AI could create jobs, not destroy them: EY - Economy - AFR

TEXT START: Australia’s construction and retail sectors stand to be the biggest winners over the coming decade from the artificial intelligence boom, according to new modelling from EY that counters fears the technology will cause widespread job losses.

THE DISSECTION

This is a labor-market reassurance memo disguised as economic modelling. It converts projected GDP growth, productivity gains, and data-centre construction into an implied defense of employment. The excerpt provides no net job count, wage analysis, distributional analysis, or evidence that the jobs created will be durable and economically necessary.

THE CORE FALLACY

The text confuses increased output with preserved mass employment. Under DT mechanics, AI can expand GDP while reducing the human labor required to produce it. Construction and infrastructure spending are deployment effects—a temporary buildout—not proof that AI preserves the wage-to-consumption circuit. Retail can grow in revenue while requiring fewer workers. A larger economy can therefore contain a smaller economically necessary workforce.

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS

• Productivity gains will create more human jobs than they eliminate.
• “Jobs created” means stable, accessible, adequately paid employment.
• Aggregate growth will be distributed to displaced workers.
• AI-related infrastructure demand will remain durable rather than peak during rollout.
• Sectoral winners can absorb workers displaced across the wider economy.
• A ten-year GDP forecast is evidence about long-term human indispensability.

None of these assumptions is established by the supplied excerpt.

SOCIAL FUNCTION

Partial truth functioning as ideological anesthetic and transition management. AI can generate investment and new activity; that does not refute labor substitution. The claim gives institutional cover to treat a production problem as a growth opportunity while leaving ownership, control, and mass participation unexamined.

THE VERDICT

EY’s projected $95 billion–$116 billion gain, as presented here, is not a rebuttal to obsolescence. It measures economic expansion, not whether humans remain necessary to generate it. Construction and infrastructure may be the scaffolding of the transition, but scaffolding is not a permanent labor market. The article puts a jobs costume on a GDP forecast; under the Discontinuity Thesis, the mass employment circuit remains structurally exposed.