Bailey: Can AI make cutlery?

Typical central banker perspective on AI. His entire speech is focused on the effect of AI on productivity. Not on people. Bailey talks about AI like it's just another shiny new tech advance, like Bessemer's process for making steel, or like networking computers to create the internet.

AI isn't that. It isn't just a more efficient way to do things. Making better steel on an industrial scale displaced the labor of craftsmen - they could not compete and lost their jobs. But the market expanded because good steel got cheaper and more people made stuff with it. The end result was more jobs, not less, and higher economic productivity.

AI in these early stages will create some new jobs. But every time an AI is trained to do something, the human version of that skill is permanently replaced. There might be a new human skill created at the same time, but that also will eventually be done by an AI. And the list of new labor opportunities for people will always be shrinking, not growing.

So economic productivity skyrockets because AI works cheap. All the central bankers see a rising GDP and think everything is great. The class of capital owners - the rich - they're doing great too, for a minute. But the need for human labor gets smaller and smaller, and it's damn difficult to run a consumer-driven economy when nobody has an income.

A labor economy isn't the only way to get and distribute resources, we've got options. It isn't actually jobs that we need to preserve, it's income. There's ways to do that. But if people like Bailey don't start talking about and planning those ways *right now*, we are all gonna be proper fucked when economies start to fall apart and we have no plan B.