Happy AI News: Job Losses? Nope, Not a Thing
September 19, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.
I read “AI May Not Steal Many Jobs after All. It May Just Make Workers More Efficient.” Immediately two points jumped out at me. The AP (the publisher of the “real” news story is hedging with the weasel word “may” and the hedgy phrase “after all.” Why is this important? The “real” news industry is interested in smart software to reduce costs and generate more “real” news more quickly. The days with “real” reporters disappearing for hours to confirm with a source are often associated with fiddling around. The costs of doing anything without a gusher of money pumping 24×7 are daunting. The word “efficient” sits in the headline as a digital harridan stakeholder. Who wants that?
The manager of a global news operation reports that under his watch, he has achieved peak efficiency. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Will this work for production software development? Good enough is the new benchmark, right?
The story itself strikes me as a bit of content marketing which says, “Hey, everyone can use AI to become more efficient.” The subtext is, “Hey, don’t worry. No software robot or agentic thingy will reduce staff. Probably.
The AP is a litigious outfit even though I worked at a newspaper which “participated” in the business process of the entity. Here’s one sentence from the “real” news write up:
Instead, the technology might turn out to be more like breakthroughs of the past — the steam engine, electricity, the internet: That is, eliminate some jobs while creating others. And probably making workers more productive in general, to the eventual benefit of themselves, their employers and the economy.
Yep, just like the steam engine and the Internet.
When technologies emerge, most go away or become componentized or dematerialized. When one of those hot technologies fail to produce revenues, quite predictable outcomes result. Executives get fired. VC firms do fancy dancing. IRS professionals squint at tax returns.
So far AI has been a “big guys win sort of because they have bundles of cash” and “little outfits lose control of their costs”. Here’s my take:
- Human-generated news is expensive and if smart software can do a good enough job, that software will be deployed. The test will be real time. If the software fails, the company may sell itself, pivot, or run a garage sale.
- When “good enough” is the benchmark, staff will be replaced with smart software. Some of the whiz kids in AI like the buzzword “agentic.” Okay, agentic systems will replace humans with good enough smart software. That will happen. Excellence is not the goal. Money saving is.
- Over time, the ideas of the current transformer-based AI systems will be enriched by other numerical procedures and maybe— just maybe — some novel methods will provide “smart software” with more capabilities. Right now, most smart software just finds a path through already-known information. No output is new, just close to what the system’s math concludes is on point. Right now, the next generation of smart software seems to be in the future. How far? It’s anyone’s guess.
My hunch is that Amazon Audible will suggest that humans will not lose their jobs. However, the company is allegedly going to replace human voices with “audibles” generated by smart software. (For more about this displacement of humans, check out the Bloomberg story.)
Net net: The “real” news story prepares the field for planting writing software in an organization. It says, “Customer will benefit and produce more jobs.” Great assertions. I think AI will be disruptive and in unpredictable ways. Why not come out and say, “If the agentic software is good enough, we will fire people”? Answer: Being upfront is not something those who are not dinobabies do.
Stephen E Arnold, September 19, 2024
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