Why AI will NOT take Accounting jobs

I want to share some quotes below from a Lex Fridman interview recently with Marc Andreessen who is the co-creator of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, and plenty more things. As AI comes into accounting firms (probably slower than we think), I suspect it will be overwhelmingly positive for the industry. See below quote from the interview in answer to the question why AI will NOT take jobs.

“The core fallacy which again is common in Marxism, called the lump of labor fallacy. That there is only a fixed amount of work to be done in the world.  It’s all being done today by people and then if machines do it, there’s no other work to be done by people. That’s just a completely backwards view on how the economy develops and grows. What happens is not in fact that. What happens is the introduction of technology into production process causes prices to fall. As prices fall, consumers have more spending power. As consumers have more spending power , they create new demand. That new demand then causes capital and labor to form into new enterprises to satisfy nuance and needs. The result is more jobs at higher wages.

The worry that creation of nuance and needs at rapid rate will mean there’s a lot of turnover in jobs? So people will lose jobs? Losing a job and having to learn new things and new skills is painful for the individual.. 2 things to that. One is the new jobs are often much better. There was a panic about a decade ago and the truck drivers are going to lose their jobs. 1. That didn’t happen because autonomous driving was not ready. 2. Truck drivers live a decade shorter than everyone else. It is a dangerous job, they have higher rates of skin cancer from being in the sun all the time. The vibration from being in the truck all the time is very damaging to your physiology. For these reasons there is a shortage of truck drivers.

So, the new jobs are often better, but you don’t get the new jobs until you go through the change. It is still going to be painful for some people, but that is the process of life.

This concern has played out for literally centuries. There was a panic in the 2000s around outsourcing was going to take all the jobs. Panic in 2010s that robots were going to take all the jobs. In 2019 before COVID we had more jobs at higher wages in the world at any point in human history.

So, the overwhelming evidence is that the net gain here is like wildly positive. Most people overwhelmingly come out the other side being huge beneficiaries of this. 

Link ot interview https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/lex-fridman-podcast/id1434243584?i=1000618818540