When people ask me what artificial intelligence is going to do to jobs, they’re usually hoping for a clean answer: catastrophe or overhype, mass unemployment or business as usual. What I found after months of reporting is that the truth is harder to pin down—and that our difficulty predicting it may be the most important part of
In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.
The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.
Still, the machines pressed on.
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You give jobs today, too much credit. We have a danish book called: “How we got busy doing Nothing” (translated) which describes how more and more workers, which needs to work a 37 hour week, had to come up with fucked up processes just to make the job a little more complicated, how meetings has been the new norm instead of doing actual work. When I red the article, this is the people I am thinking of. Agile coaches, middle leaders, schedulers, people who manually put data into sheets documents. This is a lot of fucking people, atleast at my office. I am not scared (yet) since I still manage all the hardware componants in the car-rooms etc. But all the other people. What will they do when a 18EUR/month AI can replace a 4685EUR/Month co-worker?