Add to the chorus from Duolingo and Shopify's leadership, the voice of Fiverr's CEO: https://share.gvine.app/hUzR9aAYmobaL1Py9. In the words of Micha Kaufman: "AI is coming for your jobs. Heck it's coming from my job too. This is a wake up call."
I think it’s a scary time to be an entry level person doing white collar work. But I think there are still some massive questions about what is the actual the capability of AI vs the hype. There is a fork in the road here: on one path AI really can replace jobs without generating new ones, and that means we will have to reinvent entire swaths of our social contract. On another path, AI will act like all other technologies and create new opportunities for work and fall short of the promise to replace humans.
While I think we will benefit from more people knowing how to code (not just practically, but philosophically), I am certainly really concerned about the evaporation of white collar jobs due to AI optimism. The reality is AI is not yet doing the jobs of these people and yet companies are assuming it can and will and making the cuts and layoffs in anticipation of this future value creation. This is not sustainable either for the companies' bottom lines OR for the workforce to have companies investing in unproven technology at the expense of such a large segment of the workforce. The government is likely to be many dollars short and a decade late in solving for this.
One of my next hires will be a prompt engineer who can also design logic based systems (I had to rush teach myself how to do this and there’s so much more to learn). AI will create new jobs no doubt, but to your point, I’m not convinced it will be more than it automates.
Opinions:
I actually believe the trades are safe and likely will see growth as we have massive labor shortages there right now (we need more bodies). AI will allow for manual labor businesses to scale like never before, we might even see the first billion dollar welding business as defensibility moves to manual labor and hardware (software is cheap). A lot of trades have apprenticeship programs which pay people to learn and not the other way around. We will also see a lot more founders and creators now that the barriers to build are lower. So I can see more self-employment.
The question I’m asking myself is when will AI powered robots with the dexterity of a human (or better) make it to market. Then not even the cleaning lady is safe.
I am definitely seeing the pattern you’re describing with friends who went to coding bootcamps worried about their job stability. I am chiming in here for a tiny bit of optimism to say that from my specific perspective as a founder of an AI company, my next hire will likely be a clinical prompt engineer - a new kind of job. And all kinds of industries outside of clinical work need people now to iterate and engineer prompts quickly in response to user feedback who have certain domain expertise (including lived experience). So, maybe the some of the folks who went to bootcamps can transfer those abilities into prompt engineering. The examples I’m thinking of are friends who do mostly frontend coding who don’t particularly love coding anyway, they just want decent jobs.
I just had a conversation with one of my friends the other day. He just graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and he worked really hard for 4 years. Not to mention he's really smart! But he's been discouraged because he's watched all of his engineering friends struggle to find jobs, or watching them get laid off. He's found that AI is quickly starting to replace coders. I appreciate your question, "Who is going to take responsibility for the labor market displacement?" You've given me lot's to think about with this post.
The value is really in the difference between who SHOULD and who WILL take responsibility. The beneficiaries (users displacing human work with AI) should take responsibility by training and helping people find new jobs within our outside their current organization/industry.
What WILL happen is what always happens. Benefits are centralized on P+L statements while the costs are socialized and spread across all of us through unemployment claims and other programs.
This dynamic is a huge piece of what makes replacing humans with AI appealing to employers.
Nice post Charles, thanks - and nice to see someone in a leadership position talking about this (as per your introduction).
There is definitely a knowledge gap that AI hasn't been able to bridge yet. I'm in the process of hiring a software engineer to help me build something. I can't use AI because I wouldn't know what I was looking at even if AI produced the exact thing I needed (and even after that, what do I do with it?). This engineer might us AI to build it - but those without knowledge cannot use the tool of AI (yet - but will we ever get there?). The same is true for consultants, lawyers, doctors etc. - those with experience, and who know what to look for, can use it as a powerful aid. But the opportunities to become experienced in the first place might vanish. To your point, will law firms reinforce their roster by training grads even though AI can write the brief faster anyway? Or will they hire less and let the floor rise until everyone's retired...? Then who do you call when you need a lawyer? I wouldn't fancy going to court by myself with just chatgpt prompts to save me - instead perhaps my lawyers can use it to complete the trial faster..!
The convo I'm having and the questions i have: 'what does AI mean for college students'? After years of pushing people to code, what should we tell young people to study now? 'How will Ai impact the so-called career ladder?'. Anecdotally, college students are having a hell of a time getting white collar entry-level jobs right now. How do they enter the work force in the first place, with what roles? And how do they climb the ladder with no actual skills. Most leaders were IC operators first... honing their craft to get to the point of leading a team in that craft. How do we make leaders when AI is performing the entry level skills? Thank you for saying the quiet parts out loud & opening the dialogue.
So much to share here. Your thoughts are my thoughts in many ways. I think investors and executives have yielded the current outcomes resulting in the negative sentiment. The layoffs came fast and ugly. They paused on hires and pushed who was left to absorb the rest of the work. It started with Twitter, green lighted everyone else to follow. I think government will likely follow this trajectory, especially with the current administration.
I can share as a founder. I pitched a mission to help the workforce improve their career and job opportunities, using AI. But the investor community doesn't have an appetite. AI and humans have a great potential to bring great value to our society, and markets. Businesses have more power than government right now, it's largely on them and those of us willing to push to switch the narrative.
Great article and thoughts! I think these are definitely questions that need contemplation. I don't see the AI shift being similar to Cloud or Mobile (or even the web when it originally formed). I think you have to go back further, it's more like the industrialization of agriculture. There you had a huge part of the economy that employed a significant chunk of the labor force that was completely upended by machines. But that process of industrialization sparked an entirely new economic structure based around the availability of food. Essentially it took a part of the economy, made it significantly more efficient, which opened up resources and labor to build on top on it. We don't get DoorDash unless we invent the tractor first.
I think AI will be similar. The jobs it replaces today will feed into the demand for new ways to build on top of the infrastructure it creates. Just like when it's 'easier to farm food, new ways of storing, consuming, living, all become possible', when it's 'easier to code, new ways on building, inventing, living' all become possible.
Just like with the industrialization of agriculture, AI is not 'replacing workers', as in an AI now steps in to do what a person used to do. AI is a labor multiplier - it allows one person to now do what 20 people used to do. That's a huge efficiency gain. Large gains in efficiency actually drive economic growth as it frees up resources to find other ways to create value.
So I think I am cautiously optimistic at this point.
This is a much-needed line of inquiry. And very refreshing that the questions are asked without definitive answers, a quality that might explain why no one is talking about these things. History does not always repeat and in this case might not even rhyme. We may be in completely new territory and adrift at a time when the nature of discourse has been reduced to “engagement”. Thanks for asking the right questions!
Add to the chorus from Duolingo and Shopify's leadership, the voice of Fiverr's CEO: https://share.gvine.app/hUzR9aAYmobaL1Py9. In the words of Micha Kaufman: "AI is coming for your jobs. Heck it's coming from my job too. This is a wake up call."
I think it’s a scary time to be an entry level person doing white collar work. But I think there are still some massive questions about what is the actual the capability of AI vs the hype. There is a fork in the road here: on one path AI really can replace jobs without generating new ones, and that means we will have to reinvent entire swaths of our social contract. On another path, AI will act like all other technologies and create new opportunities for work and fall short of the promise to replace humans.
While I think we will benefit from more people knowing how to code (not just practically, but philosophically), I am certainly really concerned about the evaporation of white collar jobs due to AI optimism. The reality is AI is not yet doing the jobs of these people and yet companies are assuming it can and will and making the cuts and layoffs in anticipation of this future value creation. This is not sustainable either for the companies' bottom lines OR for the workforce to have companies investing in unproven technology at the expense of such a large segment of the workforce. The government is likely to be many dollars short and a decade late in solving for this.
One of my next hires will be a prompt engineer who can also design logic based systems (I had to rush teach myself how to do this and there’s so much more to learn). AI will create new jobs no doubt, but to your point, I’m not convinced it will be more than it automates.
Opinions:
I actually believe the trades are safe and likely will see growth as we have massive labor shortages there right now (we need more bodies). AI will allow for manual labor businesses to scale like never before, we might even see the first billion dollar welding business as defensibility moves to manual labor and hardware (software is cheap). A lot of trades have apprenticeship programs which pay people to learn and not the other way around. We will also see a lot more founders and creators now that the barriers to build are lower. So I can see more self-employment.
The question I’m asking myself is when will AI powered robots with the dexterity of a human (or better) make it to market. Then not even the cleaning lady is safe.
I am definitely seeing the pattern you’re describing with friends who went to coding bootcamps worried about their job stability. I am chiming in here for a tiny bit of optimism to say that from my specific perspective as a founder of an AI company, my next hire will likely be a clinical prompt engineer - a new kind of job. And all kinds of industries outside of clinical work need people now to iterate and engineer prompts quickly in response to user feedback who have certain domain expertise (including lived experience). So, maybe the some of the folks who went to bootcamps can transfer those abilities into prompt engineering. The examples I’m thinking of are friends who do mostly frontend coding who don’t particularly love coding anyway, they just want decent jobs.
The thing people seem most uncomfortable with that I personally feel so sure of is: "this time is different"
I just had a conversation with one of my friends the other day. He just graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and he worked really hard for 4 years. Not to mention he's really smart! But he's been discouraged because he's watched all of his engineering friends struggle to find jobs, or watching them get laid off. He's found that AI is quickly starting to replace coders. I appreciate your question, "Who is going to take responsibility for the labor market displacement?" You've given me lot's to think about with this post.
The value is really in the difference between who SHOULD and who WILL take responsibility. The beneficiaries (users displacing human work with AI) should take responsibility by training and helping people find new jobs within our outside their current organization/industry.
What WILL happen is what always happens. Benefits are centralized on P+L statements while the costs are socialized and spread across all of us through unemployment claims and other programs.
This dynamic is a huge piece of what makes replacing humans with AI appealing to employers.
The only discussion on AI and future of work that I wanted to read and consider worth sharing, so far.
Nice post Charles, thanks - and nice to see someone in a leadership position talking about this (as per your introduction).
There is definitely a knowledge gap that AI hasn't been able to bridge yet. I'm in the process of hiring a software engineer to help me build something. I can't use AI because I wouldn't know what I was looking at even if AI produced the exact thing I needed (and even after that, what do I do with it?). This engineer might us AI to build it - but those without knowledge cannot use the tool of AI (yet - but will we ever get there?). The same is true for consultants, lawyers, doctors etc. - those with experience, and who know what to look for, can use it as a powerful aid. But the opportunities to become experienced in the first place might vanish. To your point, will law firms reinforce their roster by training grads even though AI can write the brief faster anyway? Or will they hire less and let the floor rise until everyone's retired...? Then who do you call when you need a lawyer? I wouldn't fancy going to court by myself with just chatgpt prompts to save me - instead perhaps my lawyers can use it to complete the trial faster..!
I’ve been thinking along the same lines, I’ve suggested a few potential incubator type projects focuses on getting more people into entrepreneurship (not vc-backed) and trades https://stateofthefuture.substack.com/p/young-people-cant-get-jobs-now-what, keen to know what you think
The convo I'm having and the questions i have: 'what does AI mean for college students'? After years of pushing people to code, what should we tell young people to study now? 'How will Ai impact the so-called career ladder?'. Anecdotally, college students are having a hell of a time getting white collar entry-level jobs right now. How do they enter the work force in the first place, with what roles? And how do they climb the ladder with no actual skills. Most leaders were IC operators first... honing their craft to get to the point of leading a team in that craft. How do we make leaders when AI is performing the entry level skills? Thank you for saying the quiet parts out loud & opening the dialogue.
So much to share here. Your thoughts are my thoughts in many ways. I think investors and executives have yielded the current outcomes resulting in the negative sentiment. The layoffs came fast and ugly. They paused on hires and pushed who was left to absorb the rest of the work. It started with Twitter, green lighted everyone else to follow. I think government will likely follow this trajectory, especially with the current administration.
I can share as a founder. I pitched a mission to help the workforce improve their career and job opportunities, using AI. But the investor community doesn't have an appetite. AI and humans have a great potential to bring great value to our society, and markets. Businesses have more power than government right now, it's largely on them and those of us willing to push to switch the narrative.
Great article and thoughts! I think these are definitely questions that need contemplation. I don't see the AI shift being similar to Cloud or Mobile (or even the web when it originally formed). I think you have to go back further, it's more like the industrialization of agriculture. There you had a huge part of the economy that employed a significant chunk of the labor force that was completely upended by machines. But that process of industrialization sparked an entirely new economic structure based around the availability of food. Essentially it took a part of the economy, made it significantly more efficient, which opened up resources and labor to build on top on it. We don't get DoorDash unless we invent the tractor first.
I think AI will be similar. The jobs it replaces today will feed into the demand for new ways to build on top of the infrastructure it creates. Just like when it's 'easier to farm food, new ways of storing, consuming, living, all become possible', when it's 'easier to code, new ways on building, inventing, living' all become possible.
Just like with the industrialization of agriculture, AI is not 'replacing workers', as in an AI now steps in to do what a person used to do. AI is a labor multiplier - it allows one person to now do what 20 people used to do. That's a huge efficiency gain. Large gains in efficiency actually drive economic growth as it frees up resources to find other ways to create value.
So I think I am cautiously optimistic at this point.
This is a much-needed line of inquiry. And very refreshing that the questions are asked without definitive answers, a quality that might explain why no one is talking about these things. History does not always repeat and in this case might not even rhyme. We may be in completely new territory and adrift at a time when the nature of discourse has been reduced to “engagement”. Thanks for asking the right questions!