There was a recent NY Times article with the title of today’s blog post. I wanted to summarize it for you and give you my spin as lots of folks are rightfully quaking in their penny loafers these days. So many companies – and not just tech firms – are “right-sizing” their workforce because of the expeditious adoption of artificial intelligence. As the article suggests,
“Some experts argue that A.I. is most likely to affect novice workers, whose tasks are generally simplest and therefore easiest to automate. Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the A.I. company Anthropic, recently told Axios that the technology could cannibalize half of all entry-level white-collar roles within five years. An uptick in the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has aggravated this concern, even if it doesn’t prove that A.I. is the cause of their job-market struggles.
But other captains of the A.I. industry have taken the opposite view, arguing that younger workers are likely to benefit from A.I. and that experienced workers will ultimately be more vulnerable. In an interview at a New York Times event in late June, Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer of OpenAI, suggested that the technology could pose problems for “a class of worker that I think is more tenured, is more oriented toward a routine in a certain way of doing things.”
So, which is it? Are we throwing the younger or the older offboard the ship to lighten our load?
“The ultimate answer to this question will have vast implications. If entry-level jobs are most at risk, it could require a rethinking of how we educate college students, or even the value of college itself. And if older workers are most at risk, it could lead to economic and even political instability as large-scale layoffs become a persistent feature of the labor market.”
My view is it depends quite a bit on the industry and company as it may be different in the legal or management consulting industries (where I think young people will get creamed as evidenced by this WSJ article about McKinsey) as compared to the health care industry (where I think expensive doctors may be in trouble). But, more immediately, I worry more about younger workers as we’ve seen a 20-25% drop in computer-related employment for workers with less than two years of tenure as AI took their jobs. The same can be said for lower-level customer service jobs. My gut is that more tenured workers and managers will use AI as their efficiency engine and may even get more effective in their work with fewer direct reports.
At the end of the day, let’s recognize that knowledge workers are in trouble since AI has commoditized knowledge. So, as I’ll point out this week, it’s time for us to explore some of the most human qualities that AI can’t easily replicate: intuition, creativity, embodiment, morality, true empathy.
I predict that the word “handmade” will make a comeback. “Handmade AI” is an oxymoron. Wisdom can’t be copy-pasted.
-Chip