George Hahn

Last year, he told Axios the white-collar bloodbath could spike unemployment to 20%.

In 2023, when the AI narrative felt more optimistic, Elon Musk said, There will come a point where no job is needed.

AI will be able to do everything.

In 2021, a year before launching ChatGPT, Sam Altman wrote, Translation?

AI is an extinction level event for workers, according to those who benefit most from AI being an extinction level event.

Their story is as old as the Industrial Revolution.

In Narrative Economics, How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller argued that fears about machines replacing human labor contributed to 19th century economic downturns.

Later, science fiction reinforced the narrative, feeding the incorrect belief that automation caused the Great Depression.

Fears about the rise of computers exacerbated the double-dip recession of the early 1980s.

The danger, according to Schiller, isn't labor disruption, but the narrative's negative feedback loop.

The economic hardships created by a temporary recession or depression are mistaken for the job-destroying effects of the machines, which creates pessimistic economic responses as self-fulfilling prophecies.

I believe we have the makings for the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy Schiller warned about, as AI washing masks inflation, tariffs, and overhiring.

Consider tech workers, the supposed canaries in the coal mine.

Net technology employment in the U.S.

grew from 8.7 million in 2020 to 9.6 million in 2023 and has remained flat since then.

Not great, but by no means apocalyptic.

Oracle, which laid off 18% of its workforce in March and is projecting negative cash flow until 2030, isn't capturing AI efficiencies, it's trading people for chips.

Last month's announcement that Meta would cut 10% of its workforce fed AI anxiety, but in reality Meta is returning to its 2021 headcount.

Microsoft's 7% layoff target would reduce its headcount to 2022 levels, but even after those cuts, Microsoft would still have 47% more workers than it did the year before the pandemic.

Since XAI's 2023 founding, its headcount has grown to an estimated 5,000 people.