Don't trust the robots, even if they won't steal your job

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

David Oks isn’t worried about AI job loss:

The most important thing to know about labor substitution, the place where any serious analysis has to start, is this: labor substitution is about comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. The question isn’t whether AI can do specific tasks that humans do. It’s whether the aggregate output of humans working with AI is inferior to what AI can produce alone: in other words, whether there is any way that the addition of a human to the production process can increase or improve the output of that process. That’s a very different question. AI can have an absolute advantage in every single task, but it would still make economic sense to combine AI with humans if the aggregate output is greater: that is to say, if humans have a comparative advantage in any step of the production process.

Thoughts on Eric Daigle

Don't trust the robots, even if they won't steal your job