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I've all of the sudden seen AI blackpilling break out into the normie space around me. Not so much about FOOM, and paperclipping, or terminator scenarios, but around the sudden disruptive nature, and especially around economic upheaval. Not exactly sure why. Veo3 has been part of it.
For example, coworkers suddenly aware that AI is going to completely disrupt the job market and economy, and very soon. People are organically discovering the @2rafa wonderment at how precariously and even past-due a great deal of industry and surrounding B2B services industries stand to be domino'd over. If my observation generalizes, that middle class normies are waking up a doompill on AI economic disruption, what is going to happen?
Let's consider it from 2 points of view. 1 They're right. and 2. They're wrong. 1. is pretty predictable fodder here - massive, gamechanging social and economic disruption, with difficult to predict state on the other side.
But is 2 that much less worrisome? Even if everyone is 'wrong', and AI is somehow not going to take away 'careers', people in mass worrrying that it's so will still manifest serious disruption. People are already starting to hold thier breath. Stopping hiring, stopping spending, running hail mary's, checking out.
Somehow, it's only senior management who doesn't realize the impact. (They keep framing 'If we can cut costs, we'll come out on top, instead of following the logical conclusion, if everyone stops spending the B2B economy collapses.) - I have a nontechnical coworker, who has recently recreated some complex business intelligence tool we purchased not long ago using readily available AI and a little bit of coaching. He had an oh shit moment, when he realized how cannibalized the software industry is about to get. The film industry seems about to completely topple, not because Veo3 will replace it immediately, but because, who's going to make a giant investment in that space right now?
I suspect the macro economic shock is going to hit faster than most are expecting, and faster than actual GDP gains will be made, but maybe I'm just an idiot.
My gut feeling is that this AI wave will be a short panic and then basically blow over. To predict massive job loss you have to assume that jobs are already distributed rationally, and that companies are good at adapting to and using new technology efficiently. Neither of these are even remotely true!
If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have. On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?
So the idea that just because there's a new technology coming out that can do a bunch of fancy new stuff, does not convince me that we'll have massive job loss at all. What will likely happen, and what has already been happening for a while, is that the people in white collar roles who can use these tools will just shift off more and more work to them privately, and pretend they are still just as busy. The roles might get a tad more competitive.
But we're not going to be in a doomsday scenario where everyone loses jobs, even IF AGI comes out tomorrow.
Let me join the chorus of voices enthusiastically agreeing with you about how jobs are already bullshit. I've never been quite sure whether this maximally cynical view is true, but it sure feels true. One white-collar worker has 10x more power to, well, do stuff than 100 years ago, but somehow we keep finding things for them to do. And so Elon can fire 80% of Twitter staff, and "somehow" Twitter continues to function normally.
With that said, I worry that this is a metastable state. Witness how thoroughly the zeitgeist of work changed after COVID - all of a sudden, in my (bullshit white-collar) industry, it's just the norm to WFH and maybe grudgingly come in to the office for a few hours 3 days a week. Prior to 2020, it was very hard to get a company to agree to let you WFH even one day a week, because they knew you'd probably spend the time much less productively. Again, "somehow" the real work that was out there still seems to get done.
If AI makes it more and more obvious that office work is now mostly just adult daycare, that lowers the transition energy even more. And we might just be waiting for another sudden societal shock to get us over that hump, and transition to a world where 95% of people are unemployed and this is considered normal. We're heading into uncharted waters.
I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
If you find your work meaningful and seeing that it is not bullshit, well good for you. I've also been mostly lucky in that aspect that I've done very little bullshit through the years. But I've ended up recently in "Bullshit Jobs" territory by doing stuff is that essentially specializing to tech that is designed for scaling to millions of concurrent users and applying it for B2B that is going to see tops of a couple of thousands users if they capture the majority of the market. There is very little wrong with the tech in itself, and it is useful... but the thing that I'm using it for is not benefiting the business, improving the world or making me happy because it is being misapplied. I quit my last job for the very reason, thought I was out of it and all of a sudden I got transferred back to doing the same thing at the new place.
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