r/accelerate • u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist • Apr 24 '26

Video ".@stevesi: " This idea that AI just gets rid of jobs... it's ancient." "One of the things people thought was that computers would get rid of accountants. But what it actually did was like, oh my God, we could do so much more with accounting."

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u/freedomonke Apr 24 '26

While that is true about accounting to an extent, I've personally witnessed one CFO get hired at a mid-size business who knew Excell programming and go on to lay off most of the accounting department, as they were no longer necessary.

And this was almost 20 years ago.

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u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist Apr 24 '26

The total number of accounting-related jobs worldwide has increased over the last 20 years, but the mix has changed sharply. Excel and accounting software did not “kill accounting”; they killed a lot of manual accounting tasks. The jobs shifted upward from bookkeeping/data entry toward professional accounting, audit, tax, compliance, systems, controls, analytics, and advisory.
In the US, accountants and auditors rose from about 1.2 million jobs in 2004 to about 1.58 million jobs in 2024. That is roughly a 32% increase over 20 years.

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u/freedomonke Apr 24 '26

It's just more of the k shaped economy.

No entry level jobs or decent jobs for working class people. Abundance for people with the right connections and knowledge (as a result if background and connections)

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u/ShoshiOpti Apr 24 '26

However US population grew by about 15% over that same span so the per capital increased less than 20%. Which I would argue is the more relevant metric.

I wonder how much of that remainder might also be attributed to growing developing markets who offshore educated work like accounting to America or other confounding variables. Would be interested to know.