April jobs report live updates: Labor market on ‘solid footing’ as US economy surprises with 115,000 job gains

The labor conversation around AI is starting to evolve. Earlier this week, Coinbase (COIN) announced what has, at many tech companies, come to be the baseline expectation: we’re cutting a bunch of jobs because of AI. And in local roles, local industries, and specific situations, cutting staff “due to AI” has a long runway ahead. Even if — or perhaps especially if — these cuts are mostly in the spirit of something management wanted to do anyway. After all, there are many companies with many thousands of roles that do not obviously and directly touch the P&L. In an AI context, you can just cut them and figure it out later. But so, with the tech industry at the center of both the AI investment boom and AI-related job cuts, more voices are starting to weigh in on why the former is the opportunity and the latter is not just a talking point, but an entirely wrong conclusion. Enter David George, head of a16z’s growth fund, who argued forcefully in a post published Wednesday that the “AI will replace jobs” narrative needs to go. George writes, in part: The AI Alarmist, “Permanent Underclass” panic isn’t a convincing story. It isn’t even a new story. It’s the “lump-of-labor” fallacy, with updated branding.The “lump-of-labor” fallacy claims there is a fixed amount of work to be done. It assumes a zero-sum competition between existing workers, and anyone or anything that may do the same job—whether that’s other workers, machines, or in this case, AI. If there is a fixed amount of useful work that needs doing, then if AI does more, humans must do less.The problem with that premise is that it defies everything we know about people, markets and economics. Human wants and needs are anything but fixed. […]Of course AI will absolutely eliminate some tasks and compress some roles (and there’s some evidence that that may already be happening). The shape of the labor market will change, as it always does when a transformational technology is unlocked. But the claim that AI will produce economy-wide, permanent unemployment is unhelpful marketing, bad economics and worse history. To the contrary, productivity gains should increase demand for labor, because labor becomes more valuable. George’s post takes on, in detail, many of the conclusions that flow from thinking about labor and innovation as fixed. The costs of AI, for instance, are already collapsing. When costs for a technology fall, adoption rises, and economic activity falls. Previous innovations have all been met with similar levels of skepticism and resistance and then were followed by more economic growth. And the technology itself is in an active process of creating roles that don’t yet exist. This won’t be the last piece written on the matter to take this view, but to see a prominent name in the venture space take time to stand on the side of AI as a force multiplier, rather than an opportunity flattener, shows us where the AI conversation is likely going, rather than where it’s been.