ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?
AI and the automation of work — Benedict Evans (ben-evans.com)
It’s different because of the last 200 years, lol. Those 200 years have seen us get from nothing to now. From horses, to Waymo. From the start of photography, to 4K/120fps in your pocket.
What all technologists completely miss about the future of work and economics, is that we already have plenty. We have tons. We have insane amounts of everything. There’s nothing to produce more. There’s no need for more.
That’s the massive difference compared to the start of the last 200 years, in 1823! At that time, the world seemed to be gigantic and wild. Today it is the same Starbucks, TikTok and phones in hands from Jakarta to NYC to Brisbane. There’s nothing to produce at massive scale anymore. We have far too much of everything, and it’s available pretty much everywhere.
Look at creative industries! The job market is dire there because guess what, there’s far too much entertainment. I can’t even remember when I downloaded Ted Lasso season 1 and I still haven’t watched it because well, there’s tons of entertainment available and I keep forgetting about it. Not so long ago, you would watch a movie or show religiously, and most people tuned in. Today, it’s just so granular and weird.
Now, the real thing we could do, is re-distribute that wealth properly. That would change everything.
“So, we don’t know what the new jobs will be, but we have a model that says, not just that there always have been new jobs, but why that is inherent in the process. Don’t worry about AI!”
Of course we do worry because the point is not that there won’t be new jobs, the point is that there are not enough jobs for an economy as large as the West Global Capitalism, even with new jobs. The real world is finite. Computers in the past 30 years already have cut a lot of people off from having a job. AI is even better at this! I’ll take my mom’s career (accounting) as an example:
1970s: accounting firm (10-15 folks).
1980s: mom is independent (her, an assistant and 3 computers for 40 years). She semi-retired in 2020.
2020s: one accountant part-time, Excel, maybe an assistant? Taxes can be taken care of automatically with so many services already.
2030s: this intellectual career that no one could have possibly imagined being done by a computer (lots of reading), for which my mom graduated from a top 10 business school in the world, does not exist anymore.
That’s progress! But that also means less jobs. Period. I hate that naïve techno-optimism that’s only here to push more tech, but refuses to think about societal changes related to this. Tech is great and is modifying society heavily. We should focus on that instead of being vague and wrong with “this is progress as usual!” takes.
It’s truly a brand new world. New life conditions. It’s different.
(edit: older post from last year, still on point or even more so)