I think one of AI’s biggest effects is simply that it makes people realize even high-income professionals can lose their positions.

This also follows from how current LLMs work. In practice, when I use them in domains I already understand, they can produce very high-quality results. But in domains I do not know well, the results can be poor, and the bigger problem is that I may not even be able to judge how poor they are.

So my conclusion is that AI will reduce the number of jobs, but it will not eliminate the need for people.

In education, the value of memorization may decline in the AI era. We may instead place more emphasis on domain modeling, problem framing, or the ability to choose and use tools effectively. But the more fundamental issue is that the IT industry may simply lose the capacity to employ as many people as it once did.

More precisely, I mean white-collar labor.

I think the deeper cause is a K-shaped economy in which the lower and middle classes become poorer. When ordinary consumers become poorer, one of the first things they tend to cut back on is discretionary spending, including spending on many kinds of IT services.

The core infrastructure layer is different. Large incumbents such as Microsoft and Google already dominate much of it, and they are likely to be more resilient. Search, video consumption, and a few other essential digital services will also remain strong. But many other IT services are, in practice, discretionary goods. Those companies may be hit much harder if consumers have less purchasing power.

People talk constantly about productivity these days, but we were already living in an age of overproduction before AI. AI is moving us from overproduction into an era of explosive production. The problem is that production can expand far faster than people’s ability to consume.

The cycle is supposed to be:

*products → revenue → employment*

But if the consumers who are supposed to support that revenue become poorer, the cycle weakens. Productivity alone cannot solve that.

I agree with the author that academics need to move beyond treating papers as the primary unit of achievement. Much of what the article argues is reasonable.

But there is another difficulty. Most academics built their reputations through papers. They use that reputation to obtain speaking opportunities, consulting work, grants, and other forms of income and status. Even if one person decides to move beyond the paper-centered system, it is difficult to change much unless the larger incentive structure changes as well.

My view is that IT workers have, in a sense, been working to reduce their own jobs since long before AI. The more infrastructure becomes centralized, the more peripheral and smaller companies are squeezed first. AI is simply another example of that process.

Until recently, people often said that highly skilled IT professionals were difficult to replace. AI changes that perception. Even when it does not fully replace knowledge workers, it can put significant downward pressure on the wage premium attached to specialized knowledge.

I do think AI will raise productivity. But companies will also reduce headcount accordingly. And if purchasing power becomes increasingly concentrated among a smaller group of people, product development itself may become more biased toward the preferences of those few consumers. That can create another negative feedback loop.

The claim that universities can simply choose important problems that are cheap to validate is also more difficult than it sounds.

If validation itself increasingly depends on AI, and universities cannot afford to own enough GPUs, then they remain dependent on large AI companies. That dependency will inevitably influence which research problems are practical to pursue.

Any research program is constrained by the institutions and funding sources that make the research possible. Always.

At the same time, I actually agree with the author that universities will become more important.

People often talk about “skill” as though it were some pure and independent quantity, but in my experience hiring rarely works that way. If one candidate is highly capable without a degree and another is equally capable with a degree, employers will usually prefer the credentialed candidate.

More broadly, people tend to hire those with whom they feel cultural familiarity and trust. University networks provide exactly that. Alumni often help other alumni, directly or indirectly.

So I think universities may increasingly become both social institutions and stronger elite-training clubs.

For someone like me, coming from a poorer country and without much money, there may not be many choices in that system anyway.

Still, I think the author’s argument is far too optimistic.

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