The job that AI was supposed to replace is experiencing the opposite of the expected outcome. Software job postings are outpacing other fields. Why is that? If you lower the cost of production of something that has lots of use cases, people want more things produced. We’ve seen this play out in the industrial world constantly, and now we’re finally seeing it in knowledge work. Because software now is much lower to cost per unit, people want way more of it. So we start to use software for all new things and people and companies light up more software projects than ever before. But because the job itself is not fully automated (and likely won’t be for as far out as we can see), you still need people that understand these systems to maintain the code, decide what to build, run it over the long run, update it, and more. That all requires people to do work. The same thing is going to happen in many other fields as well as we bring down the cost of production of previously extremely scarce areas of work. Agents will cause more abundance than replacement.
AI 原本被认为会取代的那类工作，如今却出现了与预期相反的结果。Software 职位发布的增长速度正在超过其他领域。为什么会这样？如果你降低了某种拥有大量 use case 的事物的生产成本，人们就会想要生产更多这种东西。我们在工业世界里已经反复看到这种情况上演，而现在我们终于也在知识工作中看到了同样的现象。因为如今 software 的单位成本低得多，人们就会想要更多得多的软件。于是我们开始把 software 用到各种新的事物上，个人和公司也以前所未有的规模启动更多 software 项目。但由于这项工作本身并没有被完全自动化（而且在我们可预见的未来里，很可能也不会），你仍然需要理解这些系统的人来维护代码、决定要构建什么、长期运行它、更新它等等。这一切都需要人来完成工作。随着我们降低那些过去极度稀缺的工作领域的生产成本，许多其他领域也会发生同样的事情。agent 将带来更多的丰富供给，而不是取代。