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The thing about AI is that software replaced people piecemeal. The report that took 1 person 2 weeks to generate now is a 20 minute batch job, but that report w

The thing about AI is that software replaced people piecemeal. The report that took 1 person 2 weeks to generate now is a 20 minute batch job, but that report was run quarterly and was only 1 position. There is plenty more work to do. We've already automated much of what is there to automate, most of our "bullshit" jobs are human communication or human reasoning. Once you fully automate 1 CSR or 1 compliance officer in an industry, you've effectively automated a large percentage of them. Instead of seeing a gradual displacement of labor, you're going to see large chunks of people become completely irrelevant. We're seeing this in the gaming industry now, where a huge focus is on AI art, aiding in (but not solely responsible for) mass layoffs. I don't know if AI will eliminate more jobs than AS/400s did, but it will be a much more disruptive transition.

mechagodzilla 3y ago
I would look at this somewhat differently - I think very 'narrow' jobs (with lots of people doing the same, very specific job) were previously more common. Think of the rooms of people replaced by 'mail-merge', for instance. For jobs that involve lots of disparate activities and responsibilities, it is difficult to 'automate' the job because it consists of many different jobs, none of which fully occupy a human. That type of work resists expensive solutions, since automating 1/16 of someone's job is just a slight productivity boost, but not necessarily much of a savings to the company, and you might need to develop 16 separate solutions with varying levels of reliability and effort. If a 'department' is only a handful of people, reducing the number of people has negative impacts on reliability and sustainability for the company - how vulnerable is your company now if you only have 1 compliance officer, and they leave / get sick / whatever? There will definitely be some jobs that get eliminated by this type of technology just the way mail-merge eliminated lots of workers (or a zillion other examples in the last 200 years), but it's not obvious to me it will even increase productivity enough to deal with the worsening demographics hitting pretty much every developed country these days.

mechagodzilla 3y ago

I would look at this somewhat differently - I think very 'narrow' jobs (with lots of people doing the same, very specific job) were previously more common. Think of the rooms of people replaced by 'mail-merge', for instance. For jobs that involve lots of disparate activities and responsibilities, it is difficult to 'automate' the job because it consists of many different jobs, none of which fully occupy a human. That type of work resists expensive solutions, since automating 1/16 of someone's job is just a slight productivity boost, but not necessarily much of a savings to the company, and you might need to develop 16 separate solutions with varying levels of reliability and effort. If a 'department' is only a handful of people, reducing the number of people has negative impacts on reliability and sustainability for the company - how vulnerable is your company now if you only have 1 compliance officer, and they leave / get sick / whatever? There will definitely be some jobs that get eliminated by this type of technology just the way mail-merge eliminated lots of workers (or a zillion other examples in the last 200 years), but it's not obvious to me it will even increase productivity enough to deal with the worsening demographics hitting pretty much every developed country these days.