The job market does not have to be net negative due to AI.
As I’ve confessed before, my 🔮 is cloudy. With that profession, here are two theories with respect to the job market and this moment of AI uncertainty.
I believe these hold for at least the conditions where superhuman intelligence is not achieved. Otherwise, we will have unstable equilibrium.
Crushing the Competition
Companies are marveling at AI in the moment. They say “Wow, look at what we can do with this. We can be so efficient.”
There are two roads to take from there.
The organization continues, saying, “We can do the same amount of work with fewer people.”
This is the scarcity mindset. The path Block has taken, laying off 40% of the company.
we’re not making this decision because we’re in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that’s accelerating rapidly.
In the other, the organization instead says, “We can do so much more with the same amount of people.”
This is the growth mindset. These organizations keep their existing hiring plans or expand them. They retool and reorganize. They accelerate, not maintain, their roadmaps. They pull ahead of the competition, the ones maintaining their existing pace with fewer people. They crush them.
The job market does not have to be net negative due to AI.
Computers as Jobs
Computer used to be a job that people did. Very intelligent people. Often women. We’ll refer to them as capital-C “Computers”.
These Computers, well, they computed complex maths: planetary orbits, rocket trajectories, flight paths.
Then computers as we know them came. Computers that could work tirelessly, consistently, and with near flawless execution given proper instructions and oversight.
What about the Computers? Were they relegated to the dustbin of economic history? No.
Yes, there may have been momentary disruption in how we applied them.
Capitalism is ruthlessly efficient.
It would be economically wasteful to not utilize these individuals.
It would be capitalistically irrational.
And so we found new uses for them. In overseeing the computers. Taking on higher order levels of work. New abstractions. The job market was not zero sum, exchanging Computers for computers. Computers are the spiritual ancestors of today’s software engineers.
And so it can be with AI.
While handcrafting code may become a hobbyist endeavor, utilizing their human intelligence will not.
We will find new, knowledge-based uses for intelligent people. The uses are hard to see right now in the fog of war.
Capitalism is ruthlessly efficient.
It would be economically wasteful to not utilize these individuals.
It would be capitalistically irrational.
The job market does not have to be net negative due to AI.