About 4 years ago, I took a screenshot of a website that tried to set “realistic” expectations about the prospect of AI displacing people from their jobs.
Now, if you’re someone who’s kept up with the progress the field of AI has made, the picture above should look funny (or scary) to you.
Implied in the screenshot are a bunch of assumptions that had guided the thinking of many (mostly knowledge workers) on the subject of job outlook and the impact thereupon by AI.
For a better part of the last 8 years, there was this sort of elite prognostication that AI could only take menial jobs. Jobs that were manually intensive, but repetitive nonetheless, requiring little skill on behalf of those carrying out those jobs.
I took the above screenshot quite cognizant of this perspective.
Around that time, I’d read The Future of the Professions by the Susskinds. It was immediately apparent to me that they were the only writers on the topic of AI and work truly cognizant of the impact of AI on knowledge work, often touching on some weighty issues like the automation of doctors and prescriptions on what to do if perchance AI does put swaths of them out of a job but outperforms them.
Some time in the future I hope to explore the psychology underlying why many of the world’s foremost knowledge workers thought themselves immune to automation by AI. This is not that piece, however.
In my piece on AI’s progress and its transformation as an all-encompassing tool for solving the problems we do not know how to solve, I wrote:
It also became apparent to me that said race for strong AI may be for all intents and purposes, zero-sum; a zero-sum pursuit of work and meaning; a zero-sum pursuit of resources and capital; a zero-sum pursuit perhaps for the dictation of the future of human civilization as we know it.
At first, I felt hesitant to write these words for fear of exaggerating. But I knew these things to be true; that despite not having “Strong AI” we have in these models, independent modules of intelligence; the use of said modules of intelligence by those aware of their abilities, would obviously make them less reliant on others for work; that only those with abilities to handle tasks difficult for even for those with above average intelligence would be spared; and that if those modules of intelligence where at some point in the future integrated into a more coherent whole, there would be an immense concentration of power.
A few months on, these words are starting to show themselves even more true. I stumbled upon this tweet highlighting the impact of AI on freelance marketplaces. The entire post is worth your read:
The paper on which the thread is based further highlights that the effect touches even on the best freelancers:
The release of ChatGPT leads to a 2% drop in the number of jobs on the platform, and a 5.2% drop in monthly earnings. The results are robust to several alternative tests, including a similar reduction in the employment outcomes of freelancers offering design and image-editing services following the introduction of image-focused generative AI. In addition, we find that offering high-quality service does not mitigate the negative effect of AI on freelancers, and in fact present suggestive evidence that top employees are disproportionately hurt by AI.
The freelance marketplace is as unregulated as could be and so the changes affecting these markets have massive implications for the wider job market.
None of this is particularly shocking to me. My thoughts on the matter haven’t changed:
What has however heightened in me is the sense that individuals will have to do more for themselves. They will need to build their own businesses, offer their own consultations, etc. For there will come a time when people who would have once hired others for a skill of a high degree of technical competence will be able to do it themselves. And this will propagate across societies at large.
I don’t think this time will come nearly as quickly as many think, but one needs to hedge for this eventuality in case it does arrive sooner than expected.
I’ve always welcomed more accessible advances in intelligence as a way to augment my own. But I increasingly worry about those for whom this sudden wave takes unprepared.
I look back at the screenshot of the chance of job displacement of Graphic Designers, and can only wonder what the authors of that website are thinking now.