Uncomfortable and Unanswered Questions I Have as an AI Investor

I've been in a lot of rooms with a lot of smart people who are working on the future of AI and a few important questions still feel unanswered to me.

I’ve been in many rooms and events with other VCs and tech executives, and every conversation naturally gravitates toward discussing the present realities and future possibilities of AI. These conversations have been interesting, but most have left me uneasy about a handful of questions that have gone unanswered or been avoided altogether. These aren’t new questions, but they certainly feel more urgent and timely to me lately based on the tone and tenor of those conversations.

We Encouraged A Lot of People to Learn to Code - Now What?

Starting about 10 or 15 years ago, there was a concerted effort to get many people to learn to code to get jobs in the tech industry, whether those folks worked for a big tech company or a traditional big company trying to modernize its operations. The logic was that getting people to learn computer science at university or how to code outside of traditional universities was an excellent idea and would open pathways to good, in-demand jobs. There are many valid educational reasons to learn to code or to study STEM fields beyond the economic payoff. Still, much of the rhetoric focused on employment opportunities in the tech industry as the primary driver for this focus. I do not have a degree in CS and have never been a professional software developer, so take my views with a healthy grain of salt. Still, I wonder whether we oversold people the transformative nature of the opportunities here given how quickly the landscape for entry-level software developers has changed in the last 24 months.

AI-driven white collar job destruction is happening much faster than predicted even last year.

I’ve been reading a handful of these CEO letters about how they are pivoting their larger, established companies to be AI-first. Two that stand out are this one from the Shopify CEO and this one from the Duolingo CEO. While neither memo explicitly talks about replacing employees with AI, the discourse around these articles suggests that informed employees see the writing on the wall and know that AI is coming for many of their jobs even sooner than people thought a few years ago. Whatever comfort there might have been that AI would take a while to go for white collar jobs in sales, customer support, and HR has been dispelled. Whether the technology is entirely up to the task or not, CEOs are pushing hard to get the most out of AI-powered efficiency and cost improvements, and that trend is only accelerating. For every published memo we read, many more are being written or haven’t been shared.

Who is going to take responsibility for the labor market displacement?

This is the one theme that nobody seems to want to touch. Companies pursuing aggressive AI deployments often do so to get more efficient and compete with other companies offering their customers AI-powered solutions; it’s hard to compete if you aren’t pushing the envelope and staying on the cutting edge. I don’t expect profit-maximizing private and public companies to feel deep responsibility for what this change means for the segment of the workforce impacted by this transition; we don’t live in an era where that is a genuine concern for most companies and I believe most employees are fairly clear-eyed about the social contract between them and their employers and the nature of their employment (whether they think it’s the optimal relationship is another question for another post).

The other entity that could take responsibility is the government. I sense that the government at all levels understands AI's coming disruption, but it isn’t well situated to get ahead of its impact on the labor force. Government is deliberative and slow by design, which works well in stable times but can be a real challenge in moments of great upheaval like the one we are in now.

The impact on displaced white collar workers, which appears to be happening faster than anticipated, is a problem without an owner and kind of hot potato that nobody wants to grab or own, as it’s a tricky problem to solve and doesn’t have obvious, straightforward answers. I wonder who will step into the void to address this as it accelerates and becomes a more visible and urgent problem.

Senior and Junior People are Having Very Different Experiences

When I first wrote this section, I planned to frame it as an older versus younger worker difference, but that felt off. The real divide seems to be between executives and leadership (many of whom in the tech industry are young) and non-executive management and individual contributors. Admittedly, I spend most of my time talking to senior executives, CEOs, founders, and people generally in leadership positions. Much of what I am hearing comes from how they view AI's transformative power and what it will mean for the companies and organizations they run. They are uniquely positioned to capture the benefits of these savings, and they view their jobs and positions as generally safe from AI disruption for now.

When I talk to people who are not in management but are in white-collar occupations like software development, finance, consulting, or other high-prestige entry-level jobs, their perspective is very different from that of management; they are acutely aware that they are the eventual targets of these efficiency and cost-cutting plans. They seem to intuit that they studied, interned, and trained for a world that might not exist.

This Time Feels Different - More Work but Less Labor

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, this time does feel different. Two of the most significant platform shifts I’ve seen in my career, the move to the cloud and then the move to mobile, created a lot more labor demand. With all of this cloud and mobile software, we needed people to manage data centers, focus on uptime, work in security centers to keep an eye on intruders, and perform various other essential tasks that arose as software penetrated new industries and parts of life. And, because there weren’t technologies that could do most of that work, the only solution was to hire and train people to do new(ish) jobs like site reliability, developer operations, and the like. From everything I’ve seen, the rise of AI is replacing labor with machines and agents because they can do most, but not yet all of the work. As is the case with any innovation, the optimist in me wants to believe that this new tech wave will create new job categories and titles that didn’t exist before, but this wave feels different because I think the companies that would otherwise create those jobs for people are going to push much harder to have software do more of the work.

I don’t have the answers to anything I have written about here - I wrote this to help me think this through. But I’ve been in many meetings lately where everyone else either doesn’t have the answer, has an answer but is unwilling to share it, or won’t say the quiet parts out loud.