16 Musings on AI’s Impact on the Labor Market

Nuance is a must on this topic

Shady Sharify / Better Images of AI / Who is AI Made Of / CC-BY 4.0

1. In the short term, generative AI will replace a lot of people because productivity increases while demand stays the same due to inertia.

2. In the long term, the creation of new jobs compensates for the loss of old ones, resulting in a net positive outcome for humans who leave behind jobs no one wants to do.

3. The most important aspect of any technological revolution is the transition from before to after.

4. Timing and location matters: older people have a harder time reinventing themselves into a new trade or craft. Poor people and poor countries have less margin to react to a wave of unemployment.

5. Digital automation is quicker and more aggressive than physical automation because it bypasses logistical constraints—while ChatGPT can be infinitely cloned, a metallic robot cannot.

6. Writing and painting won't die because people care about the human factor first and foremost; there are already a lot of books we can't possibly read in one lifetime so we select them as a function of who's the author.

7. Even if you hate OpenAI and ChatGPT for being responsible for the lack of job postings, I recommend you ally with them for now; learn to use ChatGPT before it's too late to keep your options open.

8. Companies are choosing to reduce costs over increasing output because the sectors where generative AI is useful can't artificially increase demand in parallel to productivity. (Who needs more online content?)

9. Our generation is reasonably angry at generative AI and will bravely fight it. Still, our offspring—and theirs—will be grateful for a transformed world whose painful transformation they didn't have to endure.

10. Certifiable human-made creative output will reduce its quantity but multiply its value in the next years because demand specific for it will grow; automation can mimic 99% of what we do but never reaches 100%.

11. The maxim “AI won't take your job, a person using AI will; yes, you using AI will replace yourself not using it” applies more in the long term than the short term.

12. We should transition from “AI is eating the workforce” to “AI has created a new workforce” with safety nets and governmental help available to those who need it.

13. Employers have a moral duty but also incentives to help their employees adopt AI as a tool to upskill and reskill. Doing so satisfactorily is hard because inertia, learning barriers, and uncertainty are formidable foes.

14. No matter how intelligent the frontier AI systems are, the future will remain unevenly distributed; don’t believe those who claim you can rest because you won’t need money after AGI.

15. There’s a limited number of timelines where your job is the biggest of your worries: you may learn to get ahead with AI, you may not feel a thing because progress halts, and you may be dead if AI alignment isn’t solved.

16. The only thing that invariably protects your job in a post-AI world is the quality of your relationship with the people who pay you (being self-employed will be the preferred and safest choice).

---