Jobs Categories Have Always Come and Gone: Enter A.I.

There are not a lot of switchboard operators anymore, the typing and stenographic pools have disappeared (along with carbon paper and whiteout), banks of clerical accountants using manual adding machines have vaporized, milkmen are pretty much gone, and film processors have been replaced. Steel manufacturing, food storage, medical technology, communications, travel, etc. have all morphed into a routine mass of “other.” Look back at 1940, before most of us were born or at least conscious of our surroundings and looking for jobs. The American job market was rather dramatically different. But that’s the way change has always been, even as Singularity theorists will tell you, the greatest change in the last thousand years is probably the acceleration rate of change itself.

The Internet, social media, GPS tracking, MRIs, dirt-cheap jet travel, nuclear weapons… and power, remote work, home delivery and ubiquitous access to car services, air conditioning (!!!) and smart phones are “efficiency” technologies that have created more jobs than they have replaced. Technology changes everything, sometimes slowly and at other times faster than a zoomy cat. Climate change and massive demographic shifts, the conflicts that were driven by climate change… and that nasty leader of change: war.

A couple of years ago, I was regaled by a partner in national law firm about how I did not get that the Metaverse was the next big thing and that I needed to stake out some real estate there for my law firm. I smiled and pretended to be an old guy who did not get this “new stuff.” To me, whether it was timing, the disruptive need to maximize my Metaverse experience, literally to immerse myself, would be greatly benefited by my buying a very expensive headset; it was an easy “no.” That alone told me that since most people can’t spend that kind of money, unless and until the cost dropped and the value was vastly more compelling, this was unlikely to generate the standard-setting expectations that lawyer held dear.

But when artificial intelligence began to be developed into real applications, where I saw clear benefits to managing masses of data (internal and external) and teaching itself how to identify valuable patterns, providing descriptions in English, charts most dramatic and even visualizations based on word-inputs, I knew this was a big deal. I had been studying plasma computing, which has a way to go, capable processing thousands if not millions of times faster than our most advanced supercomputers today, the words “game changer” were dramatically inadequate.

Aside from that visual of a robotic assembly line, what I was learning was considerably more, a technology that impacted white collar experts as much as robotics had impacted blue collar workers. And so, I read with interest an article, New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940–2018 by David Autor, Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons & Bryan Seegmiller, Oxford Quarterly Journal of Economics (August 2024, published March 15th), that reminded me that human labor will always be radically changed by seminal shifts in technology, that those who can get comfortable with this may well prosper. Here is the abstract from that Oxonian piece:

We answer three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories (“new work”) in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work, where does it come from, and what effect does it have on labor demand? We construct a novel database spanning eight decades of new job titles linked to U.S. Census microdata and to patent-based measures of occupations’ exposure to labor-augmenting and labor-automating innovations. The majority of current employment is in new job specialties introduced since 1940, but the locus of new-work creation has shifted from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980 to high-paid professional occupations and secondarily to low-paid services since 1980. New work emerges in response to technological innovations that complement the outputs of occupations and demand shocks that raise occupational demand. Innovations that automate tasks or reduce occupational demand slow new-work emergence. Although the flow of augmentation and automation innovations is positively correlated across occupations, the former boosts occupational labor demand while the latter depresses it. The demand-eroding effects of automation innovations have intensified in the past four decades while the demand-increasing effects of augmentation innovations have not.

Simply, patent-based tech has created a present-day schism where highly paid professionals make alarming money from these changes, while those performing physical “blue collar” tasks have only prospered when they have learned to use the technology for their economic betterment. Populism probably grew in the social petri dish.

Yet, learning to use that technology – namely artificial intelligence – is the essence of future employment opportunities. Could society develop such that virtually any work can be better accomplished with AI-controlled machines? To those who believe that machines can never replace sentient tasks, are completely incapable of creating new artistic directions, I have to remind them that we are all programmed to one level or another, we all are capable of learning and accessing new inputs. AI will only grow from here.

So, if I were able to take away the functions of the brain consumed with running the human body – walking, eating, keep the heartbeat going, etc. – and use the balance of the processing power and memory of an AI device with a greatly expanded computing platform (inevitable), we are very close to AI having and soon exceeding the power of the human brain… in everything. Is this the stuff of science or science fiction? One wag posited that the reason we have not yet connected with a “there must be one out there” deep space alien society of greater sophistication than us mere Earthlings just might be: they all perished when they developed AI that totally replaced them. Others have posited that should AI truly takeover, a generous system of “socialism” would dominate how human beings live. There might even be technological containment of climate change.

In the meantime, AI is to stay. We need enforceable ethical boundaries, multinational treaties on how nations can interface with the technology, limit the permissible applications, and add more deep thought on how we can grow, use AI, but make the world safer, more comfortable and allow human beings to seek meaning in new and exciting ways. Or not. We need sophisticated education experts, perhaps aided by AI, to design classrooms (see above picture) at every level to make children, who will replace us, masters of that AI future. We will make mistakes, but the mistake we cannot make is to deal with AI without understanding what it is and what it can do.

I’m Peter Dekom and embracing knowledge and eschewing fear are the essence of our path forward in the world of growing artificial intelligence applications.