An iron ring does not technically make you an engineer in Canada. It just says you graduated from an engineering program. A P.Eng, which is a professional engineer's license is something you acquire after multiple years of experience and testing.
What if this is just telling us that much of the coding being done in the world, or knowledge work in general, is just busy work? Just because you double the capacity of knowledge workers doesn't mean you double the amount of useful output. Maybe we have never been limited by our capacity to produce, but by our ability to come up with good ideas and socially coordinate ourselves around the best ones.
Love this. My only critique is that this perspective may lend credence to doomerism as the new categories of AI enabled jobs will lag in being captured by official statistics compared to the rate of established jobs being identified as under risk by ever more capable AI. That is, it will capture occupational risk better than occupational opportunities and feed a zero sum mindset view of the economy.
Greater output doesn't always equal greater productivity. In my days in the investing business we would have junior investment professionals putting together elaborate and detailed investment committee memos. When it came time to review a deal in the investment committee meetings we spent all our time trying to sift through the content of the memos and diligence done to date to identify the key risks and opportunities, with what felt like a 1:100 signal to noise ratio being typical. The productive element of the investment process was identifying the signal, not producing the content that too often buries the signal deeper. Imo, AI tools to date make it so much easier to create content which makes it harder to be productive.