It seems that a lot of white collar jobs will become (already becoming) positional goods, such as aristocratic titles, at least for a few years, possibly longer.
AI will do 100% of the “meat” of the job better than almost all humans, and ~equally for every user (prompting won’t matter much).
But business will still demand accountability for results, and that the workers can claim that they understand and attest AI outputs (these claims themselves won’t be tested, though, nor would it really matter in the grand scheme of things). At the same time, the productivity of these jobs will increase more than businesses can absorb, at least for a few years (and then perhaps fully automated companies will ensue). Thus, fewer total white collar workers are needed.
When the skill doesn’t really matter, and the demand decreases, the jobs will become highly contested and the credentials, prestige (pedigree), connections, and “soft skills” (primarily: of passing the interviews) will decide these contents rather than “hard skills” (of which only the skill of understanding sophisticated AI outputs and potentially fix remaining issues with AI outputs will really matter, but the marginal difference between workers who are good and bad at this skill will be relatively small for the company’s bottom line, and testing candidates for this skill will be too hard).
The above straightforwardly applies to all “digital”/online/IT/analyst/manager jobs.
I don’t buy the takes like Steve Yegge’s https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer and similar, with projections of white collar workers becoming 10x, 100x more productive than today. Backlogs are not that deep, and the marginal value of churning through 99% of these backlog issues for companies is ~0.
I also don’t believe in Jevon’s paradox wonders of increased demand for “digital” work, again at least for a few years (or realistically, 10+ years) until the economy goes through a deeper transformation (including geographically). In the meantime, the economy looks to be already ~saturated (or even oversaturated) with IT/digitalization, marketing, compliance, legal proceedings, analysis, educational materials, and other similar outputs of white collar work.
It seems that a lot of white collar jobs will become (already becoming) positional goods, such as aristocratic titles, at least for a few years, possibly longer.
AI will do 100% of the “meat” of the job better than almost all humans, and ~equally for every user (prompting won’t matter much).
But business will still demand accountability for results, and that the workers can claim that they understand and attest AI outputs (these claims themselves won’t be tested, though, nor would it really matter in the grand scheme of things). At the same time, the productivity of these jobs will increase more than businesses can absorb, at least for a few years (and then perhaps fully automated companies will ensue). Thus, fewer total white collar workers are needed.
When the skill doesn’t really matter, and the demand decreases, the jobs will become highly contested and the credentials, prestige (pedigree), connections, and “soft skills” (primarily: of passing the interviews) will decide these contents rather than “hard skills” (of which only the skill of understanding sophisticated AI outputs and potentially fix remaining issues with AI outputs will really matter, but the marginal difference between workers who are good and bad at this skill will be relatively small for the company’s bottom line, and testing candidates for this skill will be too hard).
The above straightforwardly applies to all “digital”/online/IT/analyst/manager jobs.
I don’t buy the takes like Steve Yegge’s https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer and similar, with projections of white collar workers becoming 10x, 100x more productive than today. Backlogs are not that deep, and the marginal value of churning through 99% of these backlog issues for companies is ~0.
I also don’t believe in Jevon’s paradox wonders of increased demand for “digital” work, again at least for a few years (or realistically, 10+ years) until the economy goes through a deeper transformation (including geographically). In the meantime, the economy looks to be already ~saturated (or even oversaturated) with IT/digitalization, marketing, compliance, legal proceedings, analysis, educational materials, and other similar outputs of white collar work.