What does AI Mean for the Future of Work?

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that I believe the Information Age ended on March 14, 2023 with the launch of GPT-4, and we are now entering a new era which will be known as either the “AI/Robotics Age,” the “Knowledge Age,” or the “Machine Age.” I believe AI will profoundly change the way we work, and the time to pay attention to it is now. Earlier this week, several prominent public and business leaders, many of them senior in the field of AI, signed an open letter calling for a 6 month moratorium on the further development of AI technologies more advanced than GPT-4. This was in response to what they see as massive potential disruption to the global workforce, information platforms (which are already starting to be infiltrated by AI bots), and a lack of time to prepare society for what is coming. It’s worth noting that some researchers have articulated even more existential concerns, worried about our eventual progression into a Artificial General Intelligence, where future AIs may have intelligence and capabilities far beyond what humans are capable of or even understand and use it to eventually destroy humanity.

I will not list all of the occupations which I believe will be impacted by AI. Frankly, it would be too long and my goal in writing this is not to call out any specific profession. I’ve already shared the example of what is happening to programmers, but know that these dynamics will extend far beyond that. Few people want to think of their own hard work and analysis as something which could be automated by AI, so instead, ask yourself: how much of your own work is sending an e-mail or a chat message to someone else, asking them to do something for you or to provide you with some piece of information? Now consider, how much of their work could be done by an AI, trained on your organization’s internal data and knowledge from reputable sites on the Internet, with the ability to engage socially and economically on your behalf on the Internet? Probably a lot more than most might think.

To be blunt, the concerns around massive disruption of the global workforce in the near-term are real and founded. Historically, so called “knowledge workers,” who had advanced skills like coding or legal expertise had substantial moats to their work. They were more immune to the relentless focus American industry put on outsourcing, off-shoring, and automation since the 1980s. But the tables have turned and it is knowledge work which AI will most effectively augment, and in some cases replace. 

Now, at least some of that knowledge work are the very first tasks AI / GPT-4 is good at. Not just sort of good, scarily good; to the point where it can do something like 80% to 90% of coding tasks in a matter of seconds- tasks which might take some humans hours or days. Especially in the discipline of coding, almost every elite coder I know working on cutting edge technologies like blockchain is already using AI tools to accelerate their work, and many claim to be more than 10x+ productive as a result. This means that individual coders can do more than ever before, which either means we will have more coding than ever before, or fewer coders than before.

But it is not all doom and gloom- there are perhaps reasons to be optimistic. In the history of technological disruption, humans always found creative ways to use new tools to make their work better and do even more of it. It has been a fundamental reality in our civilization’s ceaseless increases in productivity, which have gone exponential since the dawn of the Industrial Age (since ~1760) and more recently during the Information Age (since ~1970). There is good reason to believe that we can and will use these technologies simply to be more productive at scale, rather than totally replace human jobs. Workforce reskilling can be impactful, and if the displaced workers this time really are among some of our brightest, then perhaps they will be even more enterprising in finding or creating new opportunities for themselves.

But I think we must consider the fact that demand for new work may not increase on pace with how quickly the technology could replace humans doing similar work today.

If in fact 80% of coding work can be automated, then it is not likely that we will immediately find 5x the amount of coding work to meet current employment in this field. Potentially even worse within the context of this scenario, this is the worst the AI will ever be at these tasks. From here, it will only get better and with many more well-heeled firms participating in its development.

Further, if we experience possible recessionary conditions in the economy in late 2023, firms will have “the cover” they need to eliminate jobs at scale. Many will replace certain roles with AI or AI-augmented workers, and they will never backfill the employees they laid off. Meanwhile, new firms entering the market will never scale up their workforces in the same way as legacy firms- conditions which we know from history could lead to large-scale corporate disruptions from scrappy upstarts who are able to stay forever lean.

I believe we need intelligent government policies to deal with the disruption I expect we will see over the next 5 years (mostly as subsidies for displaced workers and reskilling programs, and perhaps in the form of new corporate taxes or subsidies for employing humans), but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. While the “open letter” I mentioned earlier in this article may have good intentions behind it, the game theory suggests that no government would ever agree to a 6 month pause on AI research in earnest, and that many governments and firms would violate it in secret if they did.We are in a new era, and AI is the new global arms race. Think one part Manhattan Project and one part Space Race / Moon Landing. And if we consider the Space Race as our example, then GPT-4 is our “Sputnik” moment. The stakes are enormous for both governments AND firms to figure out how to put this technology to good use, and quickly. Any society which attempts to limit the use of AI in material ways may find themselves on the wrong side of history as they are quickly left behind in both immediate productivity and future AI technology advances.

AI will massively increase human productivity and will create untold wealth for our societies, especially when it is eventually paired with robotics. And from this point, it will accelerate all of our civilization’s research efforts such that we advance faster and faster. There is no stopping what has started here, and indeed I expect to see AI budgets increase on the order of 10x to 1000x in many organizations.