While I can agree with the long-term result — less work, more production, new kinds of jobs — I dissent in the short term.
Take Hollywood. With AI entertainment on demand, I see the industry exiting. The writers seem to see something coming too: the Guild has been on strike since May 2, 11,500 of them, and among their demands are “regulations around the use of AI to create source material and write, or rewrite, literary material.” The studios’ counter, per Time, was an annual meeting to discuss the technology. The distance between those two positions tells you which side thinks the clock is running.
Then the desks. With lawyers and bankers replaced by more capable logic resources — perfect command of facts, data and the math that makes a deal work — I see the further loss of high-paying industry. Accountants obviously exit with them. HR, coders, architects. Name a white-collar industry and I think I could make a case for the exit door. IBM’s chief executive made one himself ten days ago: the company expects to pause hiring for back-office roles it thinks AI could do, and of roughly 26,000 such jobs he said, “I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period.” That’s about 7,800 people, at one company, said out loud.
I even include entrepreneurs. We think humans are more creative than an AI, but what we call creativity is mostly the observation of improbable outcomes — and an AI can consider billions of improbable outcomes before it calculates the best way to profit from a market opportunity. Founders are not exempt from the arithmetic.
In short, I think the world can become very awesome, very quickly. But the interim period has me worried. I think we lose a lot of jobs. Johnson, in the preface to his Dictionary, put it by way of Hooker: “Change, says Hooker, is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.”
Also, I wonder whether AI contributes first to cost cutting and only later to revenue generation. The early evidence points at cost, or at somebody else’s revenue. IBM’s news is a hiring pause. The same week, Chegg’s shares “plummeted over 49% on Tuesday after Chegg acknowledged that ChatGPT is starting to hurt its business.” So far the loud stories are about savings and about losses. The revenue stories are quieter, if they exist yet. Maybe the market is waiting for revenue generation first?
