Benjamin Todd
speaker
4,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard 28 May
Benjamin Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Though how it exactly shakes out depends on different industries and how much more of the thing people would want.
With something like accounting, most people only need to do their, they want to do their accounts once a year.
So if they can use AI to do that for a tenth of the cost, roughly speaking, they will just spend a lot less on accounting and get the thing done.
But most things aren't like that.
Like if you could, if a luxury holiday became only 10% of the cost, I think many people would just take like a lot more holidays and they would do more of it.
And so, yeah, many, like if you're a company making software and you can just produce more software and sell more of it and get more profits, that will often happen instead.
That does seem to be a common pattern where partial automation causes rising or steady employment and wages.
And then when you get to really thoroughgoing automation, eventually employment does decrease.
When ATMs rolled out, there was lots of news stories about how bank tellers, like the people who count money in bank branches, would be made unemployed.
And actually it was true that the number of bank tellers needed to run a bank branch decreased by about half, which you might think would half employment.
But what that actually meant was that now a much smaller number of employees could run a bank branch, which meant it was like much cheaper to run bank branches, which then meant they actually opened way more branches and overall employment actually rose for another 20 years.
And now the bank tellers would just spend, they wouldn't spend their time counting money.
They'd spend their time like talking to customers about their mortgage or troubleshooting stuff.
But then after that 20 year period, we had smartphones and people started to just do online banking.
And so they wouldn't, they would like kind of totally bypass bank branches.
Then since that point, employment has fallen a lot.
So for each job would hit a different point depending on how easy it is for AI to do that job.
Yeah.
People can also move into new jobs.
And what should generally be happening is...
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