> They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they.
Because companies want to make MORE money.
Your hypothetical company is now competing with another company who didn’t opposite, and now they get to market faster, fix bugs faster, add feature faster, and responding to changes in the industry faster. Which results in them making more, while your employ less company is just status quo.
Also. With regards to oil, the consumption of oil increases as it became cheaper. With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.
> With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.
Not sure about that, at least if we're talking about software. Software is limited by complexity, not the ability to write code. Not sure LLMs manage complexity in software any better than humans do.
> Which results in them making more
Not necessarily.
You are assuming that the people can consume whatever is put in front of them. Markets get saturated fast. The "changes in the industry" mean nothing.
A) People are so used to infinite growth that it’s hard to imagine a market where that doesn’t exist. The industry can have enough developers and there’s a good chance we’re going to crash right the fuck into that pretty quickly. America’s industrial labor pool seemed like it provided an ever-expanding supply of jobs right up until it didn’t. Then, in the 80s, it started going backwards preeeetttty dramatically.
B) No amount of money will make people buy something that doesn’t add value to or enrich their lives. You still need ideas, for things in markets that have room for those ideas. This is where product design comes in. Despite what many developers think, there are many kinds of designers in this industry and most of them are not the software equivalent of interior decorators. Designing good products is hard, and image generators don’t make that easier.