Follow the Money . . . the Generative AI Job Apocalypse Is Mostly Fiction.
I suspect we are approaching a time of re-balancing our views of HI and AI.
You don’t hear about HI these days. It’s coming back. Back to the future . . .
HI is, of course, “Human Intelligence”.
You may remember back in early 2024 that a well-known firm, looking for an IPO, made some bold, impressive announcements.
- They boasted that an AI assistant they had deployed was “doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents.” This raised eyebrows given that the company had recently laid off roughly the same number of employees to weather financial difficulties.
- The company was asked how they arrived at their calculation for its AI assistant’s human-equivalent productivity.
- A spokesperson eventually admitted the productivity number was “illustrative” to indicate the more long-term consequences of AI technology . . . . . . .
Hmmm . . .
Remember the forecasts on impact of RPA? A Big 4 report in 2016 forecast that RPA was “expected to eliminate 40 percent to 75 percent of manual labor”.
Rafael Brown, Stephen Klein and Sarajit Jha all shared some thoughtful commentary on this in the past week.
Stephen Klein shared a thought-provoking article “The Generative AI Job Apocalypse Is Mostly Fiction”.
He argues that the eco-system of intertwined money flows have a vested interest in developing and sustaining the narrative. He suggests three massive clues:
1. When powerful research studies are published, check who’s paid.
2. If powerful research studies are published by the same sources who are making the lion’s share of the money, well that’s a clue too
3. The moment Sam Altman says anything, and the “experts” go into amplification mode and parrot everything he says with no critical thinking whatsoever
Quoting Alvin Foo, Sarajit Jha shared the words of the former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt:
“We believe that in the next year, the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI”.
Eric continued “Within three to five years, we’ll see AGI systems as smart as the best humans. And in six years, artificial superintelligence smarter than all of us combined. This is happening fast, and society isn’t ready.”
I don’t know about you, but our software engineers do more than just “write code”. It is equivalent to suggesting that marketers just “design ads”.
We made the same mistake with RPA when we realized, only too late, we were misleading ourselves. It should have been called “Robotic Task Automation” and maybe now, “Intelligent Task Automation”. Not “Robotic Process Automation”. But it was good marketing!
We continue to confuse and conflate “tasks”, some of which can be automated and workflowed, with “jobs”, “work”, “functions”, “processes” and “end-to-end value streams”.
Rafael Brown commented that the company that benefits the most from the Gen AI bubble has zero AI employees (maybe not actually zero, but the argument holds). Nvidia hires humans and most of all, Engineers.
The reality for ACTUAL tech companies is the need for more humans in the age of AI.
Whilst marketing for mere mortals suggests the future is AI agents, actual tech companies continue to hire technical humans.
Maybe, when assessing the big news items, we should “follow the money” as recommended by all good TV detectives. It turns out that “follow the money” was a catchphrase popularized by the movie “All The President’s Men” that explored the political corruption surrounding the Watergate scandal (ask an elderly relative about that! 😉)
Even Microsoft, in it’s latest efficiency drive, is relying on cutting middle managers to expand “span of human management control” rather than relying on an AI solution.
Our own development team would like additional HI (Human Intelligence) resources for their AI work. Demand for HI doesn’t seem to be lessening.
There is massive value in AI.
In my view, based on how business outcomes can be better engineered, is that value can be maximized by combining probabilistic AI combined with binary, deterministic, “rules based” (aka traditional) software.
Some things in life, business and commerce are binary, some things are probabilistic.
Some things are about “Mindset””.
You can read Stephen’s thoughts on the “AI Jobs Apocalypse” here . . .
Rafael Brown’s data on the job stats of AI behemoths can be read here . . .
Whether you agree or not with these points of view, they are worth a read to get a balanced view of the argument, so you can make your own conclusions, plans and decisions accordingly.
Cui Bono?
Follow the Money . . . the Generative AI Job Apocalypse Is Mostly Fiction
Thanks for reading . . .