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When will the AI penny drop?
I returned from lunch to find that a gray morning had given way to a beautiful spring afternoon in the City, the sun shining on courtyard flowers and through the pints of the insurance men standing outside the pub, who still start drinking at midday. I walked into the office, past the receptionists and security staff, then went up to our floor, passed the back office, the HR team who sit near us, our friendly sysadmin, my analysts, associate, my own boss. I sent some emails to a client, to our lawyers, to theirs, called our small graphics team who design graphics for pitchbooks and prospectuses for roadshows in Adobe whatever. I spoke to our team secretary about some flights and a hotel meeting room in a few weeks. I reviewed a bad model and fired off some pls fixes. I called our health insurance provider and spoke to a surprisingly nice woman about some extra information they need for a claim.
And I thought to myself can it really be that all this is about to end, not in the steady process envisioned by a prescient few a decade ago but in an all-encompassing crescendo that will soon overwhelm us all? I walk around now like a tourist in the world I have lived in my whole life, appreciating every strange interaction with another worker, the hum of commerce, the flow of labor. Even the commute has taken on a strange new meaning to me, because I know it might be over so soon.
All of these jobs, including my own, can be automated with current generation AI agents and some relatively minor additional work (much of which can itself be done by AI). Next generation agents (already in testing at leading labs) will be able to take screen and keystroke recordings (plus audio from calls if applicable) of, say, 20 people performing a niche white collar role over a few weeks and learn pretty much immediately know how to do it as well or better. This job destruction is only part of the puzzle, though, because as these roles go so do tens of millions of other middlemen, from recruiters and consultants and HR and accountants to millions employed at SaaS providers that build tools - like Salesforce, Trello, even Microsoft with Office - that will soon be largely or entirely redundant because whole workflows will be replaced by AI. The friction facilitators of technical modernity, from CRMs to emails to dashboards to spreadsheets to cloud document storage will be mostly valueless. Adobe alone, which those coworkers use to photoshop cute little cover images for M&A pitchbooks, is worth $173bn and yet has been surely rendered worthless, in the last couple of weeks alone, by new multimodal LLMs that allow for precise image generation and editing by prompt1. With them will come an almighty economic crash that will affect every business from residential property managing to plumbing, automobiles to restaurants. Like the old cartoon trope, it feels like we have run off a cliff but have yet to speak gravity into existence.
It was announced yesterday that employment in the securities industry on Wall Street hit a 30-year high (I suspect that that is ‘since records began’, but if not I suppose it coincides with the final end of open outcry trading). I wonder what that figure will be just a few years from now. This was a great bonus season (albeit mostly in trading), perhaps the last great one. My coworker spent the evening speaking to students at his old high school about careers in finance; students are being prepared for jobs that will not exist, a world that will not exist, by the time they graduate.
Walking through the city I feel a strange sense of foreboding, of a liminal time. Perhaps it is self-induced; I have spent much of the past six months obsessed by 1911 to 1914, the final years of the long 19th century, by Mann and Zweig and Proust. The German writer Florian Illies wrote a work of pop-history about 1913 called “the year before the storm”. Most of it has nothing to do with the coming war or the arms race; it is a portrait (in many ways) of peace and mundanity, of quiet progress, of sports tournaments and scientific advancement and banal artistic introspection, of what felt like a rational and evolutionary march toward modernity tempered by a faint dread, the kind you feel when you see flowers on their last good day. You know what will happen and yet are no less able to stop it than those who are comfortably oblivious.
In recent months I have spoken to almost all smartest people I know about the coming crisis. Most are still largely oblivious; “new jobs will be created”, “this will just make humans more productive”, “people said the same thing about the internet in the 90s”, and - of course - “it’s not real creativity”. A few - some quants, the smarter portfolio managers, a couple of VCs who realize that every pitch is from a company that wants to automate one business while relying for revenue on every other industry that will supposedly have just the same need for people and therefore middlemen SaaS contracts as it does today - realize what is coming, can talk about little else.
Many who never before expressed any fear or doubts about the future of capitalism have begun what can only be described as prepping, buying land in remote corners of Europe and North America where they have family connections (or sometimes none at all), buying crypto as a hedge rather than an investment, investigating residency in Switzerland and researching countries likely to best quickly adapt to an automated age in which service industry exports are liable to collapse (wealthy, domestic manufacturing, energy resources or nuclear power, reasonably low population density, produce most food domestically, some natural resources, political system capable of quick adaptation). America is blessed with many of these but its size, political divisions and regional, ethnic and cultural tensions, plus an ingrained highly individualistic culture mean it will struggle, at least for a time. A gay Japanese friend who previously swore he would never return to his homeland on account of the homophobia he had experienced there has started pouring huge money into his family’s ancestral village and directly told me he was expecting some kind of large scale economic and social collapse as a result of AI to force him to return home soon.
Unfortunately Britain, where manufacturing has been largely outsourced, most food and much fuel has to be imported and which is heavily reliant on exactly the professional services that will be automated first seems likely to have to go through one of the harshest transitions. A Scottish portfolio manager, probably in his 40s told me of the compound he is building on one of the remote islands off Scotland’s west coast. He grew up in Edinburgh, but was considering contributing a large amount of money towards some church repairs and the renovation of a beloved local store or pub of some kind to endear himself to the community in case he needed it. I presume that in big tech money, where I know far fewer people than others here, similar preparations are being made. I have made a few smaller preparations of my own, although what started as ‘just in case’ now occupies an ever greater place in my imagination.
For almost ten years we have discussed politics and society on this forum. Now events, at last, seem about to overwhelm us. It is unclear whether AGI will entrench, reshape or collapse existing power structures, will freeze or accelerate the culture war. Much depends on who exactly is in power when things happen, and on whether tools that create chaos (like those causing mass unemployment) arrive much before those that create order (mass autonomous police drone fleets, ubiquitous VR dopamine at negligible cost). It is also a twist of fate that so many involved in AI research were themselves loosely involved in the Silicon Valley circles that spawned the rationalist movement, and eventually through that, and Scott, this place. For a long time there was truth in the old internet adage that “nothing ever happens”. I think it will be hard to say the same five years from now.
1 Some part of me wants to resign and short the big SaaS firms that are going to crash first, but I’ve always been a bad gambler (and am lucky enough, mostly, to know it).
Why hasn't it already?
My wife worked about five years ago at as a credit analyst, where part of her job involved determining whether or not to extend extra lines of credit: the easiest thing in the world (I would think) to automate. Really, a very simple algorithm based off of known data should be able to make those decisions, right? But my wife, using extremely outdated software, at a place with massive employee retention problems due to insanely high workloads, was tasked with following a set of general guidelines to determine whether or not to extend additional credit. In some cases the guidelines were a bit ambiguous. She was instructed by her manager to use her gut.
As I think I've mentioned before, I work with AI for my IRL job fairly extensively, although mostly second-hand. The work we do now would have required much more human effort prior to modern AI models, and having been involved in the transition between "useless-to-us-GPT" and "oh wow this is actually good" I can tell you that our model of action pivoted away from mass employment. But we still need people - the AI requires a lot of hand-holding, although I am optimistic it will improve in that regard - and AI can't sell people on a product. You seem to be envisioning a world where an AI can do the work of 10 people at a 14 person company, so the company shrinks to 4 people. I'm living in a world where AI can do the work of 10 people, so we're likely to employ (let's say) 10 people instead of 20 and do 100x the work the 20 people would have been able to do. It's quite possible that in our endeavor the AI is actually the difference between success and failure and when it's all said and done by 2050 we end up employing 50 people instead of zero.
How far that generalizes, I do not know. What I do know is that "capitalism" is often extraordinarily inefficient already. If AI ends up doing jobs that could have been replaced in whole or in part by automation a decade before anyone had ever heard of "ChatGPT" it will be because AI is the new and sexy thing, not because "capitalism" is insanely efficient and good at making decisions. It seems quite plausible to me that people will still be using their gut at my wife's place of employment at the same time that AI is giving input into high-level decisions in Silicon Valley boardrooms.
I definitely believe that AI and automation change the shape of industry over the next 50 years - and yes, the next 5. What I would not bet on (absent other factors, which are plenteous) is everyone waking up the same day and deciding to fire all their employees and replace them with AI, mass pandemonium in the streets. For one thing, the people who would make the decision to do that are the people least likely to be comfortable with using AI. Instead, they will ask the people most likely to be replaced by AI to study the question of whether or not to replace them with AI. How do you think that's going to go? There's also the "lobster dominance hierarchy" - people prefer to boss other people around rather than lord it over computers. Money and personnel are a measuring stick of importance and the managerial class won't give up on that easily.
For one, I'd like to point out that this has been a constant for centuries at this point, dating back to at least the industrial revolution. I was discussing family history a while back, and we have photos of my great grandfather proudly picketing for a union that doesn't exist anymore. That entire profession was gone and the union folded before I was born because of pre-AI "automation" (computers, really). Entire professions have disappeared since WWII because of the spreadsheet — VisiCalc famously sold users on a $2000 Apple II to run a $100 application, in 1979 dollars!
The real question that comes to mind about "AI" in these days is whether this is a rather impactful step change (like the spreadsheet, or the smartphone), or whether this is something else in kind. And I'm somewhat leaning toward the former, and find that arguments for the latter tend to under-sell the impact of major technology changes even within my lifetime; for all the concern about "singularity", exponential growth manages to look pretty similar but lacks the vertical asymptote. But I'm open to hearing other ideas.
Personally I find "spreadsheets" very apt so far. I think they definitely have the potential to disrupt some jobs. But if I'm being honest I think a lot of the "email jobs" are begging for disruption anyway, for other reasons. I would not be surprised if "AI" takes the blame for something that was more-or-less going to happen anyway.
I think robotics (which obviously has a lot of overlap with AI!) is potentially vastly more impactful than just "an AI that can do your email job." If you started randomly shooting "email job holders" and "guys who maintain power lines and fiber optic cables" you would notice the disruption in the power lines and fiber optic cables much sooner unless you got weirdly (un?)lucky shooting email jobbers. Similarly, AI will have a much bigger impact if it comes with concrete physical improvements instead of just better video games, or more website code, or better-written emails, or whatever, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of people work in the video game/coding/email industry.
(I hope I am right about that. I guess wireheading is kinda an option...)
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