Will your job survive AI? — Harvard Gazette – Expert on future of work says it’s a little early for dire predictions, but there are signs significant change may be coming
Will your job survive AI? — Harvard Gazette – Expert on future of work says it’s a little early for dire predictions, but there are signs significant change may be coming
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From the article
In recent weeks, several prominent executives at big employers such as Ford and J.P. Morgan Chase have been offering predictions that AI will result in large white-collar job losses.
Some tech leaders, including those at Amazon, OpenAI, and Meta have acknowledged that the latest wave of AI, called agentic AI, is much closer to radically transforming the workplace than even they had previously anticipated.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI firm Anthropic, said nearly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in tech, finance, law, and consulting could be replaced or eliminated by AI.
Christopher Stanton, Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, studies AI in the workplace and teaches an MBA course, “Managing the Future of Work.” In this edited conversation, Stanton explains why the latest generation of AI is evolving so rapidly and how it may shake up white-collar work.
AI will kill many so-called bullshit jobs for sure.
But I highly doubt that AI will lead to lower costs for consumers when these jobs are replaced.
Jobs are being taken. However I have not seen a single major article on the ones being created. Hundreds of billions are being spent each year on AI. Money is flowing – people are making money – it would be interesting to list those jobs and those people.
The future has change? No shit.
> The earliest versions of generative AI tools were prone to hallucinate and to provide answers that were inaccurate.
Every AI tool I’ve come across still do this to some extension.
> So, we are starting to see the uptake of these tools consistent with the narrative from these CEOs.
If this technology actually worked, then the shortsighted emotionally driven CEO would be one of the first to go.
I think that AI will only replace the jobs of people that write articles and statements that AI will take over jobs. Or has it already?
If you’re a bit of an expert in anything, you run into the limits of LLMs – which everyone is RAVING about – very quickly.
And to have an ‘exponential curve’ or even somewhat linear curve on improvement, you need the same improvement in training data. And what is going to generate that? AI?
Why is it a “dire” prediction to imagine robots taking away jobs?
What did we think robots were for?
The purpose of labor-saving technology is to save labor. If machines can produce goods so we don’t have to that’s a good thing.
The only thing that’s dire about our situation is that we’ve so far stubbornly refused to implement UBI.
When there’s no UBI, jobs are our source of income and then removing jobs feels like an emergency. Lack of jobs arbitrarily makes people poor today.
When jobs get removed what should happen is the UBI goes up and we all celebrate more leisure instead.
For more information visit: www.greshm.org
Jobs will be replaced when the utility is actually profitable beyond an excuse to cut off the COVID hired fat.
The biggest AI providers are all losing money, only the shovel sellers and consultants are making cash. There are fundamentals costs due to the way LLMs work… I think this will be the revelation at the end of this bubble. The use cases that actually return a profit to the providers and save enough time from the consumers they are willing to pay the big price for it (its big, they’re all eating costs now so it seems cheap).
Think less asking for a chocolate cake recipe and more produce a report based on this carefully curated prompt.
The real issue needs to be in a society where low level remedial work can be outsourced to AI how are we going to deal with the surplus of human capital now available?
Do we institute UBI from a technology tax on the companies to subsidize the 22-62 age group who will be out of work? Or do we turn into a completely dystopian society where you basically turn your city into segmented sections where jobs for the lower class exist but they don’t get access to any of the high end amenities because they are insulated into a present version of the past. Where only people in certain careers and fields get to actually deal with all the technological improvements and how that enhances their lives
AI will replace a lot of jobs.
In its current state, it’s replacing those jobs pretty shittily, but they don’t care because the savings on labor is astronomical. They’ll take a shitty free product over a quality expensive product any day.
But I think we can all see that AI will become incrementally better. All new technologies are mocked when they’re new and bad. But AI will only get better, the LLM will become just the front end part that communicates with us, while the back end takes on more and more intelligence.
This is probably the start of a revolution on the scale of the industrial. Massive shifts in labor. Massive unemployment while the economy re-sorts itself into its new form.
I wish we had someone I trust at the helm during this time.
Why do these experts think people will just lay down and take this shit without riots or protest or a general strike? They’re assuming a lot. People will only take so much bullshit before it hurts enough of the middle class to push back.
[Why Are We Pretending AI Is Going to Take All the Jobs?](https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-are-we-pretending-ai-is-going)