/AI6h ago

Economist Tyler Cowen argues AI will create more jobs than it eliminates by boosting individual productivity

Energy grid and medical trial bottlenecks require human labor

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#1227Erik Torenberg
Original post
a16z@a16z

.@tylercowen on why AI creates more jobs than it destroys:

"One of the neatest properties of current AI models is they allow a small number of individuals working with AI to really do a lot more work than was possible previously."

"This will mean more companies, more projects, more nonprofits, just more ventures."

"One area is generally energy, electricity, the grid... It's completely screwed up. It will take twenty years, thirty years, forty years to fix... The AIs cannot do that on their own."

"The biomedical sector and medical trials, there will be many, many, many more ideas to test. AIs will help with the testing, but I don't think pure testing by simulation will be possible anytime soon."

"Simply care for the elderly. There will be robots, personal companions. We have this already. But the elderly also will want human care. It wouldn't surprise me if in the future, fifteen, twenty percent of all jobs were elderly care."

"Luis Garicano had an excellent online essay. He referred to what he called 'messy jobs': jobs where it's hard to explain exactly what the job is, but on a given day you're doing eleven different things, and it requires coordination and figuring out what you ought to do next and getting other people to help you... There's a real future in messy jobs."

Tyler Cowen with @dataWyatt

David George@DavidGeorge83

http://x.com/i/article/2052046618393014272

8:30 AM · Jun 6, 2026 · 63.4K Views
Sentiment

Positive users focus on AI creating new jobs and ventures as Tyler Cowen explains while negative users dismiss the claim as useless due to immediate displacements and accuse a16z of non-payment.

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14 comments with sentiment.
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VIEWS61
Utkarsh Singh@Utkarsh51557661

@a16z @tylercowen yes, but don't forget the risk of burnout for those individuals trying to keep up. the pressure can flip quick.

4hViews 61
LIKES2
CryptoLee@OlaLee2022

@a16z @tylercowen bullish on Anylayer

5hViews 9Likes 2
REPLIES1
AMILLIAI@AMILLIAICORP

@a16z @tylercowen You can't even pay your bills. Don't return emails. Act like you can't see comments http://newsonscale.com/factcheck $NewsOnScale

Wth would want to use A16z as an investment partner when A16z partners can't pay 5k? Are yall broke till IPOs?

5hViews 3
Rick Duchin@DuchinRick

This is my life right now.

One founder. Seven patents filed or ready. A continuous personal health monitoring platform covering consumers, athletes, military, and cardiac — built with AI as the core engine.

Five years ago this takes $10M and a team of 50. Today it’s one person who understood the problem deeply enough and used AI to close the gap.

The platform is HabitCure. The insight is simple and nobody has solved it: your body is talking every hour of every day. The entire healthcare system only listens twice a year.

We never stop listening.

— Rick Duchin, Founder HabitCure

6hViews 28
Derrick Dao@derrick_dao

The productivity multiplier argument is sound but misses the transition friction. When one person does the work of ten, the income concentrates faster than labor markets can reallocate the other nine. The 1990s manufacturing automation parallel is instructive: aggregate employment eventually recovered, but the geographic and demographic distribution of the damage was permanent — communities built around specific industries didn't recover when aggregate numbers did. AI job creation may be real and significant; it just won't necessarily happen in the same places as AI job displacement.x

5hViews 29Likes 1
Winston B.@DoDataThings

@a16z @tylercowen Seems like Cowen's energy-and-grid point lands the AI productivity story squarely in atoms territory. More ventures means more permitting, more transformers, more messy-job coordination. None of that compresses the way code does.

4hViews 45
Marquis ChaCha@ChachaMarquis

@a16z @tylercowen i don’t know. i think people are overestimating the difference it will make in the next 10 years. i don’t think it will pay off for these labs. it could be used for advances in a few specific areas & be a useful tool for a lot of people that doesn’t actually change much overall

5hViews 44
让长风使尽@Rangfeng1117

@a16z @tylercowen The real test isn't whether AI creates *more* jobs, but whether displaced workers can upskill fast enough. Cowen's right about productivity gains, but history shows labor reallocation takes a generation, not a quarter.

5hViews 35
Abiola@the_xthread

@a16z @tylercowen Anylayer Ai agent

5hViews 29
cc@TVAddictStill

@a16z @tylercowen The reason people think AI will destroy more jobs that it creates is not the "lump of labour fallacy". And some of the jobs (such as "messy" jobs) that might be created sound quite unpleasant.

4hViews 27
Tony Rost@raspberryman

Agriculture -> Manufacturing -> Services -> Stewardship.

Humanity is understaffed already to govern the extreme outputs of planetary superintelligence.

As long as humans practice self governance, it’s all hands on deck - we won’t have enough labor to cover even the minimal demands on governance.

3hViews 24
EdKo@EdKolife

The new jobs argument is historically accurate and currently useless. Electricity created more jobs than it destroyed - but not for the people whose jobs it destroyed, and not on the same timeline. Cowen's examples are real. They're also 20 years out. The displacement is happening now.

3hViews 16
dul_ 14_emofi@DulKopi14

@a16z @tylercowen Absolutely spot on. Empowering lean teams with tools like AI and Anylayer means we're going to see an explosion of new, highly complex ventures being built from the ground up

6hViews 13
Oliveira@OliveiraNeife

@a16z @tylercowen Amazing job anylayer, bullish here...

6hViews 13
AhoyO@brouwjon23299

@a16z @tylercowen Abundant elder care jobs, to put it very crudely, means that lots of engineers and bankers will transition to the exciting career of wiping 80 year old ass. Persuading them to be happy with this will be difficult.

3hViews 12
Moonlit Monkey@MoonlitMonkey69

@a16z @tylercowen It does neither rn.

6hViews 10
nope 🇵🇸@lotusthe2nd

@a16z @tylercowen Lol. How did that work out with automation?

6hViews 6
Nikhil Kumar@nikhilkr

@a16z @tylercowen the messy jobs are safe because they’re physical and the physical world is still brutally hard to automate.

3hViews 5
AMILLIAI@AMILLIAICORP

@a16z @tylercowen If you're broke, say you're broke. Dont offer X users 5k a fact checker and ignore them once it's finished. Embarrassing! Billionaires screwing over the little guys for a petty 5k.

5hViews 4
overthinkdaily@lustingxxx12

@a16z @tylercowen AI seems most likely to automate the predictable parts of work. The future belongs to jobs that are messy, physical, social, or all three.

6hViews 3
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