take up more and more of other people’s jobs. And so unemployment increases, and people will be left scrounging around for jobs. There are two problems with this. One is that it operates on the assumption that the total number of jobs in the economy is fixed at any given point. And over time, that same number of jobs is reduced by technology coming in. But the most important fact about capitalism is that the economy is always growing. So there is a constant process by which, as the economy grows, there’s also a demand for more jobs — sometimes more jobs of the same kind, and other times, entirely new jobs, entirely new occupations that didn’t exist before. When you take that dynamic aspect into account, here’s what you find. As new technology comes in, it of course displaces labor, but it also increases productivity. And what do the increases in productivity mean? They mean that the economy potentially is growing even faster as it becomes more efficient. As it grows faster and becomes more efficient, it means new plants, new shops, and new hotels opening, which also creates demand for more labor. So one thing that happens is that, as people are displaced from one sector of the economy or one factory where new technology has come in, because demand is growing in other sectors, they’re sucked into new jobs. This is something Karl Marx pointed out very early on. He says that there are two things happening simultaneously in capitalism. One is that technical change, which is the term he used for new machines coming in, displaces labor. But that same technical change also increases the pace of economic growth. And that means that there’s a demand for labor in the other sectors of the economy that are growing faster. And the labor that was displaced is sucked up into the new ones. Two things are happening at the same time. What the fear of job loss and the fear of technology are based on is what economists call a “partial equilibrium” model of the economy. You’re only looking at one sector or one line, and you’re projecting onto the rest of the economy what’s happening in that one line. But in fact, sectors are related to each other. And there are what we call linkage effects. What happens in one sector affects what happens in other sectors. So the technological change in one can speed up the economy. And that means also speeding up the rate of labor absorption in other sectors. People who are laid off in one sector get picked up in other sectors. This is why, over the decades and the centuries, technological change has been a constant

in capitalism. Enormous new technologies have come in. Waves of technology have displaced labor. And what you see is jobs in particular sectors disappearing. But there has never been a long-term tendency for unemployment to increase as new technology is introduced. In fact, in the history of capitalism, the level of unemployment has remained basically constant, oscillating around the rate of accumulation. So in the aggregate, technological change per se should not be feared. What we should focus on is how to deal with it and how the distributive consequences of technological change occur. Can you use the historical record to talk more about the dynamics of technological innovation within and across sectors? There have been waves of technological change in the history of capitalism. One was the early nineteenth century, when textiles, spinning, and weaving were automated. Then there was the mid-nineteenth century, when steam power took over factories. The late nineteenth century was when electricity and electrification came in. You look at any one of these times where people in the older professions were experiencing technological shifts and being pushed out of those professions, and what you find is two things happening simultaneously. Income increases because technological change means that the economy is growing faster. And as demand increases, entirely new services and entirely new jobs are created by the people whose income is growing. And the workers who have been displaced in one sector find jobs in the other. The other thing is that it all kind of depends on where the automation is happening. Suppose the automation is happening in what’s called the capital goods industries — industries that produce machines that other industries buy to make their products — or industries that produce raw materials for other industries. Now, if they become more efficient, the price of machines will go down. The price of raw materials will go down. As those prices go down, production becomes much more profitable for the companies that buy the raw materials and machines at lower prices. So those downstream industries now produce more. They invest more. And as they expand faster, they suck in more labor. So there are two sources of job growth. One is what we call an income effect. As people’s incomes go up, they raise the level of aggregate demand, which calls forth new jobs and new occupations, oftentimes in the service sector but also in manufacturing. The other is what’s called a price effect: if the technological change is in the machine goods sector, then sectors that use the cheaper machinery can expand faster, which sucks in more employment as well. This goes back to what we said about Marx’s model. Two things are happening simultaneously. Technical change is throwing people into what he called the reserve army of labor. And the people in the reserve army of labor are being sucked up into new jobs because technological change increases aggregate income. Now, we don’t know whose income is being increased. It might be the capitalist’s income. It might be the worker’s income, but the economy doesn’t care about that. It’s aggregate income that’s being increased. The other thing technical change does is that it lowers the price of inputs, which means that people using those inputs can expand their production at a faster rate. The aggregate result is that jobs are being lost in one sector, but overall employment in the economy is not declining. And

that means the overall tempo, not just of economic growth, but of employment and employment absorption, is going up. So when you say the reserve army of labor, you’re referring to people who might have lost their original employment due, in this case, to automation but then may be hired in either another sector or potentially within that same sector at another firm . . . Well, the reserve army of labor is people who are unemployed. That’s what it means. Unemployment can result from automation, as you said. But the point is, the picture people have in their minds is that because of automation the ranks of the unemployed will grow and grow and grow. My point is that’s just half the picture. The people who are being thrown out of their jobs because of automation do not become a permanently unemployed pool of labor. They are sucked up into new jobs because the economy as a whole is still growing. The reserve army of labor, which is the ranks of the unemployed, therefore does not grow over time. It actually remains fairly stable at a very low level. Why do you think there’s so much anxiety then about the coming wave of AI and the potential job loss? It’s a very good question because it’s not new. If you look back over the past 180 years or so, and you go to the business press to see what they’re saying about jobs, it’s the same story. In the 1870s, the 1920s, the 1950s, and then the 1980s, it’s the same story. Every time there’s a wave of technological innovations, the business press says, “Well, this is the end. This is it. It’s the apocalypse. We’ll never get more jobs again.” The only sense I can make of it is this pervasive analytical error that the journalistic core makes. I don’t blame workers for worrying about this, but you do kind of wonder where journalists get their education, because of course they should know the difference between specific sectoral effects of technical change and economy-wide effects. You cannot project what’s happening in one sector to the entire economy because the way that sector feeds into the rest of the economy is multidimensional. Sure, people are being laid off, but those same layoffs are also lowering input prices, accelerating economic growth, and boosting the incomes of people downstream of that sector and some within it. You have to net out all those effects. It’s a very good sign for us that this is not the first time revolutionary technology has come into the economy. If you look back at other instances where revolutionary technology did come in, it was never an apocalypse. It never has been. At least if we think that this is not qualitatively different from the other times that technology has come in, we shouldn’t expect qualitatively different results either. Now, there is one difference that AI has relative to other kinds of technologies and other waves of innovation. Many technological innovations are really only about this or that technique or this or that task — think of X-ray machines that make diagnoses easier, or manual drill operators being replaced by electric drill operators. These are ways of improving tasks. Then there’s something called general-purpose technologies. General-purpose technologies are innovations that don’t just improve particular tasks or particular kinds of jobs, but fan out across the economy and simultaneously — potentially at least — improve many, many different sorts of tasks. Electricity is one example. With electricity, you were able to suddenly harness it to

all different sorts of production techniques. Computers are another example. They can be used in many, many different sorts of settings. AI is something like that. So where AI differs is that it won’t just have a sectoral effect. It won’t just make this or that line or this or that technology better. It’ll improve technologies all over the place. That’s an important difference, and it could mean its effects are more widespread, but it’s not necessarily revolutionary because we’ve seen general-purpose technologies before. So, while it could mean AI will have much broader effects, I don’t think it’s unique. Now, one thing we should keep in mind is that because it’s a general-purpose technology, these tend to take a little bit longer to exercise their effects because they aren’t just implemented in, say, an auto factory or a textile factory. They’re going to be implemented all over the place, which means it’s going to take some time for them to filter through the economy and for their full impact to be seen. That’s an important distinction. But none of that, I think, changes the general analysis, which is that in the past, when general-purpose technologies have come around, we’ve seen that economies adjust, jobs are lost, but then new occupations come up, jobs are picked up elsewhere, and the overall unemployment rate goes through a brief transition but then settles down again to its normal place. So, on a macro level, the most likely scenario is that there will not be a net job loss, but rather a displacement of workers, either from one sector to a

Wikipedia advocacy shapes LLM values

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Using mirrord to verify AI-SRE fixes against the staging cluster

Part II of two. See Part I for the recipe. In Part I we’ve discussed how you can plug mirrord into your AI-SRE so it can autonomously test its fix in the real cluster. In this post, we’ll show this running end-to-end on a real Kubernetes cluster against HolmesGPT , the only OSS AI-SRE we found that is self-hostable. We planted two bugs to test both possible verdicts: PASS when the patched run clears the alert’s SLO without any regressions, REJECT when it doesn’t (the patched run still violates the alert’s SLO, or cleared the SLO but added a regression). Flow: HolmesGPT investigates an alert and returns a markdown report. A small Claude wrapper turns the report into a code patch. The verifier runs that patch under mirrord exec , compares against an unpatched baseline, and returns a verdict tied to the alert’s actual